This summer, the Hardwick Police Department used federal stimulus funds to purchase two Taser X26 stun guns. Many other Vermont towns already have them, and the state police announced this month that it wants to buy 260 at about $1000 apiece, billed to the state.

A Taser is a high-tech version of that old police tool of persuasion, the cattle prod. It uses compressed nitrogen to shoot metal “probes” that lodge in the target’s flesh. The probes remain attached to the gun by wires, which transmit 50,000 volts of pulsing electricity into the body over five seconds, disabling the neuromuscular systems. The person usually falls down, smashing whatever parts of the body hit the ground first. As long as the probe stays put, shocks can be administered.

The Taser company and its fans say the weapon subdues the most aggressive comers without occasioning injury to officers, other civilians or the person Tased. Budget cutters love Tasers, too, since they slash police workers’ compensation claims.

Marketed as “less lethal” and praised for minimizing force, however, the Taser has a benign reputation that may actually have the effect of lowering the threshold for force — or worse.

Hardwick’s Taser policy is a case in point: It contains not an intentional instruction to excessive force but an allowance of discretion that can easily lead to it. For instance, in the past a cop probably would have considered a subject in control once he was handcuffed or shackled. The policy forbids the weapon’s use on a restrained person — “UNLESS physical resistance has to be overcome to stop an immediate threat (of possible injury) to the officer, subject, other citizens or property.”

Property? A shackled man attempting to destroy the furniture to which he is attached merits a 50,000-volt shock? The Hardwick policy recommends keeping the barbs attached until the “combative subject” is delivered to the police station, jail or medical facility.

Why does Hardwick need Tasers?

“Tasers are an integral part of law enforcement,” Police Chief Joe LaPorte told me, unhelpfully.

But aren’t the weapons the officers already carry — guns, clubs, pepper spray — sufficient?

LaPorte repeated what he’d just said, adding that Tasers are less harmful than those other things. He’d been Tased and he’d been sprayed, he avowed — and pepper is worse.

Others who’ve been at the wrong end of the wire differ with the chief’s assessment.

“My muscles contracted like this,” said “Robert” (who asked that his real name not be used), pulling his arms sharply back. “I fell down, tore up my knee, smashed my face.” Robert, 38, showed up at one of two recent community forums called “Questioning Tasers” organized by Aaron Kromash, an activist from Greensboro; the town contracts with the Hardwick PD for coverage.

“You have no control of your body,” Robert continued. “You drool, you cry, you twitch. I felt like I was being tortured.”

In November 2008, Robert recounted, he arrived at the emergency room at Copley Hospital in Morrisville suffering an extreme reaction to the smoking-cessation drug Chantix. Chantix’s advertisements warn that the medication may cause “anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia or confusion.”

Robert was experiencing them all; he wishes hospital staff had immediately sedated him. Agitated, he exited the building past a Morristown police officer. The officer smiled, said Robert, then started Tasing — repeatedly — before dragging Robert back into the ER, where staff shackled and sedated him.

Once home, Robert was served with a citation for disorderly conduct. He contested it to the Lamoille County State’s Attorney, attaching medical and psychiatric records attesting that he was under the influence of a drug gone wrong and had committed no crime. No charge was brought.

Robert says he has suffered extreme aftereffects of the experience: nightmares, panic, inability to concentrate. He was hospitalized again and underwent outpatient therapy for 18 months. “And it changed me,” he told the meeting. “I used to think the police were there to protect people.”

Hospital records affirm Robert’s claim that he was shocked multiple times. The officer in question signed an affidavit saying he had administered only one five-second dose of electricity.

The Morristown Police Department denied my request for the incident report, citing “privacy concerns for the person of interest and the witnesses involved” and arguing it is not a public record. Both the ACLU and I dispute this interpretation of statute; the Supreme Court allows redaction of names if privacy is a legitimate issue.

The only incontrovertible arbiter would be the data the weapon records with each use. But Vermont’s Public Records Law, which is vague and unevenly enforced, does not specify whether these data should be publicly accessible, or even require police to collect them. And the Taser leaves no visible trace.

Not considered firearms, Tasers are unregulated by the federal government. In 43 states, including Vermont, civilians may carry them. For under $400, I can purchase a “consumer” model about the size and shape of an electric razor in a selection of colors, including pink and “electric blue.”

Vermont has no statewide protocols governing the use of Tasers. Each police department makes its own rules and decides whether the rules have been broken. And if a citizen objects, the complaint — like other allegations of police misconduct — is usually handled by the department itself, or the local select board or city council.

The only recourse an aggrieved citizen has is to sue.

Even if the cop zapped Robert only once, that use could be considered excessive force. The UN and Amnesty International have condemned some cases of Taser use as a form of torture, in violation of international law.

In fact, the shock could have killed Robert. From 2001 to 2008, according to Amnesty, more than 300 people in the U.S. and 25 in Canada died — many from cardiac arrest — after being Tased by police. Other watchdogs put the number above 500 today. In the deaths Amnesty investigated, 90 percent of the victims were unarmed and “did not appear to present a serious threat” to police, other people or themselves.

Robert’s experience is not unusual. The growing roster of unarmed Vermonters Tased while committing no crime includes a homeless woman in Barre whose “active resistance” consisted of folding her arms in front of her chest when she was told to put them behind her back for handcuffing; patients at the Brattleboro Retreat; and protesters who had chained themselves to a barrel.

It is hard to imagine a person less capable of aggression than one chained to a barrel.

People taking certain medications, suffering heart disease or epilepsy, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol are especially vulnerable to the effects of Tasing. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests these are precisely the people whose unpredictable behavior inspires police to use the Taser.

One of these was Lawrence Fairbrother, 57, of Fairlee, who has a seizure disorder. When he started seizing at a friend’s home, the friend called the state police for help. Fairbrother crawled under a car in fear. He was dragged out, Tased, handcuffed and arrested for DUI. The charge was later dropped. Fairbrother’s 2007 federal lawsuit alleging excessive force won a $40,000 settlement from the state police — but no apology. “We still believe Mr. Fairbrother was not actually in the throes of a seizure,” said Assistant Attorney General J.J. Tyzbir.

Vermont has made some progress. After Disability Rights Vermont (then Vermont Protection & Advocacy) investigated police Tasings at the Brattleboro Retreat, a successful “safety plan” was instituted that largely obviates police involvement, says DRV supervising attorney A.J. Ruben.

Eighty percent of the state’s officers have undergone training in engaging with people with mental health problems. But the training has limitations. “It tells police to slow down, give space, not be so threatening,” says Ruben. “That’s in direct contradiction to standard operating procedure, which is don’t allow time to tick by, control the situation before things escalate.” Increasingly, that means don’t talk, Tase.

Cops have a right to work in safety. That said, risk of injury is part of the job. And that risk is rarely high enough to justify risking the death of a civilian, even if that civilian is breaking the law.

Amnesty International recommends a ban on Tasers until they can be proven safe. Like Amnesty, Vermont civil-rights groups, including the ACLU and Disability Rights Vermont, advocate restricting the weapons’ use to situations where deadly force would be employed. In 2007, the Vermont Association for Mental Health called for a moratorium on Taser shocks to minors — a policy that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The ACLU has repeatedly demanded clear protocols for holding police accountable for misconduct, including the abuse of Tasers.

Robert and his wife want to petition to keep Tasers out of Hardwick. Will town officials listen? According to activist Kromash, the select board deliberated for 13 minutes before giving LaPorte the go-ahead to buy the guns. Kromash invited the chief to the community forums, but he declined to attend.

And when I called LaPorte, he was irritated by the press attention the forums had stirred up. He didn’t want to talk to me, he said. “I’ve already spent too much time on this issue.”

This piece originally ran in Seven Days.

So reads the official Hardwick-Greensboro Police Department Chaplain Training Manual, to be used by the town’s new police-sponsored cadre of clergy, the volunteer component of Hardwick’s new Police Education and Community Enrichment program. PEACE, for short.

Recruited from among Hardwick’s eight houses of worship — four traditional and four modern evangelical Christian churches — the God Squad will offer counsel to stressed-out officers who request it. They will also ride along, at the officer’s behest, on calls promising conflict or crisis, from fights to car crashes — “situations,” says Police Chief Jim Dziobek, “where people’s faith might not be the strongest.”

Among the qualifications for service are “God-like compassion” and a valid driver’s license. The uniform includes black shoes you can run in and, on the chaplain’s person, a small Bible and latex rubber gloves.

The training manual is an amalgam of statistics and anecdotes, psychobabble and conventional counseling techniques for dealing with SIDS or suicide, prayers and constitutional interpretation, and a species of paranoia commonly circulated among politicized evangelicals: “Diversity is being taught in schools the problem is that diversity is for everyone except Judo-Christian” (sic).

The bulk of the document is the oeuvre of Reverend Bill Hinckley, of the Shield of Faith Ministries in Plainfield, Connecticut, to whom Dziobek was introduced two years ago by pastor James Tousant of Hardwick’s Promised Land Ministries. Since Hinckley conducted training in Morrisville, Tousant has served as Hardwick’s “unofficial” chaplain, accompanying officers on death-notification visits. After the bad news is delivered, the minister says, he sticks around to talk, to call family or funeral home — and, if asked, to pray.

Dziobek is optimistic that an agent of a Higher Authority will help the worldly authorities manage Hardwick’s rowdier citizens when the program expands to include the drunk, disorderly and domestically violent. “People behave differently in church than they do at home,” the chief explains. “You bring that church point of view to the home, and people act different . . .

“But we’re not trying to press religion on anyone,” he stresses, “or any particular religion.”

*******

I am not reassured. In fact, when this atheist Jew envisions a fundamentalist Christian padre at the elbow of a cop telling me my boyfriend has just been crushed on Route 14, I also imagine the Hardwick PD with a padrecide on its hands.

Dziobek several times mentioned a similar program of the Vermont State Police. But Wayne Whitelock, a minister on the VSP’s Peer Support Team, emailed me to “make sure you did NOT refer to me as the ‘Vermont State Police Chaplain.’ The Vermont State Police does not have a Chaplaincy program and provides no religious services to their troops. There is a careful separation between church and state.” The team also does not work with the public.

*******

So are the well-meaning Jims, Dziobek and Tousant, unwittingly establishing a state religion in Hardwick? Since constitutional law relies on the perceptions of a “reasonable person,” I seek one: Mitch Pearl, at Langrock, Sperry and Wool, cooperating attorneys for the Vermont ACLU (on whose board I serve).

The answer, says Pearl: It depends. To pass First Amendment muster, a state-sponsored function must be predominantly secular. The Salvation Army may receive state money to ladle soup to homeless people, so long as it doesn’t serve up Jesus with the meal. Presumably, the Promised Land pastor may hold a widow’s hand.

But the program can’t have either the purpose or the effect of inhibiting or advancing religion, or one religion. “What if a Wiccan volunteered?” Pearl muses. “If they said, sure, join us, that would be less of a problem.”

Still, references to Jesus in the manual take him aback. “It’s hard to imagine a public body adopting as an official policy that God is the answer to man’s dilemma,” he says. “But it seems to me that this is a statement that the Hardwick Police Department not only endorses religion but endorses a particular religion. It sounds highly problematic.”

Might the program be intrinsically religious and coercive? A chaplain is a chaplain, after all — religion is his business. And the cops aren’t offering a psychotherapist or a pie to comfort the bereaved. The police, moreover, are the police — coercion is their business. Even if the officer doesn’t order anyone to kneel and pray, the minister arrives under his aegis. Notes Pearl: “The police are authority figures. Most people believe they should cooperate with them.”

Add to this the pressure to get along in a small town and, legality aside, some may feel disinclined to refuse the minister’s kind offer. “This is another of these things about being in a minority in a small town,” says one Hardwick Jew. “Usually, you don’t make too much noise.”

*******

Following “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy being,” the training manual’s second of Ten Commandments for Law Enforcement Chaplains is “Thou shalt love thy Police Department and all its personnel.” That may be balm to Hardwick’s police, who don’t get a whole lotta lovin’. The town of 3100 spends a quarter of its budget — $445,000 in FY2007 — on the force, and folks generally don’t feel they get what they pay for. (The department failed to arrest anyone for a series of break-ins last year, even though one victim watched the perpetrator take his wallet. Meanwhile, it issued 527 traffic warnings and 705 tickets.)

So it’s reasonable for Chief Dziobek to try to make PEACE with the public. As America slouches toward theocracy, it’s not surprising he’s chosen God as his squad-car partner — or that I may be accused of churlishness for objecting. So be it. The U.S. is a secular democracy. Its Constitution protects my right to exercise religion — or not to.

For now, my lawyer is drawing up a DNR order: Do Not Redeem. And if the good pastor decides to pray in my dooryard anyway, he’d better be wearing those black running shoes.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.