...Police data show that in almost 1,000 Taser deployments since December 2004, 63 percent of the suspects were black. Houston's population of 1.95 million is 25 percent black.

You do the math.

Tasering may well be racially-biased in Houston, but Houston's population data is irrelevant.

Tasers were deployed just under 1,000 times over the past two years -- against one-half of 1 percent of suspects arrested -- and half the people arrested in that period were black.

That's much more relevant.

Even more relevant is a breakdown, racially, of those arrestees who resist arrest, or do whatever it is that triggers the use of tasers (assuming race is not "the" trigger).

The race of the officers doing the tasering would probably be relevant as well.

The recent arrest and use of a Taser against a black professional football player has once again put the police department of the nation's fourth-largest city under scrutiny.

I would imagine it is also more.

It is not fair to crticize the police based on one statistic when you ignore the obvious.

If the fact that blacks are more likely to be arrested compared to their percentage of population then it seems reasonable that they are more likely to be tasered by simple math.

In a convenient and easy world, if 50% of the arrestees were black, then black tasered arrestees would be the same 50%.

When the third largest city in the US, Houston, experiences an almost 30% increase in crime after its population grows 10% overnight with 200,000 black evacuees from New Orleans's high crime 9th ward - it is a matter of simple numbers that you are going to have and increase in black arrests over that time frame.  

You relocated a large number of blacks with a statistically high crime rate into another city - yes your arrests are going up.   Similarly - the "population" data for percentages of black living in Houston does not account for the 10% increase in population.

I am not saying that there isn't a problem - but using Houston arrests post Katrina against population data pre Katrina to prove an increase
in arrests rates is not valid. If the numbers are real - then you should be able to find it in another city that did not experience the largest instantaneous relocation events in US History.

On a personal note - I have lived in Houston for eight years - and crime has gone up significantly on the streets I live in since Katrina.  It is very noticeable.  Since Katrina there has been two drive by's and two murders within a few blocks of my house and my car vandalized - and I live in a very nice area that experienced almost NO violent crime in the past eight years.  And one of those arrested for the crimes near my home from New Orleans.  

There are areas of town where that are being completely reshaped by the recent spikes in crime.  The problem is - they aren't making enough arrests and very nice parts of Houston are being dragged down and starting to look like crime infested back-street New Orleans.

This is not true or LE training is no longer the same as when I was a cop, and I worked under much more precarious circumstances that police here in the States.

There are too many efficient, tried, and proven methods to take down a suspect, some of them centuries old, that any GROUP of police using stun guns or Tasers should receive blanket condemnation and re-training.