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The nature of this question is inherently ambiguous. On the one hand you could easily say that some police officers have broken the law by tasering unarmed citizens. Certainly some people didn't need to be tasered and simply could have been brought to the ground and cuffed. But one also has to realize that an unarmed man 'can' be just as dangerous as an armed man. Police have to think of their personal safety too. Just because they are police officers doesn't mean they have to put themselves at risk in moments when they could avoid it.

Perhaps an example would be good here. Say an officer is chasing a suspect and manages to corner this suspect in an ally. When the officer approaches and tries to get said suspect to the ground, the suspect attacks the officer. The officer, unfortunately, has trouble battling this combatant because, as it turns out, the suspect is on PCP, a drug we should all be familiar with in considering what it does to the human body. The officer makes the decision to taser this person because he has no other way of getting this person to the ground. In the end, the officer has the suspect in custody, and nobody was truly hurt, including the officer.
Would you consider that to be a legal use of a taser? I would. The fact is, police officers do a job that is, by nature, very dangerous. Not only do they have to worry about armed suspects, but they also have to deal with the occasional suspect who is unarmed but fights back. If tasering a person, whether a citizen or not, is the only recourse an officer has, then there is no reason to consider it unlawful, provided it has a valid reason. Certainly officers shouldn't be able to taser people simply because they ran, or because they climbed a tree. But in the case of violence? Of course. There is nothing wrong with that. If we were arguing whether or not it would lawful to shoot an unarmed citizen with a gun, then my answer would be wholly different. Since we're not, I can do nothing but say no to this question.

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