The big difference, for the victims, is that the British police weilding weapons when they shouldn’t are much less likely to shoot an actual gun. A taser can kill, and it can certainly cause distress - the victim in this case should get compensation - and perhaps he did; if it’s given under the police criminal injuries board it’s often in closed court, which is an issue in itself. But it’s less likely to kill than a gun.
I’d note that the other bloke wasn’t actually ‘caught that night “on suspicion of carrying an offensive weapon”’ because “caught” means he actually did it. All this means really is that that they arrested someone else who didn’t actually have an offensive weapon. Maybe that suspicion was reasonable and maybe not. There’s no suggestion that the person arrested did actually have a weapon but was let go.
In the context of this case all it means is that the police carried on looking, which is not a bad thing; they hadn’t suddenly decided that this blind man was Rutger Hauer and had magic sword-fighting powers gifted to the blind.
SciFiSam. The “other bloke” I referred to, i.e. not the blind 61 year old who was tasered in the back while walking at a snail’s pace but the 27 year old was described as in my original link as
Which I took to mean he was toting a sword but not charged. An earlier BBC version of the same story has
