A patrol officer arrived at the scene first, and a few minutes later, a unit of Emergency Service officers. When they arrived, the police said, Mr. Morales ran onto the fire escape outside his third-floor apartment.

Fleeing the officers up the fire escape, he tried to enter an apartment on the fourth floor by pushing in an air-conditioner, the police said. Unsuccessful, he then descended to the second-floor fire escape and from there jumped down to the security-gate housing for a ground-floor storefront, which was about 10 feet from the sidewalk.

As an officer was securing himself on the second-floor fire escape, Mr. Morales jabbed at him with an eight-foot-long fluorescent light tube, the police said.

Under orders from a lieutenant, the officer on the sidewalk, who is 37 and has been in the department for 10 years, used the Taser on Mr. Morales, according to the police, and he fell to the sidewalk, hitting his head. That was at 2:27, the Police Department said, about 22 minutes after the Emergency Service officers arrived at the scene. The police said an officer at the scene had radioed for an inflatable bag, and it was not clear why the bag had not arrived when Mr. Morales fell, or why the officers had not waited for it before using the Taser on Mr. Morales.

Mr. Morales was taken to Kings County Hospital Center with serious head trauma and was later pronounced dead. The cause of death has not yet been determined.

The order not to use the Taser in such circumstances appears in a 10-page interim order issued by the Police Department in June. Mr. Browne said that the order was released before the distribution of new holsters for police sergeants, who were ordered to carry their Tasers with them, rather than keep them in their cars, as they had previously done. Emergency Service officers have been carrying them for 24 years.

Image Iman Morales

The order discusses types of people the Taser should not be used on, including children, the elderly and pregnant women, and instructs officers not to use them “in situations where the subject may fall from an elevated surface.”