That’s not how it happened. Someone shot a video which has been widely released and is linked from the site below.
Summary: Robert Dziekanski, a Polish immigrant who spoke no English, was flying into Vancouver Airport. After he had been through security and was sent on his way he became confused and basically couldn’t find his way out of customs to find his mother, who was nearby, but in the reception area outside of customs. He wandered around for many hours, growing increasingly confused and distressed, and did throw a few things and frighten people. (Both he and his mother approached airport staff for assistance but none was forthcoming.)
Once the cops turned up, by all accounts (and according to the video which was released), he was perfectly calm, and all he needed was help finding his way out.
He was posing no threat to the officers. At the very beginning of the video, one of the officers can be heard saying something like “Do we get to use the taser?”
The guy was posing no threat to anybody, but if the video hadn’t been made publicly available, then people on the internet would be able to say that he’d been resisting arrest and endangering the officers. How many other cases would have turned out differently if videos had been made available?
I saw the video. In my opinion, once you are to the point of “throwing a few things” in an airport lobby (again, he appeared to be intentionally trying to smash a glass wall with a chair) and “frightening people” by behaving like a lunatic, you deserve to be arrested and removed from the premises immediately.
I don’t think the guy deserved to die, and I’m sure that wasn’t the intention in using a taser on him, but to say he was “tased for speaking Polish” is ludicrous. What led to the confrontation was his own irrational and violent behavior, which he might well have resumed at any moment regardless of whether he was “standing calmly” at that precise moment.
Cool. Just so long as we’re agreed that he was tasered neither for speaking Polish nor for barricading himself in a room or attempting to smash a glass wall with a chair, because he did neither of those things while in the officers’ presence and those actions were not posing a threat to them.
Are you suggesting it’s acceptable to use a taser pre-emptively, in cases where you think there’s a chance someone might be a danger to you in the future, even though at the moment they’re posing no danger to anybody?
It’s certainly not acceptable to use a taser preemptively in all cases, and just from watching someone’s YouTube video I can’t say whether it was acceptable, according to their own rules and the perceived risk level, for the police to have used it on this man in this case. However, the fact that the cops arrived after he had been behaving violently doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that they had no knowledge of what had happened; I can well imagine they were informed what the man had been doing and were on their guard in case he went psycho again.
I think it’s unreasonable to expect them to pat a guy on his back and send him on his way after he’s been raving and smashing property in an airport—perhaps the one place where suspicious, erratic, or threatening behavior is least likely to be tolerated in this day and age. I don’t care what country you’re from; any rational adult knows you don’t behave that way in an airport and get away with it, regardless of how pissed off you are. He needed to be taken into custody, whether he was still swatting at imaginary butterflies or standing there like a perfect angel when authorities arrived.
It is a shame that he died, but he is not certainly not blameless in what led up to it.
This is not. The point of using a taser is to get a suspect under control and force him to comply. When the suspect is already under control and already complying, it is stupid, and in my opinion, criminal to use it.
Wow, I’m not particularly good with statistics, but even I can see the difference between toothpick use, which a large portion of the population does very frequently, and being tasered, which few people have happen to them even once. Do you have a statistic which shows what percentage of toothpick users have fatal accidents versus what percentage of people being tasered die? Because I would call that a much more compelling statistic than what you have put forth.
Don’t get me wrong, I support the police having tasers. I do think that any officer causing a taser related fatality should have a lifetime ban on using one again though. If that means switching to a desk job, then them’s the breaks.
I don’t get this. If an officer is found to have been negligent in the use of a taser, then I agree that a ban on use could be the right course of action. But officers can do everything right and the detainee could still die as a result of a heart condition or dumb luck. I see no reason to punish the officer for that.
wow, i must totally lack common sense, because i’d choose the taser every time. i’ve cared for a large number of patients who have been shot, stabbed, pepper sprayed, beated, and tased. of all of them, the patients who have been tased are in the least pain. they say it hurts like hell when it’s on, but immediately goes away. you cannot say the same for bullet holes, burning sensations, or contusions and broken bones.
also, it is much safer for the officer. why should we expect officers to place themselves in danger of injury by physically subduing a suspect when the taser is available?
Also, a lasso goes around the neck, not around the waist. You might get lucky and manage to get your lasso past a person’s shoulders and arms, but mostly the neck is the natural landing spot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a rope around a person’s neck was once the standard mode of execution in the US–and for good reason. 50,000 volts to the torso or a rope around my neck while one or more cops wrestles me to the ground? Zap me up, please.
Actually, I read an article about a cop who was going through that training and a freak muscle spasm or something in his back caused by the Taser caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down, AIRC.
Does anyone have good numbers on number of tazings per week in the US? The ones I pulled off the website were, ah… well, there’s whole bunches of reasons they’re not so good.
I wasn’t comparing them that way (and I have no intention of doing a bunch of research for a Pit thread ).
Let’s look at it another way (warning…fuzzy math and equally fuzzy statistic to follow…it IS a Pit thread after all):
According to this cite, there were 14,094,186 people arrested in the US in 2005 (for all crimes). I wasn’t able to get a good average of the years between 2001-2007, but that seems a reasonable figure for some rough figuring. Now, as I cited earlier, there have been 150 deaths due to tasers in the US in that same period. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that the average number of people actually arrested was 10,000,000…it’s a nice round figure. Of that, lets say that only one percent of them were violent arrests that used a taser (this is shaky, to be sure…I have no idea if it’s more or less, but again, 1% is a nice round figure. My guess: its MUCH higher). That would mean that 100,000 people (very approximately) are tasered each year by police attempting to bring them in. Over a 6 year period that would be 600,000 people tasered (my guess is that 600,000 is closer to the yearly number of folks tasered, but what the hell). So, out of those possible 600,000 folks tasered in the US in the period mentioned we are talking about 150 deaths. That is (if my math is correct) approximately .025% of the total tasered.
You’d have to look long and hard to find something that is less likely to kill you at that percentage. As I said, people are terrible at looking at probability and statistics. 150 deaths SEEMS like a lot…until you start looking at what that really means. Sure…my stats above are mostly bullshit…but they give you an idea of what numbers we are talking about. 14,000,000 people were arrested in the US in 2005 alone. How many of those arrests were done using tasers? No idea…but probably more than 100,000 per year. The death rate is usually calculated in figures of 100,000. According to NCHS the Death rate in the US per year is: Death rate: 816.5 deaths per 100,000 population (2004 statistics). We are talking about a death rate of 150 over the course of 6 years, or aprox. 25 persons per year on average. See where this is going?
To be sure, anytime someone needlessly dies it is tragic. And if the police in question are misusing the tool then they should be made to pay for that…same as if they misuse a night stick, a gun, or anything else. But it’s ridiculous to talk of taking tasers away from police because some minuscule amount of people have died from use/misuse. I’m not going to bother looking it up, but at a guess a larger number of people were killed by police accidentally using guns during that same period…and using night sticks in earlier periods.
Regarding that Polish man, all the people have gone on record with the press stating that nobody felt threatened by him. When he threw things down, there was nobody near him.
They say he had been stuck there for 10 hours. We don’t know what happened during that time; maybe he had been trying to get help for all that time.
I guess I’m not getting your point - nor you mine apparently. Your first sentence above illustrates what I’ve been saying I believe the problem is. Are you suggesting cops not have access to Tasers as a viable alternative to firearms for violent or armed resistance?
You have offered no proof there was intent to ‘execute’. Compliance would have prevented most of the tasings in the linked video. And, yes, walking away is resisting.
Well, if they resist arrest and you use a gun they probably will die. If they resist arrest and you use a taser they probably won’t. There is a key difference there.
(I won’t get into what people do or do not ‘deserve’ as I think that is a totally loaded question. To paraphrase Gandalf “Many folks that live deserve death. And some folks that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? If not, then don’t be to quick to shoot them in the head…”)
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