RCMP Watch

Tuesday, April 15 would have been Robert Dziekanski’s 41st birthday. His mother, Zofia Cisowski, did not spend that day with her son. Instead, she went to Ottawa to speak to a House committee investigating the death of that very son.

Dziekanski was shocked with a Taser at Vancouver airport on Oct, 14, 2007. He died writhing on the floor after RCMP decided this bewildered man, who spoke no English, needed to be subdued.
A tape, broadcast across the country, showed that a mere 20 or so seconds elapsed between the time the officers arrived and the moment they shocked Dziekanski - twice.

He had wandered around the airport for 10 hours after his arrival from Poland. Nobody helped him. Nobody tried to find an interpreter. An airport employee told his frantic mother waiting in the reception area that he was not there.

She went home to Kamloops thinking perhaps he had missed the plane. She no sooner got home than she received a phone call to come back to collect the body of her dead son.

In hesitant, yet clear and poignant English, Cisowski asked the committee in Ottawa if the RCMP did not have a responsibility to help her son after they shocked him. She spoke for less than a minute.

“My heart is broken,” she said later to reporters.

And in a terrible irony, almost as Cisowski was speaking, reports out of Vancouver revealed that transit cops have been using Tasers for over 18 months.

Vancouver transit cops, the only armed transit police in the country, have used Tasers 10 times in that year and a half, five times on passengers who tried to avoid paying fares.

For example, one non-paying passenger wouldn’t let go of a railing on a SkyTrain platform. He was zapped for resisting arrest. Another freeloader was shocked with the stun gun when he ran away.

Makes me feel good.

And in Toronto, the transit commission is considering issuing stun guns to special constables on its subway cars. Now I feel really safe.

We are creating a Taser culture whereby these weapons, the power of which is still being argued, are too easily used in non-violent situations.

The Taser, say its manufacturers, is the perfect deterrent to crime. It does no permanent damage and stops the perp in his tracks.

And perhaps that is true - if a real crime is committed. If someone pointed a gun at me and threatened to blow my head off, I’d no doubt be quite grateful to the cop who stunned him into submission.

On the other hand, I don’t really want my friend’s teenage son shocked because the kid did a stupid kid thing and tried to get on the SkyTrain for free.

The manufacturers of stun guns want us to believe that people don’t die from being shocked; they die from pre-existing conditions such as heart problems or drugs.

Not so fast. Medical reports now suggest it is too easy to blame deaths on something other than Tasers because stun guns do not leave any evidence of use in the body. No visible damage, no massive bruises.

So, until we have a national policy that outlines the exact circumstances under which police may use Tasers, we need to have a moratorium on their use.

Everything about Tasers is just a trifle too easy.

Ask Zofia Cisowski.