Jim Bronskill and Sue Bailey, Ottawa (Canadian Press) – The RCMP is stripping crucial details about taser firings from public reports as use of the controversial stun guns skyrockets across the country.
A joint investigation by The Canadian Press and CBC found the Mounties are refusing to divulge key information that must be recorded each time they draw their electronic weapons.
As a result, Canadians will know much less about who is being hit with the 50,000-volt guns: whether they were armed, why they were fired on and whether they were injured.
Taser report forms obtained under the Access to Information Act show the Mounties have used the powerful weapons more than 4,000 times since introducing them seven years ago.
Incidents have increased dramatically, topping 1,000 annually in each of the past two years compared with about 600 in 2005. The overwhelming majority of firings were in Western Canada, where the national force often leads front-line policing.
As taser use escalates, however, the RCMP has tightened secrecy.
Information stripped from the forms includes details of several taser cases the Mounties previously made public under the access law. In effect, the RCMP is reclassifying details of taser use – including some telling facts that raised pointed questions about how often the stun guns are fired and why.
A Canadian Press analysis last November of 563 incidents between 2002 and 2005 found three in four suspects tasered by the RCMP were unarmed. Several of those reports suggested a pattern of stun-gun use to keep suspects in line, rather than to defuse major threats.
But the Mounties are now censoring taser report forms to conceal related injuries, duration of shocks, whether the individual was armed, what police tried before resorting to the stun gun and precise dates of firings.
The RCMP cites the need to protect privacy and continuing investigations to justify removing basic details from other reports.
Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh scoffed at the explanation.
“That’s hogwash. That’s absolute nonsense,” the former attorney-general for British Columbia said in an interview. “Whether or not someone was armed … how does that violate privacy?”
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day was travelling yesterday and not immediately available for comment.
Inspector Troy Lightfoot, who helps oversee RCMP taser use, would not speculate on why the reporting changes were made. But he stressed there are still ways to monitor stun guns and other uses of force.
“I can tell you that there are many accountability systems in place with regards to police actions. You have the courts, you have coroners’ inquests, you have a multitude of oversight bodies,” he said. “There is a complaints process that can be followed.”
The RCMP has more than 2,800 tasers and about 9,100 Mounties are trained to use them.
They can be fired from a distance, laying suspects low with high-voltage bursts that override the central nervous system. They can also be used up close in touch-stun mode, which has been likened to leaning on a hot stove.
Officers say they’re a safer, more efficient option than pepper spray or batons.
RCMP reports previously released to The Canadian Press also detailed several head injuries when suspects struck the floor, along with burns caused by stuns and lacerations from sharp taser probes.
It took 15 months and an official complaint before the RCMP would release thousands of pages recording more than 4,000 taser incidents.
There are stark differences between the newly released forms and earlier versions filed about the same confrontations.
For example, the original report on a March 7, 2004, case in northern Manitoba revealed that an unarmed detainee in a Pukatawagan RCMP cell was tasered after only oral intervention. There was no attempt to subdue the inmate through physical force.
The new form says only that the confrontation occurred in 2004. The section entitled Weapons Carried or Immediately Available by Subject is blank.
And there is no longer any description of verbal commands or other police response before the taser was fired.
For years they may have baked their cake and ate too…. why?
Because the ones that should of dealth with these cases didn’tr, even though they knew they were wrong…. they came out right.
A HONEST PUBLIC INQUIRY; sitting their behinds in chairs under oath and in full public views is the only way to get to the truth – I know for Minister Day, this could be scarry but any other way, are you not endangering the public and obstructing justice.
Choosing a pannel is just another way not to deal with the issue as usual, isn’t it?
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Same story from a different source: National Post
Title: Eyes on RCMP for censoring Taser incident reports
Police cite privacy concerns
Heather Rose, Canwest News Service Published: Tuesday, March 25, 2008
OTTAWA — The RCMP are under fire for censoring details in Taser incident reports that were previously available, according to media reports that information had been removed that could allegedly violate privacy.
Paul Kennedy, the head of the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP, said the organization should be providing more information, not less, because of the immense public interest and debate over Taser use by the RCMP and other police forces.
The commission was asked to look into RCMP Taser use and protocols by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day after an incident involving Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who died last year after being Tasered by police at the Vancouver International Airport.
“The police provide a public service on behalf of citizens,” said Mr. Kennedy. “To that extent, they ought to be accountable to citizens as much as possible. You cannot have accountability without information.”
The information missing from documents obtained by the Canadian Press and CBC includes who was Tasered, and whether they were armed or warned before being Tasered, as well as resulting injuries and the duration of the shocks.
Mr. Kennedy said documents such as the Taser incident reports, which were obtained through the Access to Information Act, can be censored by governing bodies if they feel the information could compromise operational effectiveness and ongoing investigations, but in this case it is not necessary.
“They’re not exactly mandatory exemptions, the government institution itself has an ability to actually let more out if it wanted to, so there is a discretion to be exercised,” he said. “How was that discretion exercised?”
Mr. Kennedy said it is incumbent upon government organizations to constructively engage in discussion with the public, including the media, so there can be proper debate of Taser use.
The stripping of details comes in the wake of reports that incidents involving Taser use by law enforcement are on the rise.
The missing information was discovered after a joint investigation by CP and CBC found that less information was available on Taser incident forms than in previous years.
Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh said the RCMP’s reasons for the censoring of information are “unacceptable”.
He said that the RCMP suggestion that the censored details, such as whether the person was armed while being Tasered, violate anyone’s privacy is unreasonable.
“They’re simply hiding the facts from Canadians and that is not acceptable,” said MR. Dosanjh. “They are accountable to Canadians, they’re the national police force,” he said. “What kind of signal does it send to ordinary Canadians when their police force engages in that kind of obfuscation and hiding of the facts?”
The RCMP declined to comment on Tuesday morning, indicating instead that a written statement would be posted on their Web site.
First off, a Taser is a Direct Energy Weapon.
A TASER is a weapon.
Death from electrocution due to a DIRECT ENERGY WEAPON can happen immediately or it can happen hours, days, or even weeks later.
These statistics are sited in just about any electrocution death or electrocution injury investigation.
The other fact the RCMP fail to mention is the Taser inflicts physical “TRAUMA” on the victim.
Physical restraint and/or the use of force delivered via pepper-spray or handcuffs doesn’t inflict a fraction of the force trauma delivered by Direct Energy Weapons.
Another fact the RCMP fail to disclose is that doctors and nurses should and need to present when a person
is being traumatized by electrocution due to the fact the
victim can die at any moment while being electrocuted.
Electrocution by Taser produces trauma to the body and since it is done without anesthetic the body can
produce hormones and other bodily defences to counter the trauma if the body is experiencing a “flight or fight” reponse.
Some of the hormones produced are adrenlin, cortisol and norepinephrine. These horomones are present in order to protect the body in case trauma occurs to the body during a “flight or fight” stress response. Tasering them with high levels of these hormones may have a very negative effect that can be totally unpredictble. The person can die right then or several days later. Different effects on different people depending on the levels of different stress hormones.
” (RCMP) National Criminal Operations Branch – concluded 56 per cent of all RCMP in-custody deaths in Canada between 2002 and 2006 occurred in B.C., even though only 33 per cent of the force’s officers work here.”
There could be many more deaths not included in that report that we don’t know about because they died days weeks, or even months after being electrocuted by a Taser.
Check out the story about the guy the RCMP tasered in Kelowna while he sat in his car. If he died a week or months later from it it wouldn’t have been included in that RCMP report.
In which countries do they have death squads?
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This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
I hope no one believed that the huge amount of time and the huge amount of money spent to keep information out of the hands of those that could do something about things and how they hid behind the Access to Information for years, maned with former members that they were actually protecting us.
It’s time someone pointed out what they have been doing to alter investigations and it seems now that they are on the receiving side of things they are hard at work… looks good on them.
Only someone guilty would work that hard.
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