Don't Fark With The Mounties

[bust]

I hear that some of the RCMP do get a bit carried away at times. This is a really sad outcome for a very confused man in a foreign country for the first time.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6wYEBd-Mpus

[Old Hippie]

Any ideas what really happened?

 

[Ongchaiyai]

Video footage of an unarmed Robert Dziekanski, 40, of Pieszyce, shows him collapsing to the ground in pain and dying after being tasered by Canadian police at the airport last month.

 

A construction worker, Mr Dziekanski spoke no English but a Polish YouTube blogger has translated his pleas to police.

 

"I want to get out, help me find the way...Police! Police! Can't you help me?"

 

His desperate plea is followed by harrowing shrieking as he is hit by at least two 50,000-volt blasts.

 

Dziekanski was reported to be emmigrating to Canada and had arranged to meet his mother at the luggage collection area. When he was unable to find her after 10 hours, he became agitated, threw a small table at a window and started yelling at airport staff.

 

By the time police arrived he had calmed down and was standing still.

 

"This is over the mark," she said.

 

"Was the situation such a serious threat to property and a person that he had to be tasered?"

 

New Zealand police were expected to decide before Christmas whether to introduce 500-volt taser stun guns. However, even if approved, it is unlikely every frontline officer will get one.

 

Ms Drhrberg said that decision should be halted and further public consultation held.

 

"There is a huge lesson that can be learnt here," she said.

 

Opponents of taser guns had always feared they would be used to enforce compliance, when they should only be used when there was a serious threat to the public, Ms Dyhrberg said.

 

"The taser is not a gentle option."

 

Apart from the direct harm taser guns could cause, they rendered victims incapable of protecting themselves from being hurt in other ways, she said.

 

"You are totally prevented from putting your hands out, even to stop yourself from failing down a flight of stairs."

 

Dziekanski is the 18th person to die after being stunned by tasers in Canada since 2003.

 

 

[bust]

A lot of the news channel are showing a heavily edited version of the footage. The guy was no threat to anyone really.

[Flashermac]

A few days ago it was in the news about the Chicago cops tasering a woman of about 80. Some other cops were reported to have tasered a kid. Looks like the cops just want to play with their new toys.

 

 

[Torneyboy]

A lot of the news channel are showing a heavily edited version of the footage. The guy was no threat to anyone really.

 

 

"The taser is not a gentle option."

 

Says it all

[Flashermac]

Chicago police Taser 82-year-old woman

6 Nov 2007

 

By DON BABWIN, AP

 

CHICAGO - Chicago's Police Department is investigating an officer's use of a Taser last month on an 82-year-old woman who police say was swinging a hammer when they arrived.

 

Lillian Fletcher was rushed to the hospital after being jolted by the Taser last week but has been released, police said Tuesday.

 

Officials with the city's Department on Aging went to her home Oct. 29 to make a welfare check and called police when they saw Fletcher in a window swinging a hammer, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said Tuesday.

 

Officers arrived and in an attempt to subdue Fletcher, one of them used a Taser, Bond said. The department is trying to determine whether the officer violated department policy on the use of stun guns.

 

Fletcher said Tuesday that officers pushed their way into her home. "They shocked me," she said.

 

Fletcher at times sounded confused during the telephone interview. Her granddaughter Traci Taylor told the Chicago Sun-Times that her grandmother has schizophrenia and dementia.

 

"My grandmother is easily confused," Taylor told the newspaper, adding that the woman can be belligerent but is about 5 feet 1 and weighs no more than 160 pounds.

 

"I just don't think they should be Tasing 82-year-old women. That's ridiculous," Taylor said.

 

Tasers use compressed nitrogen to fire two barbed darts that can penetrate clothing to deliver a 50,000-volt shock to immobilize people.

 

Touted by law enforcement officials as less lethal than other ways of subduing combative people in high-risk situations, the weapons have come under criticism nationwide after they were blamed for several deaths.

 

In 2005, the police superintendent at the time suspended the distribution of stun guns after the deaths of two people who had been shot by police with Tasers.

 

About 150 field training officers are set to be issued new Tasers, and about 200 sergeants have had the weapons for about five years, Bond said.

 

The human rights group Amnesty International USA has voiced concerns that police departments are starting to use Tasers routinely rather than in cases of serious danger.

 

Taser use by police drew national attention recently when police stunned and arrested a University of Florida student after his fervent, videotaped outburst at an event with Sen. John Kerry in September.

 

In Ohio, a patrolman accused of repeatedly jolting a woman who had been arrested with a Taser gun faces a disciplinary hearing Friday, The Tribune Chronicle of Warren reported. The woman had been arrested because she was acting unruly at a bar, police said.

 

 

[Flashermac]

And from two years ago:

 

Taser's effects fueling concern

 

By Antigone Barton

30 May 2005

 

A deputy fired his Taser stun gun twice at the woman he was chasing â?? the second shot dropping her to the ground â?? before she announced that she was pregnant.

 

"This was not apparent," the deputy wrote in his report, "but due to her statement I did not apply another Taser (shock)."

 

The report was one of more than 1,000 reviewed by The Palm Beach Post that show how Tasers have been used in the three years since departments in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast added them to their arsenals.

 

While a growing number of human rights watchers and scientists have voiced concerns about effects on pregnant women, children, elderly people and people with heart, neurological and psychiatric disorders, the review showed that police from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce have fired the weapons at:

 

â?¢ Six people 65 or older, including an 86-year-old man; and at least 35 people 16 and younger, including a 100-pound, 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl;

 

â?¢ 87 women of childbearing age, including at least three women who, after being shocked, said they were pregnant;

 

â?¢ At least 57 people who were high on drugs;

 

â?¢ At least 272 people who were shocked multiple times, including 67 shocked three times, 31 shocked four or more times and one man shocked nine times.

 

Some of these Taser firings ended violent confrontations in which immediate harm was possible, including encounters with armed and physically threatening suspects.

 

But in at least 237 incidents, the dart-firing stun gun was used only to get compliance from passively resisting or fleeing suspects.

 

Officers in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast fired Tasers at more than 1,000 people before Timothy Bolander died in December after being shocked four times by Delray Beach police. An autopsy found he had ingested a lethal level of drugs.

 

"Most of the people shot with Tasers live," said Ed Jackson, a spokesman for Amnesty International, which has called for a moratorium on the weapon's use. "It doesn't mean they are living without consequences."

 

He attributes Taser-use frequency to a belief that the weapon does no lasting harm.

 

"The idea that Tasers are generally safe is completely fictional," he said.

 

Zapped

[wonderlust]

This is a really sad outcome for a very confused man in a foreign country for the first time.

 

What a load of bleeding heart nonsense. He was tasered because he was a threat, throwing chairs at people at an airport. If it had been a farang in Thailand there would be 20 posts in this thread saying he brought it on himself.

[bust]

What...throwing a chair is punishable by death? Six law enforcement officers feel threatened by one man? Get real!!! It wasn't Thailand so I don't quiet see your point. What would you consider reasonable action to be taken in a similar situation? He was never threatening, there was no threatening gestures or anything toward anyone. There's a woman that goes right up to him at one point, five feet away, and tries to calm him down. He was acting irrationally but in my opinion he never deserved to die.