Tasering the Elderly
It's been a little over six month since Robert Dziekanski died after being repeatedly tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver Airport. The inquiry into his death started on Monday, which appears to be none too soon, as the RCMP seem to have learned very little from the incident.
An elderly man in Kamloops, B.C., was zapped three times on the torso by a police stun gun while lying on his hospital bed, CBC News has learned.
Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.
"They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery," Lasser told CBC News.
Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.
You read that correctly. You had three RCMP officers, squaring off against an 82-year-old with a small pocket knife, on oxygen, and lying on his back in a hospital bed, and apparently the only reasonable method of subduing him was multiple shots from their taser guns. Who the hell is training these guys?
The safety of tasers is an ongoing debate, but the real issue here isn't really if they are safe to use, but how they are being used. To quote myself:
The fact that tasers are "safe", meaning that they don't normally kill the people you shoot with them, is entirely beside the point. Its their use when they need not be used that's the point. We give these guys guns and authorize them to shoot people when its justified. We'd make quite a bit of noise if the police starting shooting people when it wasn't necessary. We shouldn't be any less angry over excessive use of force in any other instances.
After the release of the video showing what happened to Dziekanski, Boris at The Galloping Beaver posted some thoughts on how policing had changed over the years from his father's day.
My father was a policeman during the 1960s and would often go out on patrol without his service revolver. Never once did he have to draw his weapon or beat someone to make an arrest. Indeed, he once, unarmed and alone, successfully disarmed and arrested a man with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in his wife’s leg. He did this with a calm voice and discussion.
Somewhere between his day, and now, there seems to have been something lost in the human side of policing.
I wonder if the invention and provision of the Tazer has created the incentive and standard procedural justification – an “immediate action” - to use it, when in the past a politiely worded request, a soothing voice, would’ve sufficed. I wonder if violent arrest technique has become increasingly official procedure, regardless of context, among some police forces.[Emp. mine]
From the recent incident above, or this one, or this one, it seems to be the case that police in North America have moved more towards forceful submission rather than conflict resolution. This is a bad move on the whole.
What the police appear to miss is that not everyone cowers when confronted with power and threats. Some people push back. Even innocent, unarmed ones. Granted, the police should be able to protect themselves, but not at the expense of the public. Ultimately, this harms the police as public trust is eroded, and the public begins to fear the people meant to protect them. Policing then becomes a version of a protection racket.
Ultimately, such tactics undermine law enforcement's legitimacy, which can have dire effects for everyone's security. Unfortunately, I don't see the trend reversing itself anytime soon.
