Canadian police Taser immigrant to death

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers repeatedly Taser-shocked Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14 and continued to shock him after he fell to the ground, resulting in his death. A witness captured the entire incident on videotape.

Dziekanski had just arrived in Vancouver as an immigrant to join his mother, who already lived in Canada. He spoke no English and became distraught when he couldn’t find her. The RCMP were called and, within 25 seconds of their arrival, they Tasered him.

The videotape, available on the Internet, clearly shows Dziekanski Tasered again as he lay screaming on the ground with one of the cops kneeling on his neck. Nothing in the video shows Dziekanski posing any danger to the police.

The RCMP attempted to cover up their conduct in this incident. They confiscated the videotape, releasing it only under threat of court action. Their description of what occurred is clearly refuted by the tape, which has been made public.

Public safety officials in Canada have been inundated with mail and e-mails calling for independent investigations and a moratorium on the use of Tasers. Some call for banning them altogether. The Polish government called in the Canadian ambassador to discuss the incident, and the Polish Foreign Ministry has called for prosecution of the police in the case.

Since the incident, police in Canada’s eastern province of Newfoundland have suspended the use of Tasers. So far Federal Public Safety Commissioner Stockwell Day has resisted calls from the opposition demanding an independent prosecutor in the case.

On the same day that Dziekanski was killed, Quilem Registre, a 38-year-old resident of Montreal, was Tasered by police. She died three days later.

There have been 18 Taser-related deaths in Canada since July 2003. In the United States, the figure is much worse: 280 deaths since 2001.

In September, a student in Florida was Tasered at a campus forum when he asked Sen. John Kerry why no one has tried to impeach Bush. This incident gained widespread public attention. However, as of October 2004, Tasers had been sold to over 6,000 police departments in the United States and abroad, and over 200 U.S. police departments had purchased Tasers for every officer on the force. In 2003, they were used in 354 incidents by the Phoenix Police Department alone.

Tasers have been used on very young children, on diabetics and epileptics, on the elderly, and on people already under restraint. While statistics are not available, racist police conduct supports the assumption that African-American, Latin@, Asian and Native youth, who are the target of an epidemic of police brutality, are also receiving a disproportionately large amount of this widespread new type of violence from the state.