Death by Taser is barbaric.
Nobody will ever know for sure how much Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski suffered when the RCMP used a 50,000-volt Taser on him.
All we really know for sure is Mr. Dziekanski is dead and Canada should be ashamed.
The non-English-speaking man arrived at the Vancouver airport in mid-October hoping to be met my his mother.
Mr. Dziekanski waited for about 10 hours. His mother, meanwhile, waited in another part of the airport and, when he didn't appear, she went home to Kamloops believing her 40-year-old son had missed his first-ever flight.
She had no idea her son lay dead following an encounter with the RCMP.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has asked for an examination of the weapons. Mr. Day needs to show compassion and courage and call on his government to ban the use of Tasers — never mind examinations, studies and calling for input. Just take the Taser away from the cops, including the RCMP and kindly tell them to do their jobs without releasing powerful volts of electricity into people's bodies.
This is Canada. We're not barbarians.
Agreed.
Posted by: Gus Khouri | November 18, 2007 at 05:26 PM
The fault lies with the officers who escalated the level of violence without need. The first course of action should be to train officers to defuse situations with minimal violence. If that fails, then ban tasers as they are evidently too tempting for the police to control themselves with.
Posted by: Martin | November 22, 2007 at 04:30 PM