Articles of Interest

Vancouver Airport Taser / Polish Immigrant Incident
 The StarPhoenix
Saturday, November 17, 2007

We have all by now seen the disturbing video of the hapless Polish immigrant screaming, writhing and dying after RCMP officers used a Taser on him at the Vancouver airport. Now almost everyone in the country is piling on police for using excessive force. Excuse me for not joining in.

What people seem not to realize is that there is no way to subdue a violent, irrational and potentially dangerous suspect that isn't disturbing. What, exactly, would these armchair critics have had the police do?

Talk to the guy?

They tried. Police when they approached the man were as non-threatening as they could be. It didn't work. The suspect, after storming around the airport, smashing up furniture and alarming everyone around him, was now ignoring police instructions. Instead of co-operating, as any reasonable person would have and should have done, he threw up his hands, turned around and walked away. Were police supposed to let him go? Were they to let him storm around some more until he felt like obeying them?

I hope not. For all anyone knew, the suspect was armed and potentially dangerous. Had he suddenly produced a weapon and killed an innocent bystander, say, the same people who today are condemning the officers for using excessive force would instead be condemning them for not using enough force.

"Why didn't they use their Tasers?" people would be asking.

All the man had to do was co-operate and no one would have been hurt. Instead, he resisted by walking away. If violent and potentially dangerous suspects can avoid arrest simply by walking away, we might as well not even have police.

Of course, Robert Dziekanski did not deserve to die. But someone who for no good reason is violent and destructive and who then ignores the police should expect to be roughly handled. That the rough handling in this case ended in tragedy is not the fault of police. They were using a tool that we have given them, a tool intended to reduce the risk of injury to both themselves and suspects. No one could have foreseen that the suspect would not survive. Independent scientific studies in Canada, Britain and the U.S. have repeatedly found that Tasers are more likely to save lives and reduce injuries to both suspects and police. That's why journalists and police officers routinely submit to being zapped for demonstration purposes.

As an alternative to zapping Dziekanski, police could have tried to physically subdue him, but not without risk of serious injury to themselves and their suspect.

For all they knew at the time, he could have been high on illegal drugs, some of which are known to give a resistant suspect the strength of several men. For all they knew at the time, he could have had AIDS or hepatitis and a pocket full of needles. The $60,000 a year we pay these people isn't nearly enough to expect them to get into a bloody brawl if they can possibly avoid it.

Pepper spray is another alternative, but that, too, has been implicated in dozens of deaths. As for police batons, they have been found to be more dangerous still, more so, even, than Tasers. Of course, none of these are necessary for suspects who don't resist arrest.

Why Dziekanski behaved as he did, we may never know. We've all found ourselves waiting at one time or another for someone who doesn't show up, as he apparently was. Most of us handle it without throwing around the furniture.

There was in this case the additional complication of a language barrier, but rational people overcome language barriers all the time, especially so in international airports. That 60 million others, many of them foreign, have passed through the Vancouver airport without incident would suggest that the problem was with Dziekanski. By the time police were called to the scene, he had long since cleared immigration and was free to go. He could have sought out an interpreter. He could have caught a cab, found a hotel room and sorted it all out the next day. Instead, he went more or less berserk and then resisted arrest.

Police are not allowed the luxury of sorting it out later. Their duty was to subdue and arrest him, one way or another, and promptly. For all they knew, he was a smuggler whose erratic behaviour was caused by a broken condom of cocaine in his stomach. Had that been the case, their prompt action might just as easily have saved his life.

When police are killed in the line of duty, we fret mightily over officer safety, for without officer safety, there can be no public safety. Then, when police use the tools we give them to make their dangerous job as safe as it can be, we condemn them.

So which is it?

lmacpherson@sp.canwest.com

© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
2007