Taser death at Vancouver airport.

[vertigo]

Indeed, we do expect more, we expect the job to be done to a reasonable standard, which it wasn't.

[NoDeity]

From http://www.canada.com/news/Mounties+did ... story.html (emphasis added)

Tasered Dziekanski dead when paramedics arrived, inquiry hears
By Gerry Bellett, Vancouver SunMarch 26, 2009

VANCOUVER — Robert Dziekanski was clearly dead when the first paramedic crew arrived to find him lying on his stomach with his hands handcuffed, surrounded by RCMP officers and Richmond firefighters, the Braidwood inquiry was told Thursday.

Paramedic Allan Maciak said he saw evidence of cyanosis — the body turning blue due to lack of oxygen — as he and his partner made their way to the Polish immigrant, accompanied by RCMP Cpl. Monty Robinson, who met them at the door.

“Cpl. Robinson (told) us that the gentleman was being aggressive, was throwing stuff and ‘We had to Taser him and we laid him on his side and he was being monitored,’” Maciak told the inquiry, which is investigating Dziekanski’s October 2007 death.

Maciak said he later spoke with Const. Kwesi Millington, who told him he’d Tasered Dziekanski “three times,” causing him to fall down.

Evidence introduced into the inquiry shows that Millington used the Taser five times.

In a statement to police, Maciak said he was surprised on entering the area to find firefighters not doing anything to assist Dziekanski, since they are trained in first aid.

He said he saw one firefighter attempting to take Dziekanski’s pulse and he asked if the “gentleman was breathing.”

Maciak said he saw Dziekanski was handcuffed and told Robinson to take the cuffs off, but the officer said “he’d been aggressive.”

“I said we need to get them off and get this fellow on his back. Once the cuffs came off, Mike (his partner) grabbed him and rolled him on his back and I said, ‘Look at his colour.’ Mike yelled to one of the firefighters to get oxygen,” Maciak said.

Asked by commission counsel Art Vertlieb to describe his condition, Maciak said Dziekanski’s tongue was blue and protruding from his lips, he was unresponsive and incontinent.

“Vital signs?”

“Absent,” said Maciak.

“There was none?”

“Mr. Dziekanski was dead,” he said.

The Polish-Canadian community is demanding that a “special independent prosecutor” be appointed to investigate Dziekanski’s death, due to a growing gap between the RCMP version of events and video evidence.

Robinson has admitted he asked to “change” his evidence after viewing a video of the death shot by a bystander.

The inquiry heard that in his initial report, Robinson claimed 12 times that the Polish immigrant swung a stapler at the officers.

This report, along with those of his fellow officers, was proved wrong by the video of Dziekanski’s death.

“I was mistaken but I was telling the truth. I sort of blended the whole interaction with him,” he told the inquiry Monday.

None of the four Mounties involved in Dziekanski’s death have been charged.

Maciak’s partner, Michael Egli, said he was “mad and very upset” when he saw firefighters standing near Dziekanski but not providing him with any medical assistance.

Egli said oxygen should have been administered, as Dziekanski was clearly turning blue. The firefighters had oxygen equipment available and he said he told them to put the mask on Dziekanski while they worked on him.

Egli said he didn’t express his concerns to the fire department at the scene, but later complained to his supervisors.

Following his evidence, Egli went over to Dziekanski’s mother, who was in court next to her lawyer, and offered his condolences for the death of her son.

The paramedics had been dispatched to the airport at 1:33 a.m. arriving at about 1:43 a.m.

They attempted to resuscitate Dziekanski while waiting for the arrival of colleagues from an advanced life support team who took over a few minutes later.

Vancouver Sun

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

If someone has stopped breathing while unconscious in your custody, having been made unconscious by your actions, and you haven't done anything to help, doesn't that sound a helluva lot like criminal negligence causing death at the very least?

[Silent Rain]

It does. And if they'd be a normal person, and not someone like a cop or airport security, they'd probably be charged with worse.

Silent Rain

[NoDeity]

Not bad for a mainstream media editorial:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... mment/home

Globe editorial
Walking a mile in the wrong shoes


From Thursday's Globe and Mail
March 26, 2009 at 12:37 AM EDT

RCMP Commissioner William Elliott wants Canadians to “walk a mile in my shoes” – a Mountie's brown boots – before judging the organization or its people in the fatal tasering of the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver International Airport. But the RCMP is not the victim here, and it will not regain Canadians' confidence by acting like one.

Mr. Elliott's comment is egregious and insulting because he asks for his organization what he does not ask of it – that it walk a mile in the shoes of an unarmed immigrant who did not speak English or French, and who had been waiting for his mother for 10 hours. Never mind a mile. The Mounties never took the first step. They began tasering Mr. Dziekanski, about whom they knew nothing, and never asked, within 30 seconds of approaching him.

Mr. Elliott asks for empathy, but why should Canadians ignore incompetence and unprofessionalism? Everything that has emerged from the four officers involved, in testimony at a judicial inquiry in British Columbia, underscores the organization's failure to train its officers properly. Corporal Benjamin Monty Robinson, the most senior of the four, had let his first-aid training lapse five years earlier. No wonder he failed to recognize or address Mr. Dziekanski's distress. Cpl. Robinson's taser training occurred in 2003 and he hadn't had a refresher course. No wonder Mr. Dziekanski was tasered five times, though he never got up after the first one. Why isn't the RCMP training its people properly?

The amateur video of the RCMP's fatal confrontation with Mr. Dziekanski should be used as a teaching tool at every police college in the country: This is what not to do.

Lesson one might be that the police, not the unarmed subject, are in control. The RCMP is on the verge of making itself a laughingstock because the four officers testified about how threatened they felt when Mr. Dziekanski picked up a stapler. (The officers had all said initially that Mr. Dziekanski had swung the stapler. He hadn't.) Canada's finest, having tamed the West quite peacefully, are now a-quiver at being collated. These officers had options. They could have backed off. Mr. Dziekanski was in a secure area. Time was on the officers' side.

But in their view, Mr. Dziekanski was in control. “He didn't afford us the opportunity” to give a warning, said Cpl. Robinson. Yet everything that happened was brought on by those officers. It was their aggressive approach – four armed police moving in as a pack, right up close, and spreading around him – that caused the confused, frightened man to pick up the stapler. Relaxing and backing off a few steps could have worked wonders. What a teachable moment for all police everywhere.

It is clear to nearly everyone in Canada except the RCMP that the tasering was unnecessary, brutal and a national embarrassment. It is equally clear that the RCMP, in its official statements and in the initial statements of the four officers, told rank falsehoods. Their training and judgment were simply not up to the task. On the positive side, Mr. Elliott said last month that his force has changed its taser policy to reflect a risk of death. He seems now to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

Mr. Elliott, a career civil servant, was made commissioner at a low point for the RCMP two years ago. His job was to fix a “horribly broken” agency. Yet it seems from his latest comments the RCMP is determined to learn nothing from the death of Mr. Dziekanski. The impression he leaves is that the organization is still horribly broken.

[vertigo]

Let's wait to see what the response is like. Most likely it'll be noncommitting, something like "we have learnt from our mistakes and have implemented various changes since this took place, we are now far better prepared to protect the public" or even "Figurehead Bob is stepping down immediately as a result of the failings under his administration".

[NoDeity]

You're probably right. I don't expect substantive changes.

[Beeman1991]

Charges may still be laid in Taser death of Dziekanski


By Staff Reporter, The ProvinceApril 14, 2009Comments (15)


Criminal charges may still be laid against the four RCMP officers involved in the Tasering death of a Polish immigrant.

The December decision by Crown prosecutors not to lay charges against the four officers in the 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport is not final, Attorney-General Wally Oppal told CBC News yesterday.

"Nothing is final . . . particularly when we're getting more and more evidence being elicited on a daily basis," said Oppal.

"It may well be, at the end of the day, the people in the Criminal Justice Branch could re-examine this."

Oppal's statements were made in light of contradictions between the officers' previous statements and their testimony at the Braidwood inquiry after watching videotape evidence recorded by a bystander.

Dziekanski, 40, appeared distressed and started throwing luggage after being stranded for several hours at the airport. He died after being hit five times by a Taser.

Charges of assault, assault with a weapon and manslaughter were considered against constables Kwesi Millington, Bill Bentley, Gerry Rundel, and Cpl. Benjamin "Monty" Robinson, but available evidence wasn't sufficient to get charges approved.

Two of the officers have been transferred outside the province. One remains in B.C. and another has been suspended for an unrelated incident.

Walter Kosteckyj, the lawyer for Dziekanski's mother, Zofia Cisowski, had previously called for the criminal investigation into Dziekanski's death to be reopened.

Last month, prosecutor Neil MacKenzie told The Province it is not uncommon for prosecutors to ask police to reopen a file.

"If additional evidence becomes available, it's always open to us to have the matter reviewed and resubmitted to Crown," MacKenzie said at the time.

© Copyright (c) The Province

From the statist legal perspective:
If nothing else couldn't the police be charged after that whole ordeal in which they made up a bunch of shit about Dziekanski being an alchoholic and basically just a horrible violent person?
I think Wally Oppal is pretty cool for at the very least letting people know its not over yet. I don't think anybody outside the RCMP really wants them to get away with this bullshit. Plus they've followed it up with several other incidences involving unnecessary force and what can only amount to stealing property.

My own view
There was video footage. If it was lost or deleted they should be charged for obstructing justice. There is a guy there who is clearly dead from their actions.... so I dont see how they can get away with it. If they cannot prove the man was committing a crime then theres no reason for them to even have used the tasers.
Manslaughter charges for all.

It's bad enough that one of the letters to the editor in the newspaper a few weeks back was from somebody who allegedly came from an eastern european country who basically said they are afraid to live here now. With all the stories emerging about the police just going all out on people now... and with the general "if you have nothing to hide you shouldnt worry about your rights not existing" attitude of an ignorant populace I dont exactly feel too good about the thought of living here.

[NoDeity]

If they cannot prove the man was committing a crime then theres no reason for them to even have used the tasers.

There's pretty good evidence that he was destroying property, which is a crime. However, damaging some desks and chairs and, possibly, a computer doesn't seem like a good enough reason to taser someone, especially when they've tried no other means of dealing with the situation.

The cop who fired the taser has testified that he did it because he thought he was in danger of being attacked. From the video and testimony from the cops and others, though, it seems pretty clear that the cops escalated the situation by their clumsy approach to the man.

[NoDeity]

A senior police official finally says what's been obvious to everyone else for a long time now:

William Sweeney, the Senior Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP, told a Senate committee, which is studying reform of the federal police force, that the Mounties are very sorry for his death, the subject of a judicial inquiry at which RCMP officers have repeatedly shown they have learned nothing. Mr. Sweeney, rather than falling back on narrow explanations drawn from the manual on “the use of force,” said the Mounties need to relearn how to talk to people, to avoid harming them.

How true. Time was on the Mounties' side. They could have tried talking to Mr. Dziekanski, offered him a chair and a glass of water. They could have stood back, instead of closing in as a pack on a bewildered man. Why has it been so hard for the Mounties to say so until now?

from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... mment/home (emphasis added)

Why has it been so hard for them to say? I think it's always very difficult for those who hold power over others to admit to making mistakes because it very strongly suggests that their holding of that power and the respect of others for that power ought to be questioned.

[vertigo]

... said the Mounties need to relearn how to talk to people, to avoid harming them.

1. That's not a quote. What did he actually say?
2. As it is phrased, it suggests only that the Mounties are too quick to action, not that action is wrong. So the apology only says effectively that "we should have talked to him first".
3. They tasered him 5 times. That was not apologized for. The manner in which they approached him was not apologized for.
4. This was the deputy commissioner, not the top dog.

[NoDeity]

Good points all, vertigo.

[NoDeity]

This article provides more quotations: http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=1585892

Excerpt:

"We must spend more time with our training to use de-escalation techniques in a much more effective manner than perhaps we have in the past," Sweeney told the national security committee.

"In my day, it was always talking," he said. "We prided ourselves on time, talk and, if necessary, tear gas before we attempted to do any sorts of interventions that would physically cause harm to others."

I'm still trying to find actual committee transcripts.

It's true that Sweeney is the No. 2 in the RCMP. However, Sweeney is the top ranking member who has actual police experience. Traditionally, a police veteran has been appointed to the position of Commissioner but someone from outside the force (William J. S. Elliott, a career civil servant) was appointed to the job in 2007 to give the appearance that something was being done to reform the culture of the RCMP

[vertigo]

"We are very sorry for Mr. Dziekanski's death," William Sweeney, the senior deputy commissioner, told a Senate committee studying RCMP reforms.

"We are committed to learning as much as possible from the circumstances surrounding his tragic death."
...
Sweeney, when asked what the force has learned from Dziekanski's death, said that Mounties need better training to return to traditional policing methods of diffusing potentially violent situations — such as talking down a suspect — rather than using force.

"We must spend more time with our training to use de-escalation techniques in a much more effective manner than perhaps we have in the past," Sweeney told the national security committee.

Okay, this is better. The Mounties need better training to use de-escalation techniques in a much more effective manner than PERHAPS they have in the past. There is no admission of guilt here.

Sweeney on Monday did not directly discuss the RCMP use of Tasers, and said he would not comment specifically on the events surrounding the public probe.

However, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott has changed the force's policy on Taser use since Dziekanski's death — which was captured on video by a witness and shown worldwide.

Officers are now cautioned to only use the stun guns in situations that pose a safety risk, rather than simply to restrain a suspect.

And this is the only change I expect to happen, a small change in policy.

----------------------------------------

But I agree with you that it's good that the opinion columns are reflecting public sentiment.

[NoDeity]

lol - I don't expect much, either.

[NoDeity]

This is kind of interesting. Mike Webster is a police psychologist who has more than 30 years experience working with the RCMP. Last fall, the force cut off all contract work with him when he publicly made some rather mild criticisms of the RCMP in the wake of the death of this poor man. This article is about an open letter who wrote to Dziekanski's mother. Here's a short excerpt that stood out to me, followed by the whole article:

“I thought this would be the closest she would get to a genuine apology from anyone associated with the RCMP,” Mr. Webster said in an interview this week. “I mean a genuine apology. If I didn't say anything nobody would. But I also thought she needed to hear someone speak the truth about what's really going on inside the force.

From http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... ional/home

Psychologist's letter a scathing indictment of RCMP

GARY MASON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
May 15, 2009 at 7:40 PM EDT

It started out as an apology for the role Canada's national police force played in the death of her son, Robert. But in its writing, police psychologist Mike Webster's open letter to Zofia Cisowski became a scathing indictment of the force's leadership.

“So how could this happen?” Mr. Webster writes in his letter to Ms. Cisowski. “The short answer is an inept, insular and archaic group of RCMP executives has let the Force fall out of step with 21st Century policing.”

Mr. Webster has a perspective on the RCMP that few do.

He's been associated with the force for more than 30 years. He's been a consultant on undercover operations, hostage-takings and kidnappings. He is recognized as a leader in his field. And this past week, he took the stand at the Braidwood inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski and suggested the four RCMP officers involved in the incident panicked and abandoned their basic training.

Mr. Webster was in the news in the spring of last year when it became public that the RCMP had cut off all his contract work over the fairly mild criticisms he had levelled at the force over the Dziekanski affair. He told me that the letter to Ms. Cisowski is not about sour grapes, but rather an attempt to educate a grieving mother, and an angry public, about how something like this could happen.

It is written by someone who has had an insider's perspective on the cultural evolution that has occurred over the last few decades within the RCMP.

“I thought this would be the closest she would get to a genuine apology from anyone associated with the RCMP,” Mr. Webster said in an interview this week. “I mean a genuine apology. If I didn't say anything nobody would. But I also thought she needed to hear someone speak the truth about what's really going on inside the force.

“I thought that might help her explain how things ever got to the point they did on that night at the airport.”

In his letter, made available exclusively to The Globe and Mail, Mr. Webster said he holds RCMP management responsible for the decision-making by the four officers in the short minutes leading to Mr. Dziekanski's death.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Webster writes in his letter, “the idea of intimidating people is entirely consistent with the RCMP management's way of managing conflict, not only with the public, but also with its own membership.

“The idea of protection is reflective of the RCMP executive's view of the public they police. We have become the ‘enemy' and they go to ‘war' with us each day, rather than collaborating with us to form a cohesive and consistent approach to policing our communities.”

Mr. Webster, who holds a doctorate in psychology, also takes aim at the Criminal Justice Branch's decision not to press charges in connection with Mr. Dziekanski's death. A decision based on an investigation of the incident conducted by the RCMP itself.

“It is a psychologically unsophisticated idea to believe that the RCMP can investigate itself,” writes Mr. Webster. “When I say this, I'm not questioning anyone's integrity. I am stating a fundamental principle of human behaviour. Human beings are highly subjective organisms … we don't like to see things that make us look bad.

“This is why medical doctors shouldn't be diagnosing themselves, researchers should be at arm's length from their own research and I make a lousy psychologist for my own family.”

Mr. Webster concludes his letter by saying that he's “deeply sorry for the RCMP's behaviour that contributed to Robert's death.”

“I wish I could tell you that the issues … that are rotting the RCMP from the top down will soon be changing. I won't do that as the RCMP is in need of significant transformational change in order to genuinely re-connect with the public and its own membership.”

While he admits to having little faith that anything much will change until the current leadership group in charge of the RCMP is changed, Mr. Webster promises Ms. Cisowski he will continue to “shine a critical light” on the role played by management of the Mounties in her son's death.

That, he says, is the least he can do.