Tasers ought to be wonderful things. They supplement — and in many cases, replace — other, less effective weapons in a police officer’s force continuum. Rather than resort to unreliable and indiscriminate pepper spray or inflict potentially permanent crippling damage with a nightstick, cops with tasers can — from a distance — gain a five-second window of control over violent people who don’t need to be shot. Yes, tasers occasionally kill people without obvious reason, but it wouldn’t shock me (heh heh) to discover that cops kill people with tasers at about the same rate as they’ve previously killed people with batons and pepper spray.
That’s how things are supposed to work, anyway.
Note the term “force continuum”, above. Legal and ethical use of force is not an all-or-nothing prospect; if some twelve-year-old delinquent eggs your house on Hallowe’en, you’re not to light up the little shit with thirty rounds of TAP, even if you are permitted to keep a poodle-shooter for home defence. Similarly, if you can resolve a situation with harsh language, nuking the site from orbit is considered unsporting.
In particular, weapons like pepper spray, batons, and tasers are only to be used against violent people.
Refusing to pay a SkyTrain fare is not generally considered “violent”.
Transit police have fired Tasers 10 times since January last year, and three cases involved non-violent suspects, according to internal police reports obtained by CBC News using access to information laws.
In one case, a person ran from transit cops during a check for free-riders and “the Taser was deployed as the subject fled,” the documents say. Another person who didn’t pay the fare was arrested but “grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go … the Taser was deployed.”
I love that language. “…the Taser was deployed.” No indication that someone “deployed” the Taser. No agency involved. No target, either — that Taser wasn’t deployed into someone’s flesh, it was simply “deployed”. People who are proud of what they’ve done do not write reports like those.
Of course, according to our benevolent protectors the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service, no-one writes reports like those. It’s all a fabrication:
The South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service, the police patrolling Greater Vancouver’s TransLink system, defended their use of the stun guns at the news conference, saying that they are used only according to a written policy.
“We have tens of thousand of contacts with the public every year. We have deployed the Taser 10 times,” Houston said. “We do not, have not and will never Taser those in our care for the non-payment of fares.”
Sure.
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