so anyone have anything to say about the tazer vid. makes one wonder just what the hell do we have protecting us, its time we get some answers, who knows we could be next. My condolences go out to his mom.
1,2,3, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapppppppppppppppp!!!
i think its pretty scary
thats our law enforcement at work… there was enough police officers there to subdue him without being taserd 50 000 volts? is that really nessecary?
i think police are just getting lazy and dont want to do the work themselves.
and if that is how we are training our law enforcement professionals… then i dont want to be at the wrong end of the law thats for sure…
Robert Dziekanski Death video, youtube is not hosting this.
edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/ … 55893.html
This was a first for me seeing a taser death.
Condolences to his Mom and family
17 deaths is not “non-lethal” force.
The guy is just standing there, not speaking English, and he’s killed. I hope these officers are charged with murder, because there’s no other explanation. The video speaks for itself. He’s not threatening them. He’s just standing.
It’s supremely bad training, and an RCMP culture of “f**k you public, we don’t care what you think” that allows this to happen.
There was no escalation, no attempt at physical contact, no nothing. Just “hello you non-English speaking guy, we’re going to kill you.”
If the officer who shot him knew there were 17 deaths from Tasers in the last few years, and he knew that it was dangerous, and didn’t attempt ANY OTHER METHOD before just killing the guy, it’s murder. Plain and simple.
Of course, that will never happen, because we have the RCMP investigating itself.
They sure didnt try to ‘talk the guy down’ for very long…like they were eager to use the tazer!
Agreed. I hope the officers are charged! 
I found the video to be chilling. I remember from the CBC radio broadcasts that the man was violent, dangerous…a real threat! But, in the video I see a frightened, disoriented man holding up a chair in a defensive posture.
Absolute bullshit! Three armed officers can’t cuff one man?
Did you count off the seconds between them walking through the door and zapping him? 2 seconds? 3 seconds? Did you see what he was doing when they walked through the door? Standing there. Doing nothing.
Here’s the problem: they can fix this really easily by just getting rid of the Tasers (the RCMP was a capable police force well before they had them). But they won’t, because that would be admitting that their officers are untrained apes who just like to zap people. It would be admitting that the RCMP isn’t well trained enough to have Tasers. The RCMP doesn’t want to admit a mistake.
Sadly, the RCMP a generation ago actually had a good reputation, and actually wanted to maintain that reputation. Today’s RCMP seems to just want to distance itself further and further from society. “You civilians don’t understand.” “We need to investigate ourselves, because we’re the only ones who know how to investigate.”
Well, I’m a civilian, and a voter, and that video has me convinced that the RCMP is rotten. There may be a small minority of officers who are f**cking idiots, but I don’t buy that anymore either. If it’s a small minority, then why does the majority defend them? Why doesn’t the majority get rid of the minority of idiots? Why? Because it’s not a minority anymore, is it?
Convince me I’m wrong, and that most RCMP officers actually give a shit. Convince me that most RCMP officers do all they can to rid the force of apes like these guys at the airport. You can’t convince me of that, because most RCMP officers will find some way of defending them instead.
That’s what I want to know. Next time I see my friends who are RCMP officers, that’s what I’ll ask them: “what are you doing to get rid of the idiots in your ranks instead of defending them?”
tazers should only be used WHEN NESSECARY!
not to subdue a suspect with more than one or two officers present
if three officers arent capable of restraining ONE MAN then how well are we training them?
UUm Question when did the fellow die? did the RCMP provide CPR on this poor guy.
At the end of that video he was not moving and you can see the RCMP moving away from the victim… Shame on the RCMP
A couple of things:
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Was an interpreter ever considered to be brought in?
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What about Pepper Spray?
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You’d think that 3 cops with their telescopic batons would have been able to take him down easily if necessary.
What they did was blatant misuse of their weapons. Take them away.
From CKNW this afternoon:
Officers decided to taser the guy as they walked in the door. The conversation was picked up on the video.
It was 23 seconds from the time they entered the area until they zapped him.
Watch the video: the guy thrashes from being zapped, he dosen’t move towards the officers at all, they zap him again. He lays on the floor thrashing from reflex. No “resisting” at all.
RCMP claim he was tasered twice. Several witnesses say four times. It took 12 minutes for the paramedics (already stationed IN the airport) to arrive.
23 seconds in the area, but only about 3 seconds after approaching the guy. He had his hands up and was saying “policia” when they zapped him. He was not assaulting them, he wasn’t resisting them.
No need for pepper spray or batons, they didn’t even confront or engage him. If an unarmed civilian woman was able to sort of have a conversation with the guy and not fear for her safety, why couldn’t the police do so?
No, this is pretty clear. They walked in, zapped him. End of story. There are no other nuances, there’s no “but you’re a civilian, you don’t understand!” here, the guy was murdered without provocation.
I’m not an expert in how to subdue an irrational person, I’m not an expert in human kinetics. I’m not an expert on human rights or civil liberties. But there are people out there that are experts, and I don’t imagine that all of them work for the RCMP.
We need to legislate civilian oversight of the RCMP.
It’s like when they brought in the expert from Ontario to comment on the levy of complaints being brought against the RCMP in recent years. You can’t leave the fox in charge of the hen-house. If you asked me to diagnose my own daily job performance, I’d tell you that there’s no way I could be doing any better, and it would always be someone else’s fault.
Every time that a cop gets killed in the line of duty, it is sensationalized so severely in the media. The guy is automatically proclaimed a hero, and he probably deserves it. Probably. But then you see things like this video, and you have to think that maybe the cop was the aggressor. One crime doesn’t justify another; two wrongs don’t make a right. Shit happens, people make mistakes. You have to be mature to admit you’ve made a mistake, and that’s why the RCMP looks so immature now.
There is a crime committed against the RCMP --> The RCMP investigates and prosecutes --> The RCMP is found to be in the right.
There is a crime committed by the RCMP --> The RCMP investigates and prosecutes --> The RCMP is found to be in the right.
While I think it shows a lack of character for the organization overall that they have always protected themselves to the exclusion of objective justice, part of the blame has to fall on the rest of society for letting them get away with it.
The RCMP investigate the criminals. Who investigates the RCMP?
I’d like to preface this with: everything I know about prosecution, I learned from Law & Order. So I don’t really know what the penance is for a misdemeanor. I don’t even know if we call them “misdemeanors” in Canada.
What did the dude do, in legal terms? A few counts of causing a disturbance? I’ll even throw in “uttering threats”, even though it is painfully apparent that no one would have understood him if he was. Regardless, I’m not saying that the dude that got TASERed didn’t break the law.
But let’s say I broke those same laws, and was arrested without incident. What would the net penalty for all of those crimes be?
A few months in the big house? First time offender, I kind of wouldn’t think so. A few thousand dollars in fines, a year of probation, some community service? I’d absolutely welcome it if someone with some expertise in this area can quantify the crimes and their penalties. But what did he get?
The dude was killed.
Sure it was an accident, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say something like “pre-meditated murder”, but how’s this counter-example. Let’s say a guy got into a fight. Let’s make it a fight with an off-duty cop, in plainclothes. Let’s say the guy puts the cop in a sleeper-hold and knocks him out. And the cop’s brain starves of oxygen and he dies. It was an accident - the guy was just trying to subdue him. I imagine that the case would be prosecuted differently.
You know what’s funny?
I’m afraid of the RCMP. I become uneasy when uniformed law enforcement agents are around. Even if one of them is just stopping by work shopping for cars after his shift has ended or something.
I look to think that I’m relatively law abiding*. I download movies and music, and I drive 120 km/h on the highway sometimes. I don’t own any weapons. I don’t worry about the possibility of having to pay a fine. But I do worry that I could find myself at the wrong end of “lethal force” through a comedy of errors.
- What’s funny, is that this is exactly like the RCMP investigating themselves. Of course everybody thinks that they are law-abiding, duh. I should not be able to speak as an authority when my objectivity is questionable.
At the Vancouver International Airport they do have interpreters, but, they don’t have any that speak the language of the victim, Polish. I’m still astounded that 3-4 police officers couldn’t more peacefully subdue one man. Even if they couldn’t speak to him they should have given him some space and gestured with hand signals about what they wanted him to do. They should have waited a few minutes before electrocuting him, killing him. After waiting for a reasonable time I think three armed men should be able to cuff one man. Police officers should have some hand-to-hand fighting training before they don a uniform.
That video is a damning indictment of the inability of Police to handle a minor disturbance.
Pathetic. 
A very disturbing video, indeed!! It seems like there is plenty of blame to pass around here. I seen Global do a piece after this incident, they had a Polish speaking man asking for assitance and did recieve it after a while. But he new where to go and ask for it, so apparently there is Polish speaking help available in the Vancouver airport, partial responsibility has to fall on the airport authority.
What we do not get from the video is exactly how this man died, the police did play the biggest part but it is still unclear whether or not it was the tasering or the actual physical confrontation, the man on top of him. I think that this determination is very important.
that video just plainly made me feel sick… 
poor guy looked terrified, he can’t communicate with these officers, doesn’t fully understand whats going on, and then POW…on the ground taking his last few breaths…
The police officers should only be allowed those stick things and pepper spray…
then again, im sure they would find ways to kill people with those too… 
The RCMP has asked that the public refrain from jumping to conclusions based solely on that video. Apparently, there are a whole bunch of other angles to their investigation, and they have lots more information than what we see in that video.
Their investigation.
They’ll let us know how it turns out, I guess.