Worst Tasering of Traveler
Somehow a commission found that four Canadian police acted lawfully when they Tasered a nervous Polish traveler at the Vancouver airport, which resulted in his death minutes later. Robert Dziekanski, 40, died in late 2007 and an amateur video of the violent (see below) arrest zipped around the internets.
The report by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the police officers “failed to adopt a measured, coordinated and appropriate response.” It also stated that the senior officer “failed to take charge.”
Dziekanski was an anxious first-time flyer, spoke only Polish and had just landed in Vancouver and couldn’t find his mother, who he’d been searching for for 10 hours in the baggage area. What’s the police response to such a predicament? Taser him to death, what else.
Hard to imagine what this commission was thinking. These officers should clearly not be allowed to wear police badges and they idiot who tasered him should be looking at a manslaughter charge.
Watch the video and see for yourself. (violence starts about 5min into the video)
(8 votes, average: 8.63 out of 10)
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Poor guy… The experience of being in a country where you cannot understand anyone, nor be understood by anyone is stressful enough, let alone being a first-time flyer and anxious about being unable to find a family member (especially his mother). Of course, his behavior may have been seen as threatening and aggressive by the security and police officers, but then again, it would have been nice to see them try and establish communications before, in turn, surrounding him in an intimidating fashion.
It would be great if airports had a list of people who could speak various languages in cases like this, I know I have, in the past, used free translation services available in Australia to act as a go-between when dealing with someone who I could not communicate with directly due to language barriers. The bloke was probably two minutes away from breaking down and crying like a baby, but, it seems everything was rushed and precipitated a bad result.
It would also be worth their while investigating if, as the video suggests, he was identified as unconscious and/or not breathing during the filmed period. If so, I did not see any of the uniformed police moving to render first aid or CPR.
That is fking disgusting what those officers did
Even if he didn’t speak the language, he should have realized that his body language was way out of control. How were the police officers to know he’d been there for 10 hours? Police officers are charged with making life and death decesion in a split second. Should they ask everyone behaving in this manner if they have any underlying medical conditions prior to tazing someone?