Better than a bullet

Take it from me, despite Vancouver death, you're far better off being hit with a Taser

Sat Nov 17 2007

IN the stampede to judgment in the Vancouver airport Tasering and death of a Polish immigrant, let's remember these four men:

Donald Miles, Matthew Dumas, Dennis St. Paul and Howard Fleury.

What unites them is that they're dead, each killed by a police officer's bullet. Three died in Winnipeg and one in Norway House.

The circumstances of how Miles, Dumas, St. Paul and Fleury each died are uniquely different, but there is one underlying thing they have in common.

They might be alive today if they were zapped by a Taser electric stun gun.

That's why police throughout Manitoba and the rest of the world are now armed with Tasers, or in police jargon "conducted energy devices." Taser, like Kleenex, is a brand name, and there are more than one kind of conducted energy devices on the market, although the Taser is by far the most commonly used by law enforcement.

Up until now, and the release of the harrowing video death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport, the use of the Taser has been widely accepted as just another tool police use to do business.

Police are now trained to use a Taser, firing a 50,000-volt electric jolt, to get an unruly suspect to comply with demands to co-operate with officers, so they can be safely handcuffed without an officer or a member of the public being injured.

The Taser is not designed to kill.

If it was, I'd be dead. And my tombstone would say the date of death was Jan. 16, 2003.

That's the day the RCMP Tasered me and some other reporters as part of news conference on Mounties being equipped with the devices.

That three-second zap will forever be branded in my brain -- almost five years later it still makes me cringe.

Being hit with a Taser does not hurt -- it's worse. It's not like smacking your thumb with a hammer or getting hit in the mouth with a hockey puck. It's not that kind of pain. It's instead the pain of sheer terror.

The Taser's two electrodes, in contact with your clothing, transmit the 50,000 volts between the two points along the surface of your skin and outer muscles.

Your body reacts in a spasm as your brain doesn't recognize what's happening. You cannot help but cry out and fall to the ground. You are absolutely powerless to stop it. Only when the device is shut off do you find relief, and within a few seconds it's almost as if you'd never been Tasered at all.

It's a horrible, horrible experience.

It's also one each police officer trained in the use of a Taser has to go through, so they truly appreciate that they can never, ever allow someone to take it and use against them.

In the three years Tasers have been used in the province, no one has died after being hit with the device.

More and more, police are coming into conflict with potentially dangerous people who disobey orders to stop or give themselves up. It could be because they're high on drugs or have a mental illness and are acting out in a way that is not normal behaviour for them, but poses a safety risk.

More and more, pepper spray and batons don't work on these people.

So police use Tasers.

Of the deaths that have occurred in Canada and the United States, excluding what happened to Dziekanski, most of those who died after being Tasered had drugs in their system combined with cardiovascular problems.

Did Tasers kill them?

Short answer is, we don't know.

Which is why The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has again asked for another review of their use. A 2005 report for the CACP said Tasers were safe, but in light of what happened to Dziekanski, police across the country want a second opinion.

That's a fair and proper decision, but I'd hate to think because of what happened in Vancouver, police back off on using Tasers and go back to what they did before.

I'm sure the families of Donald Miles, Matthew Dumas, Dennis St. Paul and Howard Fleury feel the same way.

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca

Winnipeg Free Press