Wednesday, July 23, 2008

TASER™ Saves Lives Inc. - Victim #22

A man was TASERED™ and then pronounced dead in hospital after more than five police cars with at least eight officers attended a citizen's call in Winnipeg today, bringing the total of TASER™ related deaths in Canada to 21.

Very few details and no citizen videos are available so far.

A Winnipeg police spokesperson said : "... at this point it's too early to tell if the cause of death had anything at all to do with the electronic control device."

Police in Winnipeg recently received 50 more TASERs™ which are classed in the same intermediate force category as pepper spray.

In other TASER™ news :
"RCMP officers who went to Poland to talk to people close to Robert Dziekanski seemed focused on finding negative things about him, says one of those interviewed."

What kind of person was he, was he a drinker, drug user? Was he aggressive?" she said through a translator. "Most questions were to expose him as not a nice human being -- not to find out what kind of person he really was."

This fits in with some Vancouver news articles on Dziekanski that came out following the release of Paul Pritchard's incriminating video :
" the decrepit, $77-a-month flat Dziekanski shared with his alcoholic partner ... a five-year jail term for robbery when he was a teenager ... a tumultuous common-law relationship ..."
Oh well then.


Update from CBC : #22 His name is Michael Langan. He was only 17 years old, the youngest TASER™ victim in Canada to date.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nobody has yet asked what seems to me to be the obvious question.
Have the number of deaths caused by police action dropped due to the use of Tazers? In my, totally unscientific observation, it appears the number of Tazer deaths have increased this statistic.

Raphael Alexander said...

Alison, this wasn't a "man" who was killed. It was a teenage boy. All of 17 years old.

Alison said...

Yes, you're right. I wrote the post before any info about him was available.

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