Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Thursday, January 31, 2008

Mr. Smith goes to Ottawa (on exhaustion)

Mr. Smith seemed to be claiming something like this: the victims of Excited Delirium (sic) might be sort-of killing themselves by way of exhaustion. He more-or-less claimed that immediate application of a taser (no delay to try talking) could assist the subject by getting them to 'professional help' sooner (such 'help' in reality typically being nothing more than being tossed into the nearest jail cell). I guess the urgency is that something really bad might happen; like the subject's antiperspirant being totally consumed. It was difficult to follow his logic. I'll have to review the transcript to decipher exactly what he was trying to say.

By way of counter example, let's pretend we have a marathon race in a big city where thousands of people run 26 miles. Do we expect to see, for this unquestionably absolutely-ultimate example of acidosis and exhaustion, a death rate of roughly 20 per 3000 participants (or whatever the exact numbers are)? Marathons can rarely be fatal, but not usually at the sort of rates we are seeing with Canadian taser use. Not even within the same order of magnitude. Marathons would be banned if the 'coincidental' death rate was the same ratio that we're seeing with taser deployments in Canada.

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