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.



Wednesday, January 2, 2008

RCMP fail to fully-adopt Kennedy Report

If the RCMP do not fully-adopt the Kennedy Report recommendations, then no one in Canada is as safe as they have a right to be.

And puhleezze do not take the inane position that if you act like a subservient drone when you are unlucky enough to meet up with a police officer having a bad day that you will be safe. YouTube is full of examples of people being tasered way outside of any reasonable cause. YOU ARE NOT SAFE.

Canadian lawyers should start to prepare for the next death. Because the Kennedy Report has been published and the RCMP ignore it at their legal peril. Unfortunately the human peril remains on the other end of the wires (that's YOU fellow Canadians).

Link= Canadian Press

I find this ratio interesting:

"Mounties have fired the electronic guns over 3,000 times since their introduction in December 2001." and "Dziekanski is recorded as the 18th person in Canada to die in recent years after being hit by a Taser." Note - actually CBC has the running death count as being 20, not 18. On the other side is that other forces (not the RCMP) might have been involved with some of these taser deaths.

That makes the (coincidental?) death rate as roughly 20/3000, or 0.67%. Even if some or many of these deaths really are coincidental, it would be extremely unlikely that ALL 20 are coincidental. I'll grant you that 0.67% is the gross death rate and that the net death rate might be a wee bit lower. Something like 0.xx% or perhaps 0.0x%. But something close to that range. Certainly not 'zero'.

Look at the common sense: If we have 3000 people standing around drinking Tim Hortons coffee and tasering each other for laughs, will 20 of them topple over dead if there wasn't some sort of connection? Even if some of them were snorting cocaine and fighting, 20/3000 is one heck of a death rate. The fact that these incidents were spread out in time, doesn't change the absurd ratio.

More common sense: You jolt someone with a taser and they end up dead shortly thereafter. Okay...? So you're really going to stand there (in your bucket of turds) and deny the possibility that there might be some causal connection?

Well, you can take that position if you want to, but the average citizen will not take your so-called 'expert' (sic) opinions seriously after that point.

You become a joke.

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