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.



Monday, October 12, 2009

Curious Temporal Asymmetry, at around the same time

While Taser International noted sudden cardiac arrests can occur on "golf courses, in airports" or anywhere, the involvement of a taser discharge at around the same time would place police officers and the company in a "difficult situation to ascertain what role, if any," the taser played, according to the bulletin. [LINK]

"...at around the same time..."

What a crock of sh_t.

It's not "at around the same time". It's tasered_and_THEN_died.

This sequence is the way it always occurs. And lest you think that there is no experimental control, nothing to provide the baseline, there is...

...it's the taser's Curious Temporal Asymmetry.

In every taser incident, there is a period of time after the taser is drawn and before it is actually fired. This duration - sometimes seconds, somtimes minutes - provides the long sought experimental control.

If there is no direct cause-and-effect tasered_then_dead (or dying) relationship, then one would expect the death rate per unit time just before the taser hit to be exactly the same as after the taser hit. And this data would be available in police reports. Taser incident reports are often required when the taser is even drawn. But certainly some sort of report would be filed. We would expect to see many reports where the taser was drawn, and the subject fell over before being tasered.

Based on what I have seen on the news where hundreds of people have been tasered and then died, and that we do NOT see Taser International providing any evidence of the many hundreds or thousands of cases where subjects keeled over dead at the mere sight of a drawn taser, it is perfectly clear that there is a Curious Temporal Asymmetry in the distribution of death surrounding taser deployments.

Lately, Taser International has been struggling to muddle this issue. Since the plain facts are not in their side, their attempts are pathetic and clearly reveal their desparation, and their links into the Made-to-Order "studies" by folks such as Dr. Ho.

One of their recent approaches is try to blame the struggle for the cardiac death. But there are many taser-death cases where the victim was tasered_and_died and (being dead or dying immediately after the taser hit) wasn't in a position to be fighting with the police.

Another approach they take is to muddle the taser-DEATH issue with distracting pointless discussions on the relative rates of injuries with tasers and with other weapons such as batons (should obviously include de-escalation techniques in any such comparison). If tasers only ever caused injuries, I would not have bothered starting this blog. It's an immoral act to muddle the issue of DEATH with discussion about rates of injuries.

Getting back on the rate of death, when a baton cracks a skull and the subject dies, there's no denials. When a subject is hit with pepper spray and chokes to death, there's no denial. But when someone is tasered_and_immediately_dies, oh yeah... ...it's always unrelated to the taset hit. It's "excited delirium".

But then how do you explain the taser's Curious Temporal Asymmetry?

"...at around the same time..." my ass.

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