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, December 10, 2009

A plea for PWGSC to save the RCMP from themselves

The RCMP and their watchdog, CPC, appear to share the opinion that one part of the solution to the problem of tasers (and their apparently inherent tendancy to be overused, misused and abused) is to deploy more video cameras. Conveniently {ROLLS EYES}, such officer-carried systems are now being marketed by a certain well-known maker of stunguns, Taser International. This amount of irony should be illegal.

The immediately-previous post highlighted the possible procurement issue with purchasing a weapon where it cannot even be agreed if it is potentially (inherently) lethal or not. This is the first area where additional PWGSC oversight might save Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars in indirect costs.

The next issue is the obviously-contemplated procurement, almost certainly from Taser International, of officer-carried video cameras.

Reportedly, the cost structure includes an ongoing service fee of a reported US$100 per officer per month. [UPDATE: Another report has it at US$160 per month per officer.]

No doubt there will be other expenses related to their well known QA issues (high failure rate of tasers, little if any preplanned ILS) and apparent lack of any externally-certified quality systems or standards (ISO9000, CMMI), probable lack of industry standard software standards, probable lack of requirement traceability, etc.

It seems clear that PWGSC should impose additional oversight on any further procurements from Taser International.

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