RCMP: Demonizing & Tasering
(By Don Weitz)Apparently, the RCMP and police resort to demonizing victims when they’re losing a case; RCMP lawyers have been using this tactic during the public inquiry in Vancouver into the horrific Taser death of Robert Dziekanski on August 14, 2007. (“Victim was ‘demonized’ by RCMP, lawyer says,” April 1/09). Demonizing innocent citizens in criminal trials is a dirty courtroom tactic frequently used by police lawyers against very vulnerable citizens, dead or alive. I witnessed this tactic used about 6 years ago during the criminal trial of 3 Toronto police officers charged with manslaughter and at the coroner’s inquest into in the death of Otto Vass - three Toronto police officers beat Vass to death in less than 4 minutes in a 7-11 store parking lot. During the trial, a police lawyer got hold of Vass’s medical records and proceeded to read out in open court several stigmatizing and fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses including ‘schizophrenia’ . Unfortunately, this tactic worked, the judge exonerated all 3 officers. Vass and Dziekanski were easy targets – both unarmed, both immigrants, both poor, both considered less than human.
So far, 25 Canadian citizens and approximately 350 U.S. citizens have died soon after police tasered them. According to a 2008 report by Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, roughly 40% of Taser victims have been psychiatric survivors or “EDPs”/”emotionally disturbed persons,” virtually all unarmed. Last year, the UN Committee Against Torture called the Taser a torture weapon. At a recent meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board, I pointed out these facts, urged the Board to ban the Taser. Toronto police officers snickered. Demonizing and tasering vulnerable citizens seems to be RCMP and police policy in our “just society” and in the name of “national security.”
Don Weitz
