TASER and Friends

Galloping Beaver has pointed out this cozy little relationship. Check out the impeccable endorsement our deputy chief coroner, Dr. James Cairns has given the TASER:

"I am absolutely convinced tasers will save lives instead of taking lives. And I hope some day, if I am in the position, please taser me before you shoot me," Dr. Cairns told the board at its meeting.

In other words: TASER - it's better than being shot! I thought this song fitting:

George Jonas is a total idiot or The Killer Nic-fit

I'm not just using this as title because I often find myself at odds with the former Mr. Barbara Amiel, no, today I'm convinced the man is actually one of the stupidest columnists writing in Canada.

Some backstory: Paul Wells was touting his former employer's new website and, in all fairness to their web design people, it does look better. Nonetheless, this lured me into reading the Opinion section where I stumbled across George Jonas' theorizing about the RCMP killing of Robert Dziekanski.

According to Jonas, the real way that the state killed Mr. Dziekanski was by forbidding him to smoke in the airport! No really he says:

"Before the armed agents of the state ran wild, though, the unlucky Pole ran a bit wild himself. Why did Mr. Dziekanski start throwing things around at the Vancouver airport, which eventually conjured up the Taser-toting agents of the omnipotent state?

The probable answer is nicotine starvation. Before Big Nanny deprived Mr. Dziekanski of his life, she deprived him of cigarettes. There's a chance the enthusiastic East European visitor to our shores, gung-ho enough to keep a Canadian flag at home, who talked about looking forward to seeing grizzly bears in British Columbia, ended up dying to smoke. Literally."

Wow. That's an excellent use of Eastern European stereotypes. The real killer here is that people can't smoke wherever they want? Now in fairness, further on in the column, Jonas does concede that the RCMP electrocuting Dziekanski may also have had something to do with his untimely end, and that that too, was unwise. But a nic-fit as a cause of death in this case, I mean come on! Do we even know that Dziekanski was a smoker, and if so, even a heavy one?

Is it okay to stereotype Poles again? George Jonas, you are an idiot at best, a racist demagogue at worst.

Excited Delirium = Bullshit?

The RCMP talking points are coming together now and you can bet that they will lead with the "excited delirium" line that's getting airing in the media already. What is excited delirium? How would we know if Robert Dziekanski was suffering from it? Well, what do medical and psychological professionals say about? The CBC article says this:

"In fact, the term is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, a handbook for professional psychologists and psychiatrists."

Oh. So it's not even a real disease. In fact it looks more like a post-hoc explanation. If the taser kills you, then you had it. Why not just say that the person in question had crazyitis? It has about as much medical merit.

Either way, expect to see "excited delirium" emanating from an RCMP mouthpiece near you.

Dismantling the RCMP

I put the idea forward in a post the other day. Macleans has an extended critique of the force here. The magazine doesn't appear to endorse my idea as a solution though they did say this:

"In B.C., where nearly a third of RCMP officers are posted—and where critics say criminal networks have gained the upper hand on understaffed Mounties—the stakes are even higher. Two weeks ago, the chief constable of the West Vancouver municipal police floated the idea of a regional force on the Lower Mainland, an idea that would remove the cities of Burnaby, North Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey from the RCMP's bailiwick."

Why limit it to the region? BC, and every other province, ought to get its own provincial force. The RCMP polices far too broad of an area and appears to be doing it ineffectively. What has saved them so far is the romantic image that mounties have in movies and television. Romantic images are not a good basis for policy choices.

Update: Dr. Dawg has been saying this for a while.

Murder by the State

Understandably, Polish officials are very upset with the cruel treatment Robert Dziekanski received at the hands of four police thugs. As the Clash says, murder is crime unless it was done by a policeman. It sort of got me to thinking about a Polish film that more people outside of Eastern Europe really out to know. Released in 1988, The Decalogue a ten-part series that meditates on the transgressions listed in the ten commandments. I recommend the whole thing, but here is the last bit of the fifth short, the one that concerns murder. This scene depicts the execution of a deranged murderer by an authoritarian state, not the electrical lynching of an upset and confused man lost in an airport where no one spoke his language in a supposedly free society.

A National Disgrace

There's been so much written about the apparently cold-blooded killing of a confused traveler by the RCMP - and rightly so. I was disgusted listening to rationalizations of an RCMP spokesman on CBC radio last night.

I think this is perhaps the time to take it one step further: break up the RCMP. In Ontario and Quebec there are provincial police forces that do the vast majority of what the RCMP does in all the other provinces. Before Robert Dziekanski there was Ian Bush, part of 267(!) deaths at the RCMP's hands hands of police in BC.

Here's why a break-up might help: It appears, whenever there are problems with the RCMP they seem to disappear down a bureaucratic rabbit hole. It wasn't until there was real trouble for the RCMP's complicity in the rendition of Maher Arar that anyone even knew who Giuliano Zaccardelli was. Giving the RCMP's role to new provincial forces would shorten and clarify the lines of accountability. When, say, the OPP does mess up, we can draw a line from the officers on the ground right up to the premier if we need to.

Let the RCMP do horse parades and perhaps guard federal buildings and foreign dignitaries (we can work out their new, limited role). I do not have confidence in them to do much else. Dismantle the RCMP.

Free Trade is the only Freedom?

What exactly does the RCMP think that the Council of Canadians will do that is such a security threat to the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting to be held in Montebello Quebec? And what in the hell does the US Army think it's doing telling Canadians where we can and cannot hold public meetings?! The US Army is not the law here, if Canada sooooo dangerous that our own police, intelligence, and military people can't handle things; then perhaps the US delegation ought not to attend.

These are not radical anarchists or militants or something, as far as trade liberalization critics go, the C of C is about as peaceful as they come. That doesn't mean they don't have sharp criticisms or their wits about them, but they are a far cry from the Molotov cocktail throwers.

It's a wretched irony that those that speak of breaking down trade barriers will erect every other sort of barrier, lest a dissenting voice is heard.

The Tragedy of Errors

(with apologies to William Shakespeare)
I humbly submit that this is what they ought to call the final report of the Air India inquiry. Today we learned that the bomb-sniffing dogs couldn't have found the bomb because all of them, all of them, were at some training thing in Vancouver. Ask a child what is wrong with this, did the RCMP really think that the terrorists would respect this training day?