If Winnipeg police officers were carrying Tasers back in 2005, would Matthew Dumas still be alive today?
It's impossible to say with certainty but yes, he probably would be.
Dumas was shot to death by Winnipeg Police Service Const. Dennis Gburek on Dufferin Avenue sidewalk on the afternoon of Jan. 31, 2005. As the inquiry into the young man's death heard last month, Dumas was holding a screwdriver and was fatally shot at close range after police asked him repeatedly to put down the weapon.
It's a purely academic question at this point, but if Gburek had been able to use a Taser rather than his gun, would Dumas still be alive? Not even Judge Mary Curtis, who presided over the inquiry, can substantively answer that question. But this point must be considered as Winnipeg deals with the fallout from the death of another police suspect -- this time, someone who was at the wrong end of a Taser rather than a firearm.
A 17-year-old boy died Tuesday after Winnipeg police stunned him with a Taser. He was the 22nd Canadian to die since 2003 after being restrained with this weapon. Police say the youth was suspected of stealing property and refused to drop a knife in his hand.
While the full truth, like the truth of the Dumas matter, will take a very long time to emerge, it is already obvious that the chorus to take Tasers away from police officers -- a chorus that was amplified after Canadians watched RCMP officers fatally stun Robert Dziekanski on their television sets last fall -- will grow louder and louder.
But before we are so quick to condemn Tasers, it's worth remembering why police carry them in the first place: unlike guns, they seldom kill people.
In September 2006, Winnipeg Police Service officers were given Tasers for the sole reason of preventing future tragedies like the Dumas shooting. Between January 1, 2007 and June 25, 2008, WPS officers used their Tasers 236 times in the line of duty. Only on about half of those occasions did police officers actually have to shock a suspect. Yet, until Tuesday, not a single person died as a result of getting a blast of electricity through their skin.
A soon-to-be-released study also shows that while Tasers cause more harm than other "non-lethal" restraints like pepper spray, they are safer than other restraint methods. Staff Sgt. Chris Butler of the Calgary Police Service and Dr. Christine Hall of the Canadian Police Research Centre examined 562 incidents over a two-year period in which Calgary police used force to restrain suspects.
Their findings, which have been released by the Force Science Research Centre at Minnesota State University, show that Tasers were used in approximately half (48.5 per cent) of incidents where Calgary police had to restrain subjects. About one-in-eight of those shocked with a stun gun required some medical treatment, and fewer than one per cent of these suspects had to be hospitalized.
Compare that to police batons: the study found that when police officers were forced to use their batons on suspects, nearly one-quarter of those who were hit required medical attention, with another three per cent forced to recuperate in the hospital.
When Calgary police actually used their hands to restrain a subject, 14 per cent of suspects required medical attention and four per cent had to be hospitalized. Nearly five per cent of police officers also required medical attention when taking down a suspect with their bare hands. As the report's authors conclude, police need "to seek out alternatives to hands-on physical control tactics and the baton if they wish to reduce the frequency and seriousness of citizen and police officer injuries."
Some people rightly question just how "non-lethal" Tasers are and argue that it should be considered more dangerous than pepper spray.
But even pepper spray has been known to cause a significant number of deaths and injuries. In 1995, the American Civil Liberties Association documented the cases of 26 California residents who died between 1993 and 1995 after being pepper-sprayed by police.
The ACLU calculated that "one person dies after being pepper sprayed for about every 600 times the spray is used by police."
Every one of these deaths is a tragedy. But how many more people would be seriously injured or die at the hands of police if they could no longer use less-lethal means to restrain dangerous or violent individuals?
For every incident like the one on William Avenue Tuesday or in the Vancouver airport last year, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of instances where Tasers prevent further injury and death. You will rarely hear about these and will only remember the rare instances where Tasers are overused (for example, when a Louisiana police officer zapped a suspect six times in three minutes), used irresponsibly (such as when police in Brandon demonstrated their new 50,000-volt toys for the amusement of people at a house party last October) or cause an unexpected death.
When that happens, it's worth remembering how many other people might still be with us had police been issued stun guns instead of real guns sooner.
ctbrown7@yahoo.ca
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