Police justified in using Taser on armed man: SIU

Ontario’s police watchdog has cleared a Hamilton police officer of wrongdoing in a March 2017 incident where a man cutting his own neck with a large knife was Tasered in a parking lot. Police were called to a Hamilton drugstore shortly before midnight March 29, 2017, by an employee who reported a man outside who was bleeding from the neck and had asked for rubbing alcohol, according to the Special Investigations Unit report. The man, found to have a deep cut to his neck and a fractured foot, later had no memory of how he was injured or interacting with police that night. But the SIU was able to piece together what happened from witnesses, surveillance video and data downloaded from five Tasers. Eventually, 10 officers responded to the scene, where the man was not responding to officers speaking to him, pointing the knife at police and repeatedly “slashing” at his own neck. During the interaction, three officers attempted to use their Tasers on him four times, but they were not effective. When the “subject officer” deployed his Taser, the man fell to the ground, but he continued to fight and another officer used the Taser’s stun function several times directly on his back, the SIU said. It took seven officers to gain control. SIU director Tony Laparco found the deep cut to the man’s neck was self-inflicted. The man also had fractured his ankle a month before. Laparco also found all of the officers used force that was “quite justified in the circumstances.”