Police should not use Tasers

Re Jury at Andrew Loku inquest recommends giving Tasers to all front-line cops,

June 30 The jury is dead-wrong in recommending Tasers as a safe police option. These “high energy” (50,000 volts) electrical weapons are dangerous. In recent years they have seriously injured or killed many innocent and allegedly mentally ill citizens in Canada and the United States.

From the jury testimony, we learn that Andrew Loku, a 49-yearold Black man and a troubled refugee from South Sudan, was not Tasered but shot at almost point blank range by police officer Andrew Doyle.

Other jury recommendations as such more intensive de-escalation and anti-racism training — which are rarely practised — were constructive. However, recommending Tasers as a police option is frequently overkill.

For example, four years ago a police officer Tasered 18-year old Sammy Yatim after police officer James Forcillo shot him nine times on a deserted TTC streetcar. This was police brutality.

At that time, in a deputation to the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB), I urged the Board to consider the non-coercive, life-saving alternative of Community Crisis Response Teams, a possible pilot project staffed by psychiatric survivors and street-health workers trained in crisis and trauma counselling. The TPSB ignored or rejected my proposal.

Tasers should never be a police option. They should have been banned years ago. Their major health risks, including heart attack, cardiac arrest, arrhythmia, trauma and death, are well known, but they have been irresponsibly minimized or denied by Texas-based manufacturer Taser International and its promoters.

It’s time the police and politicians got serious about treating vulnerable people in crisis as human beings worthy of empathy, dignity and respect — not targets.

Don Weitz, Toronto