Police-shooting inquest told Tasers rarely useful
TORONTO — The vast knowledge gap between police and public was underscored Thursday at an Ontario coroner’s inquest into the Toronto police shooting deaths of three armed but mentally ill citizens.
The inquest is examining the deaths in one fell swoop, its major focus on the training given to police in their dealings with the seriously mentally ill.
The cases — the Aug. 29, 2010 death of Reyal Jardine-Douglas, the Oct. 7, 2011 death of Sylvia Klibingaitis and the Feb. 3, 2012 death of Michael Eligon — are purportedly linked because the three victims were experiencing a mental health crisis and all were armed with a “an edged weapon,” a knife or scissors.
Earlier this week, Ontario Police College trainer John Zeyen testified a Taser would not be suitable for use in most incidents involving sharp weapons because its punch or zap lasts as long as five seconds, making it too slow in such dynamic situations.
That was a revelation for Anita Wasowicz, one of Klibingaitis’s three sisters who are together representing their family.
“Until I heard you yesterday,” Wasowicz told Zeyen as she began her questions, “I was confused whether a Taser would have made a difference in the case I know the best.”
A bit later, she said, “I can’t stress enough how this is a huge and shocking piece of information to me.”
With the province having announced this summer Ontario police forces can choose to issue all front-line officers with the “conducted energy weapons,” Tasers have become a real issue in the inquest’s first week even though none was deployed.
And, if Wasowicz’s questions are any indication, a wider swath of the public may also be labouring under the mistaken belief Tasers are useful in dealing with knife-wielding people, mentally ill or not.
But Zeyen, who now teaches firearms at the police college but was also a team leader in its officer safety section for the previous five years, testified Tasers are not appropriate for 80 per cent to 90 per cent of incidents involving sharp weapons.
He was followed on the witness stand by Ron Hoffman, who was briefly a police officer and parole officer, but who has a doctorate in psychology and is co-ordinator of the basic constable training program at the college.
His expertise is in training recruits (and those who train them) in tactical communications, with emphasis on dealing with the seriously emotionally disturbed or mentally ill.
He is also the co-author of Not Just Another Call, which deals with police response to the mentally ill.
The booklet teaches officers how to recognize when someone may be having hallucinations or suffering delusions or is depressed and suicidal.
This training comes early in the 12-week basic training course, he said, and infuses it throughout. Recruits are presented with real-world scenarios, with actors playing the role of the mentally disturbed.
“De-escalation” principles underlie the entire use of force training, he said.
Officers are taught to get as much information as they can, to isolate and contain a suspect or disengage entirely whenever possible, to talk softly to those they suspect may be in crisis and to call on specialists — even that the sight of a police uniform can be upsetting to those who are ill.
Ontario, he said, has led the way on use-of-force training across the country.
But, Hoffman told the jurors, all that training may fly out the window in a real-life situation and particularly where the suspect, mentally ill or not, is brandishing a weapon and threatening the officer or someone else.
In those circumstances, he said unequivocally, “the officer is bound to act.”
He said repeatedly “there’s no hard science on de-escalation,” and firmly resisted the suggestion from Peter Rosenthal, lawyer for Eligon’s family, that police forces should be disciplining officers who, in the lawyer’s words, “failed to try de-escalation techniques.”
When Rosenthal suggested police should rely more on mobile teams of officers and psychiatric nurses — now, these teams don’t respond to violent situations — and hinted such nurses know better than police how to deal with violence, Hoffman said, “Psychiatric nurses call us. Their technique is to call the police if there’s any potential for violence.”
A curious thing is why these three cases were chosen to examine police conduct with the mentally ill, since, as coroner’s counsel Michael Blain detailed in his opening statement this week, in all three the officers were backing up to avoid a confrontation or stayed outside a house where the suspect was, deciding to contain the situation.
All were cleared by the province’s Special Investigations Unit.
As Gary Clewley, who represents two of the involved officers, put it to Hoffman, as good as the training is, there’s a difference between scenarios and the reality of the street. “We’re up against a limit,” Clewley said. “Showing tour videos of a place far away is not the same as going there, is it?”
Psychiatric nurses call us. Their technique is to call the police RON HOFFMAN