Shocking lack of news around Tasers today

Iwalked past a phone booth the other day.

OK, it wasn’t a booth. It was a public phone on a cement wall around the corner of Broadway and Cambie. It appeared to be utterly dishevelled — the pigeons having had their way with it for years.

It looked homeless, which, if you think about it, is kind of its purpose.

The public phone is such a last-century thing.

In its day, it had a vitality that can only be fully appreciated by those of us who knew what it meant to be in search of one. I have a story to tell about a phone booth, and, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to connect that phone booth to a crusade of mine.

I was 17 and hanging outside a liquor store on Broadway in 1973. I was building up the nerve to, you know, give it a go — try to buy some beer. I walked in, placed my $2.83 on the counter and asked for a dozen Molsons.

The LCB clerk was a serious man, who, I recall, took an interminable amount of time to say, “no.”

It took him much less time to shoo me out the door.

Alone in the rain, I left in search of a phone booth to call Bill — a high school mate born with a deep voice and a five o’clock shadow. Bill could always be relied upon to pick up supplies in a pinch. Of course, the cost of doing business with Bill was significant. Were our endeavour not already an illegal one, charges of usury would not have seemed out of place.

In 1973, public phones were everywhere and I found one within a block of the liquor outlet. I opened the door to the booth, then grabbed the handset by the mouthpiece rather than the handle. The mouthpiece was unscrewed, wires were exposed, and I was given a shock so intense I couldn’t let go of the phone.

For days after, I felt depressed and confused. My brain felt scrambled and out of order. So profoundly did this electrocution scar me, when Tasers came into use, I made it something of a crusade to abolish them.

My avidity for this cause reached its peak in 2007 when Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski died after being Tasered by RCMP at the Vancouver airport. At the time, the Dziekanski tragedy wasn’t the only misadventure in Tasering. They seemed so commonplace. Not any more. We don’t hear much about Tasers these days, and I have to accept this, suspiciously, as a good thing.

The most recent reporting I could find was by the Vancouver Courier on June 26, 2015. The headline “VPD sees dramatic drop in Taser use” perhaps explains why we hear and read so little about these nasty little weapons.

VPD Const. Brian Montague wrote in an email to The Courier: “We are constantly trying to improve our training, and part of that is understanding the limitations of use-offorce options. The Taser, while in some cases can be a useful tool, is far from the magic answer to every encounter where police need to take immediate control of a violent individual.”

I don’t envy the work of police. I can appreciate situations get out-ofhand and sometimes the only solution is 50,000 volts of electricity.

That said, hopefully, in the nottoo-distant future, this weapon will exist as nothing more than a museum piece.

Kind of like the phone booth.