Taser use by police creeps back in B.C.
Weapon was fired 255 times in 2018: Analysis
The death of a man after an altercation with Whistler RCMP that included being pepper sprayed and shocked with a Taser highlight the real, if rare, dangers of a weapon that is seeing a resurgence in use by B.C. police.
Postmedia News analyzed more than a decade of use-offorce data by police in B.C., from 2006-18, and found that police fired Tasers 255 times in 2018 — the most of any year since 2008.
Provincewide, the Taser use has increased every year since 2011 — after years of steep declines during a period of intense scrutiny of the weapons after the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who was Tasered multiple times by RCMP in the Vancouver airport in 2007.
Deaths associated with Tasers remain rare. There were eight deaths associated with Tasers from 2013-18 and in each case investigators found factors, such as drug toxicity or self-inflicted injuries, that were the primary cause of death.
Doug King, executive director of Together Against Poverty
and a former police accountability lawyer for the Pivot Legal Society, said he’s not surprised to see Taser use ticking up.
“The Braidwood Inquiry was supposed to set the standard for all future Taser use,” he said, “but there hasn’t been a formal auditing process to determine if Tasers are being used in an appropriate manner.”
When asked for details on past or future reviews of department Taser use, both the VPD and the RCMP said they were unable to respond.
Dr. Rick Parent, a former associate professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, said that in the years after Dziekanski’s death, Taser use might have been abnormally low, as officers may have been hesitant to take out a Taser, even when the justification was there.
“I heard officers saying, ‘I’m not using a Taser, I’m not going to take it out, it’s not worth the trouble,’ ” said Parent, who spent 30 years with the Delta police.
Police in B.C. are required to report every time a Taser is drawn or fired and that information is sent to the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General each year.
The vast majority of Taser use comes from the RCMP, who police roughly 70 per cent of B.C.’s population, much of it rural. The challenges of policing rural communities can contribute to increased reliance on Tasers, or other non-lethal weapons, according to Kate McDerby, a senior communications officer at the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP.
“If you’re 87 kilometres from your closest backup,” she said, “you might move through the (use-of-force framework) differently or more quickly than if you know you have backup coming from two blocks away.”
Still, the data shows that Mounties are far more likely to fire their Tasers than other departments. In 2013, the RCMP fired Tasers 30 per cent of the time they were drawn. By 2018 that number had increased to 46 per cent.
Despite the increased use, provincial watchdogs say complaints involving Tasers have remained rare.
The Independent Investigations Office of B.C., which probes any police-involved incident leading to serious harm or death, has conducted eight investigations in the past five years involving Tasers — a fraction of the hundreds of investigations conducted over the same time period.
Data from the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner (OPCC), which oversees complaints for municipal police in B.C., shows that the number of injuries resulting from Tasers has been increasing.
Andrea Spindler, deputy police complaint commissioner at the OPCC, cautions that some of that increase could reflect a heightened awareness and reporting on the part of police. She said the OPCC has renewed its focus on ensuring reports are filed for all required incidents and that they are paying particular attention to use-of-force reports for “intermediate weapons,” a category that includes Tasers, pepper spray, beanbag guns and other non-lethal weapons.
It’s believed the man who died after being Tasered in Whistler was a longtime resident and a local business owner who may have been dealing with mental-health issues. He wasn’t identified by police and a family member didn’t want to comment on his death.
It’s not uncommon for people with mental-health issues to find themselves on the receiving end of a Taser. Roughly 30 per cent of people Tasered by police in the province from 2013-2018 were believed to have suffered from a mental-health condition. Another 30 per cent were suspected to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Jonny Morris, CEO of the B.C. division of the Canadian Mental Health Association, said he would like to see a deepening of de-escalation training for police and a continuing decrease of use-offorce.
“We see people in distress on the street and many of these circumstances are a health emergency,” he said. “For someone experiencing audio hallucinations, for instance, police commands are just one more voice.”
He pointed to the VPD’s 2016 Mental Health Strategy, which highlighted the department’s crisis and de-escalation training as evidence of steps in the right direction.
Visit heretohelp.bc.ca to find mental-health and substance-use resources or call 1-800-suicide.