‘They should have just taken a gun and shot my son’: Taser deployment and the downtrodden in Canada

Abstract

This study interrogates ostensible differential deployment of an increasingly ubiquitous tool of policing in Canada – the Taser. Taser-related deaths are problematized as evidence of a teething new urban terrorism essentially against the downtrodden. The paper argues that a combination of intersecting factors: gender, low socio-economic status, mental illness, drug use, and ethnicity are fundamental to who gets tased by the police. The paper investigates the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekański at Vancouver airport as a quintessential ‘media event’. It highlights the concomitant disarticulation of the police as repositories of order and their re-articulation as insouciant villains. Dziekański's death, the paper contends, inter alia benefitted from the Canadian ‘cultural feeling rules’ in a manner that earlier recorded Taser-related fatalities did not. In addition, the paper argues that if the current trend continues, not only will the downtrodden continue to bear the brunt of Taser injuries and fatalities, but there may be scant public outcry accompanying such gory incidents.

Keywords:

• Taser
• new urban terrorism
• the downtrodden
• ‘cultural feeling rules’

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In addition, we are indebted to Jeff Biggar for collecting the data for this paper.

Notes

1. This section derives from a previous paper by the author(s): Oriola, Neverson & Adeyanju (2010).

2. For purposes of convenience, throughout this paper, CED is used.

3. A study convened by the CBC finds that there are instances where more than 50,000 volts can be released by the Taser.

4. In its final report, the B.C. Office of Police Complaints Commissioner employed the term ‘less lethality’ to describe the mode of operation of the Taser.

5. Dziekański was said to be throwing every object in sight at the airport officials and that informed the calling of the RCMP.

6. The police work culture is noted to overwhelmingly encourage ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Procos & Padavic 2002). This paper does not focus on masculinity or the facticity of maleness vis-à-vis Taser-related deaths. For more on masculinity, see Connell (1995), Cose (1995) and McLaren (1997).

7. This figure does not include fatalities recorded by non-federal police organizations, such as city police in Edmonton, Victoria and many others.