Vancouver transit riders tasered for not paying fares

Vancouver transit riders tasered for not paying fares

www.theglobeandmail.com

VANCOUVER — The country's only armed transit police have been tasering passengers who try to avoid paying fares.

According to documents provided in response to a Freedom of Information request, police patrolling public transit in the Metro Vancouver area have used tasers 10 times in the past 18 months, including five occasions when victims had been accosted for riding free.
the use of tasers by transit police here is far outside guidelines that say they should be used only if someone is suicidal, violent or about to injure himself or someone else, Mr. Dosanjh said.

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What the hell is going on???

Tasered for fare dodging?

These weapons can be lethal, and their use against a person for simply not paying their fare is a disgrace.

This usage is way beyond anything that could be considered inappropriate, and my belief is that if a person is tased for fare dodging and dies, then the transit police officer should be charged with murder.

Canada was very quick to condemn the US about torture - tasing someone for not paying a fare amounts to pretty much the same thing.

If Canada is the peace loving country they purport to be, then I'd expect a clampdown on this very quickly.

www.theglobeandmail.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 18/4/2008 by budski]

I would agree... it seems like extreme punishment for fair dodging. On the other hand, here is a study which suggests the devices are safe, causing very few serious injuries.

“This study is the first large, independent study of injuries associated with Tasers. It is the first injury epidemiology study to review every Taser deployment and to reliably assess the overall risk and severity of injuries in real world conditions,” said William Bozeman, M.D., the lead investigator and an emergency medicine specialist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. “The injury rate is low and most injuries appear to be minor. These results support the safety of the devices.”

source

Only three subjects (0.3%) suffered injuries severe enough to need hospital admission.

you know what else causes very few injuries? telling people they are under arrest for not paying their fare. if they get violent when confronted THEN the tazer may be deployed if necessary. a friend of mine just yesterday told me a fight broke out at his daughter's school. the cops there didn't try to break up the fight or anything, they just started tazing people. pretty f'ed up. the things need to be banned until they get some guidelines in place for use and punishment for misuse.

reply to post by an0maly33


Don't get me wrong, I totally agree. In the case of the OP, seems weird they would bother tasering someone for fair dodging. How many fair dodgers actually bolt/resist?? Certainly I doubt those few people have any overall impact on the transportation budget lol. Totally ridiculous