Vancouver Airport Taser Death Video Reveals Robert Dziekanski’s Last, Painful Moments
The full video has been released and, at last, the tragic taser death of Robert Dziekanski, which Privacy Maven has written about previously, is receiving international attention and outrage.
Police shocked a Polish immigrant with a Taser about 30 seconds after approaching him at Vancouver International Airport last month, a video released Wednesday shows.
Moments later, three or four officers pinned Robert Dziekanski, 40, to the ground as he screamed and moaned in pain.
“The audio’s sickening,” said Paul Pritchard, 25, a Victoria teacher who was in the airport after a flight from China, and recorded Dziekanski’s death. “His scream is brutal.
“You hear a man die, obviously.”
One officer placed his knees against Dziekanski’s back and neck until he went limp. He later died.
Pritchard arranged to have the footage released to the public in Vancouver on Wednesday.
Vancouver lawyer Walter Kosteckyj, who is acting for the dead man’s mother, said he was appalled by the treatment of Dziekanski, who appeared disoriented but had become agitated after about 10 hours at the airport. He said Zofia Cisowski had seen portions of the video, but not all of it.
“She had a son in distress, he was looking for help, he was frightened, and he didn’t get that help,” Kosteckyj said after releasing the video to the media.
“I was surprised when I saw it. That’s not the right word. I was absolutely shocked. I expected to see some discussion, some attempt to control the situation and then things going sideways.
“What you will see is how quickly things came about. People should judge for themselves.”
Kosteckyj was angry that security guards at the airport were uninterested, and that police made no attempt to defuse the situation before using the Taser.
An American policing expert who saw the video said that the police should have been able to restrain the Polish visitor using their hands.
“I don’t even think batons or mace would have been necessary given that there were four officers on the scene,” said Michael Lyman, a criminal justice professor at Columbia College in Missouri.
The article continues. Here is the full video, which has just been released. As has been noted in these news reports, it is quite disturbing.
Mr. Kosteckyj said it’s too soon to comment on legal action, although he has been talking to witnesses to prepare for a planned coroner’s inquest. He said people have called him from as far away as Texas to offer their comments on what they saw.
“I was expecting to see a confrontation, a discussion and things go sideways, then the tasering. That’s not what you see,” he said.
“The biggest thing that surprises me is there were four professional police officers there, and that the four officers showed up on the scene, [and] none of them seemed to take the time, not one of them, to go and talk to the crowd of people, the witnesses that were there and get some background on what was going on,” he said.
He urged people to watch the video and draw their own conclusions.
A spokesman for the integrated homicide investigation team, which is investigating the incident, urged the public to await the coroner’s inquest and consider the video in the context of evidence that will include officers explaining their conduct.
But Corporal Dale Carr, a spokesman for the police team investigating the incident, conceded that may be a futile request. “People are going to form their opinions. They are going to make their conclusions and I, unfortunately, don’t expect I can control that.”
Asked about the absence of attempts to defuse the situation with conversation, Cpl. Carr said, “That’s part of what we are trying to get to the bottom of, what was going through these officers’ minds, what did they choose, and why they chose the intervention they did.”
Mathew Ingram comments on Paul Pritchard’s efforts to bring this story to worldwide attention it has needed.
The term “citizen journalism” sounds like an elaborate concept, involving groups of citizens who sign up for some sort of advanced program and then go forth and report on news events — with a “Digital Press” card in their fedora perhaps. In reality, however, it’s average people with cellphone cameras and digital videocams, taking footage of events that occur around them. A great example is the video clip of Robert Dziekanski being Tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver airport, which you can see for yourself on globeandmail.com, or at dozens of other websites and on television.
Paul Pritchard happened to be in the airport waiting for a flight, and was watching as Mr. Dziekanski became more and more agitated at being separated from his mother, who apparently was unaware that he had arrived and was still being kept behind the security doors (it was his first plane flight and he didn’t speak English). His video is disturbing not so much for the images of Mr. Dziekanski writhing in pain — although those parts of the video are difficult to watch — but for the almost complete lack of attempts to calm the victim before he is Tasered not once but twice.