CBSA YVR Taser Death Report

Un-friggin-believable:

"After six weeks of silence, the Canada Border Services Agency issued an eight-page report yesterday on the Dziekanski case to try to explain how the 40-year-old man was able to wander the international arrivals area for more than six hours before his death on Oct. 14.

The report recommends various changes, including additional cameras to track its area at the airport, more patrols, and a review of interpreter services and updated lists of the languages employees can speak.

In the document and at a subsequent news conference, the agency said it did its best to track Mr. Dziekanski, but faced challenges in doing so through an area the size of two football fields that was crowded, at times, with up to 4,000 travellers."

"Faced challenges" because it was a big area with a lot of people? It's an airport, for fuck sake. That's their job, to deal with the challenges of knowing what's going on in a big area with a lot of people. What are they supposed to be keeping an eye on, the Starbucks concession?! Oh well, at least they're accepting a modicum of responsibility for the incompetence that set up the disastrous scenario -- uh, oh wait:

"Alain Jolicoeur, the border agency's president, expressed his condolences to Mr. Dziekanski's family yesterday.

However, he ruled out sanctions against any staff of the agency, saying it was his view that they followed procedures."

The CBSA's condolences: "We're sorry, but we ain't that sorry."

Canada Border Services to talk about tazing death

Today Canada Border Services is expected to finally issue a report and talk about what went wrong within their system that eventually ended with the tazing and death of Robert Dzieskanski at YVR:

"The Canada Border Services Agency is expected to face tough questions at a news conference Monday about the circumstances surrounding the death of a Polish immigrant at Vancouver International Airport last month.

Border Services officials are expected to give for the first time their account of an alleged communication breakdown on Oct. 14 in the hours before Robert Dziekanski's death." [...]

The incident, which was captured on video by a witness, has sparked fierce debate over the officers' actions and the use of Tasers by law enforcement agencies across the country.

Yet it is unclear where Dziekanski was during his 10 hours at the airport, what he was doing and why no translators or airport staff were on hand to assist him."

Foremost of the "tough questions" Border Services has to answer should be "Why did it take over 6 weeks to say anything about the incident?" Apart from that, which in itself looks extremely suspicious, some other questions I'd expect to be answered are

Where were the translators?

Where were the airport staff that are supposed to be keeping an eye on people?

Why was RD not assisted by airport staff for 10 hours?

Why was RD's mother told he wasn't in the airport?

Why did airport staff find it necessary to call the RCMP?

And I'm sure there are many other questions about the breakdown of procedure and communications that led to this tragedy. Heads should roll over this.

But while it'll be interesting to hear Border Services finally take ownership of their monumental fuck-up in this situation, it won't exonerate the RCMP of theirs. By setting up the situation, Border Services only loaded the metaphorical gun, it was still the cops that fired it.

Update: News conference cancelled, no reason given. But it's not hard to figure out why, just look up at those hard questions. According to what I just heard on CBC, their report made recommendations for more cameras and more translators, but did little to explain what went wrong. So there you have it, your New Authoritarian Government in action: "We don't need no stinking questions..."

Reupdate: CBC details the timeline for the Robert Dzieskanski situation given by the CBSA gave in today's report. It sounds like a crock to me...

Naomi Klein on Robert Dziekanski

A shock of a different kind:

"Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989, when Poland began a grand experiment called "shock therapy" for the nation. The promise was that if the communist country accepted a series of brutal economic measures, the reward would be a "normal European country" like France or Germany. The pain would be short, the reward great.

So Poland's government eliminated price controls overnight, slashed subsidies, privatized industries. But for young workers such as Dziekanski, "normal" never arrived. Today, roughly 40% of young Polish workers are unemployed. Dziekanski was among them. He had worked as a typesetter and a miner, but for the last few years, he had been unemployed and had had run-ins with the law.

Like so many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking for work in one of those "normal" countries that Poland was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles have joined this mass exodus during the last three years alone. Dziekanski's cohorts have gone to work as bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to British Columbia, Canada, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom."

Interesting. I wonder if Dziekanski's experience living in the Eastern Bloc might have had anything to do with how the tragedy ultimately played out, or at least how it was initiated. RD wasn't violent but he was stressed out before the police arrived, and with good reason: ten hours stuck in an arrivals lounge?? Who wouldn't be bent? That he stayed there so long is amazing: one wonders if past experience had taught Dziekanski to stay put and not wander around asking questions.

This is an issue apart from the inexcusable behaviour of the RCMP. But it highlights YVR's weakness as an international airport prepared to assist travellers from around the world. How the hell did airport staff manage not to notice an obviously stressed-out traveller in the arrivals area for so long?

Were YVR TASER® cops on steroids?

I was listening to CKNW this aft (while waiting for Cable Buddy to show), and like everyone, they were talking about the TASER® killing at YVR. The context of the discussion was compensation for Robert Dziekanski's mother, and her lawyer Walter Kosteckyj was a guest on the show. Speaking about the RCMP officers involved in the incident, Mr. Kosteckyj pondered something that hadn't occurred to me thus far, but makes sense -- the possibility that the situation escalated so quickly because one or more of the officers were "under the influence" of steroids.

It's a growing phenomenon: to bulk up and keep a physical edge on criminals, some cops have been resorting to the quick fix of steroids to augment their bodybuilding routines. Steroid use among police officers has soared in the last decade, and especially in the last couple of years. According to an ABC story published last month:

"From Boston to Arizona, police departments are investigating a growing number of incidents involving uniformed police officers using steroids. So-called "juicing" has been anecdotally associated with several brutality cases, including the 1997 sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in New York City."

An expert quoted by ABC estimates roughly one in four police officers in high-pressure urban areas are on steroids, so while it's a minority, it's a significant one. While what happens in the States doesn't necessarily happen everywhere, police culture transcends boundaries. This informal poll at the BlueLine forum indicates that most officers believe strength and endurance are the best physical attributes for their job, and those are what 'roids do best. So it's probably not unreasonable to assume Canadian cops are experiencing the same phenomenon as their American cohorts, if to a lesser degree.

Well, let's see. The user profile fits. And what psychological traits are steroid users best known for? Oh yes -- short tempers and impaired judgment. Which would certainly help explain why a seemingly docile situation such as the police were dealing with in Robert Dziekanski could escalate and go sideways so fast. So steroid use could be a sidebar issue that an independent inquiry might want to examine, because if the TASERs® go, there are still maglites to bash people over the head with. And rocks.

Airport worker spoke Polish

Unbelievable:

"VANCOUVER - Minutes after Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski picked up a Vancouver airport computer and threw it at a glass wall, a Pol-ish-speaking airport worker wandered into the facility's operations centre to pick up some paperwork.

Slovakian immigrant Karol Vrba was in the room on Oct. 14 when the pair of calls came in reporting Mr. Dziekanski's erratic behaviour, but was never asked to help, even though he is conversant in Polish and Russian, the language bystanders told authorities the 40-year-old Pole was speaking.

"I feel really upset because I saw that video of what they did to him and it could have been prevented. Definitely," he said yesterday."

And nobody thought to yell out: "Anyone here speak Polish?"