Showing posts with label Robert Dziekanski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Dziekanski. Show all posts

May 03, 2008

Evidence That Stun Guns May Stimulate The Heart

Evidence That Stun Guns May Stimulate The Heart

Science Daily
Posted: 2008-05-02 17:52:03

On the eve of the British Columbia inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski, a review of scientific data in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) finds that in some cases, stun guns may stimulate the heart in experimental models. This evidence is contrary to current views that stun guns only affect skeletal muscles.

"The frequency and the shape of the pulses generated by stun guns are designed to incapacitate the target by electrically overwhelming his or her control of these muscles," state Dr. K. Nanthakumar and colleagues. "In principle, these pulses are designed to act only on skeletal muscles and to not affect internal organs such as the heart." The evidence that stun guns do not stimulate the heart is based on "...theoretical studies [that] suggest that stun guns cannot deliver the amount of energy required to stimulate the heart or cause ventricular fibrillation."

Dr. Nanthakumar and collegues point out that most theoretical and some experimental studies reveal that cardiac stimulation does not occur with stun gun discharges. However, experimental studies on pigs by 3 independent groups of investigators found that "a stun gun discharge can stimulate the heart" depending on the location of the stun gun barbs. Barbs that are located such that they form a vector across the heart have greater effect than those focused on the abdomen. In one study, swine blood pressure was abruptly lost after discharge of a stun gun, and another study "reported the deaths of 2 animals caused by ventricular fibrillation immediately after the stun gun discharge....This suggests that sufficient current density was produced by the stun gun to stimulate the heart, which according to theory should not and could not occur."

The researchers caution against applying data from pigs to humans, although "most of the basic mechanistic concepts in cardiac fibrillation and defibrillation are derived from animal studies, not humans."

Recently, there have been several deaths after the use of stun guns, including Robert Dziekanski in Richmond, British Columbia, a Montréal, Quebec man and 24 year-old Chicago, Illionois resident, Kevin Piskura. More than 300 deaths following stun gun use have been documented, 20 of them in Canada.

Regarding arrhythmias long after the discharge of the stun gun, Dr. Nanthakumar, Dr. Paul Dorian and colleagues conclude "...there is no conclusive evidence to show whether stun gun stimulation (under certain electrophysical conditions) can result in cardiac arrhythmias late after stun gun discharge. With regards to deleterious effects on the heart during the discharge they state "In our view, it is inappropriate to conclude that stun gun discharges cannot lead to adverse cardiac consequences in all real world settings."

Science Daily
Posted: 2008-05-02 17:52:03

On the eve of the British Columbia inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski, a review of scientific data in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) finds that in some cases, stun guns may stimulate the heart in experimental models. This evidence is contrary to current views that stun guns only affect skeletal muscles.

"The frequency and the shape of the pulses generated by stun guns are designed to incapacitate the target by electrically overwhelming his or her control of these muscles," state Dr. K. Nanthakumar and colleagues. "In principle, these pulses are designed to act only on skeletal muscles and to not affect internal organs such as the heart." The evidence that stun guns do not stimulate the heart is based on "...theoretical studies [that] suggest that stun guns cannot deliver the amount of energy required to stimulate the heart or cause ventricular fibrillation."

Dr. Nanthakumar and collegues point out that most theoretical and some experimental studies reveal that cardiac stimulation does not occur with stun gun discharges. However, experimental studies on pigs by 3 independent groups of investigators found that "a stun gun discharge can stimulate the heart" depending on the location of the stun gun barbs. Barbs that are located such that they form a vector across the heart have greater effect than those focused on the abdomen. In one study, swine blood pressure was abruptly lost after discharge of a stun gun, and another study "reported the deaths of 2 animals caused by ventricular fibrillation immediately after the stun gun discharge....This suggests that sufficient current density was produced by the stun gun to stimulate the heart, which according to theory should not and could not occur."

The researchers caution against applying data from pigs to humans, although "most of the basic mechanistic concepts in cardiac fibrillation and defibrillation are derived from animal studies, not humans."

Recently, there have been several deaths after the use of stun guns, including Robert Dziekanski in Richmond, British Columbia, a Montréal, Quebec man and 24 year-old Chicago, Illionois resident, Kevin Piskura. More than 300 deaths following stun gun use have been documented, 20 of them in Canada.


Regarding arrhythmias long after the discharge of the stun gun, Dr. Nanthakumar, Dr. Paul Dorian and colleagues conclude "...there is no conclusive evidence to show whether stun gun stimulation (under certain electrophysical conditions) can result in cardiac arrhythmias late after stun gun discharge. With regards to deleterious effects on the heart during the discharge they state "In our view, it is inappropriate to conclude that stun gun discharges cannot lead to adverse cardiac consequences in all real world settings."

Ah, dah, the heart IS a muscle.

Anatomy 101.

EIGHTH GRADE SCIENCE!!




March 25, 2008

the recent taser commentary in Canada ..

None of your business


From http://rustyidols.blogspot.com/2008/03/none-of-your-business.html

You may believe that Tasers are a weapon of second to last resort for the police. That the RCMP and municipal forces are only supposed to be using them in lethally dangerous encounters when the only options are 50,000 volts or a bullet.

You'd be wrong.

Don't be embarrassed, it's not an unreasonable belief. Ujjal Dosanjh former Attorney General of BC certainly believed that was the use model intended when BC adopted them. It was only after the tragic death of Robert Dziekanski that he was flabbergasted to discover that the RCMP considered the high voltage electrocution weapon an 'intermediate tool' like pepper spray or physical restraint and are increasingly using them on "clearly non-combative" people that the police would just rather not take the time and effort to talk down or restrain physically. Pressing a button and unleashing instant agonizing pain and the clear risk of death is easier than engaging in what used to be considered basic police work.

When this zap first model was revealed in the tragic case of Robert Dziekanski, an agitated and frightened, but clearly non-threatening visitor to our country shocked multiple times only seconds after the police confronted him, the RCMP seized and tried to withhold from the public the video that revealed their willingness to skip any kind of engagement and go straight to the electric torture.

Now we discover that they are still attempting to keep the details of their ever increasing use of the device from the Canadian people. It's none of our business apparently.

OTTAWA - The RCMP is stripping crucial details about Taser firings from public reports as use of the controversial stun guns skyrockets across the country.

A joint investigation by The Canadian Press and CBC found the Mounties are now refusing to divulge key information that must be recorded each time they draw their electronic weapons.

As a result, Canadians will know much less about who is being hit with the 50,000-volt guns, whether they were armed, why they were fired on and whether they were injured.

Taser report forms obtained under the Access to Information Act show the Mounties have used the powerful weapons more than 4,000 times since introducing them seven years ago.

Incidents have increased dramatically, topping 1,000 annually in each of the last two years compared with about 600 in 2005. The overwhelming majority of firings took place in Western Canada, where the national force often leads front-line policing.

As Taser use escalates, however, the RCMP has tightened the lid of secrecy.


Information stripped from the forms includes details of several Taser cases the Mounties previously made public under the access law. In effect, the RCMP is reclassifying details of Taser use - including some telling facts that raised pointed questions about how often the stun guns are fired and why.

A Canadian Press analysis last November of 563 incidents between 2002 and 2005 found three in four suspects Tasered by the RCMP were unarmed. Several of those reports suggested a pattern of stun-gun use as a handy tool to keep drunk or rowdy suspects in line, rather than to defuse major threats.

But the Mounties are now censoring Taser report forms to conceal related injuries, duration of shocks, whether the individual was armed, what police tried before resorting to the stun gun, and precise dates of firings.

It is legal to film the police anywhere they are performing their official duties, although it makes them very unhappy and making armed people who've have a tendency to electrocute first and ask questions later unhappy has it's risks. There's a growing movement worldwide to have multiple cameras aimed at the police whenever they're in sight.

This is beginning to seem like simple self defense.

Spotted at Larry Hubich's place.


January 20, 2008

Rein in those tasers

January 19, 2008
Editorial, The Globe and Mail

At a public forum organized by the Toronto Police Services Board on Thursday, Thomas Smith, co-founder of Arizona-based Taser International Inc., found himself placed on the defensive by members of the public opposed to the weapon. Patti Gillman, the sister of a man who died after being tasered by Vancouver police in 2004, told Mr. Smith that her brother, Robert Bagnell, was unarmed and was no threat to police or to the public when he was fatally shot with the stun gun. There was little Mr. Smith could really be expected to say in response to such information. His company merely manufactures the 50,000-volt weapon. Taser International doesn't decide how and when to use it. That's left to the discretion of individual police officers. And that's part of the problem.

Tasers are held up by police as a relatively safe alternative to handguns. Yet they are often used in cases where police would never have pulled handguns. It is inconceivable, for example, that police would have used handguns in the case of the 17-year-old Ottawa high-school student tasered last month because he was acting strangely near a busy road. The boy said he was distraught over a breakup with his girlfriend, but was out of the traffic and had his hands up when he was tasered by police.

The same surely can be said of 16-year-old Randy Fryingpan, who was tasered six times in just over a minute by Edmonton police in 2002. The boy was drunk, and sleeping in the back seat of a friend's car. He was tasered when he failed to respond to an officer's orders to get up. A judge later described the incident as cruel and unusual punishment. The same applies to the 2004 Edmonton police tasering of Hector Jara, who was given jolts even though he had surrendered to police and was lying face down on the ground after a car chase. The courts said that Mr. Jara was "completely at [the police's] mercy" when he was twice tasered and that police actions in that case were "irresponsible."

Deaths as a result of police taserings, such as those of Mr. Bagnell or Robert Dziekanski, the Polish newcomer tasered to death by the RCMP at Vancouver International Airport last Oct. 14, are still relatively unusual. But police taserings are not, and would become even more a matter of routine if police in Toronto and many other jurisdictions in Canada had their way.

That fact must weigh heavily in the assessment by the Toronto Police Services Board and the Ontario government of the request from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair to spend $8.6-million to equip and train every front-line officer in Toronto with a taser. Mr. Blair believes that wide dissemination of the taser among officers is a way to "save lives." In some instances it might. But the tasers also cost lives, and risk imposing other costs, including jeopardizing public confidence in the police. Civilian authorities should be highly dubious about making Mr. Smith's frightening device ubiquitous.

November 20, 2007

update: Hundreds honour man hit by Taser at airport

Again, I ask .. where were the EMERGENCY workers?

Where tasars used on a man having a PTSD attack?

Are people really that IGNORANT??


VIDEO: Hundreds pay respects to Taser victim
Grief, anger expressed at memorial service for 40-year-old Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski

Western Canada Bureau Chief

Kamloops, B.C.–Hundreds of people packed a funeral home here yesterday to both grieve and express their outrage over the death of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish man who died last month at the Vancouver airport.

Many of those attending the memorial service in Kamloops, the town where Dziekanski was supposed to start his new life in Canada, only knew him through the lens of a video camera.

Millions of people around the world saw the video of his last moments – a panic-stricken man barricading himself into the international arrivals hall before police shot him with a Taser gun.

His mother, Zofia Cisowski, wiped away her tears to quietly narrate a slideshow of Dziekanski's photographs shown during the memorial celebration of the 40-year-old man's life.

"That's my brother, that's my uncle, that's us,"
Cisowski whispered to pictures of her son, a smiling, swarthy man, arms wrapped around family in his native Poland.

Cisowski had worked for seven years to save up enough money to sponsor her son.

He was supposed to look after her and support her as she aged, according to Maciej Krych, Poland's consul general in Vancouver.

"The people in Poland are still in shock. They cannot believe something like this could happen in Canada,"
said Krych, who vowed that the Polish government will continue pressing the federal department of foreign affairs for answers.

Dziekanski was cremated following a private funeral two weeks ago. His mother, who plans to keep part of her son's ashes with her in Kamloops and return part to Poland, said she hopes some good comes from her son's death.

When Yuri Baltakis, a friend of Cisowski, got up to speak at the memorial service, he said a few words in Polish and nearly half the mourners raised their right hand.

"Most of you are confused and can't follow that simple instruction," said Baltakis. "That is what it was like for him for nine hours at the airport."

Mother and son were separated at the airport by just a few hundred feet behind frosted windows and security doors.

But because of language difficulties and poor signage, neither could find the other.

After hours of searching, Cisowski made the four-hour drive back to Kamloops hoping there would be a message waiting from her son.

Baltakis said yesterday that the airport should have had people on staff who could provide help or at least direct someone like Dziekanski, who had taken his first flight from Poland to Canada, to a phone where he could call for directions.

At the service, Joseph and Maria Drobina, who emigrated from Poland a year ago, said they had a similar experience. Just two days before Dziekanski arrived at the airport, Joseph Drobina's sister, who did not speak any English, could not find anyone to help her.

"She had travelled before but there was no effort from anyone at the airport to help her or help us try to connect," said Maria Drobina. "When we heard what happened to Zofia's son, we knew this will happen to other people, and pray to God it will not be the same tragedy."

Among the nearly 300 people who attended the memorial service, a handful were outside carrying signs urging the RCMP to ban the use of Taser guns.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has ordered a review of the weapon, but has resisted calls by critics galvanized by Dziekanski's death for a moratorium on the guns, which deliver 50,000 volts of electricity to their targets. Since 2002, Amnesty International, which has advocated banning Tasers, reports that 17 people have died in Canada as a result of the weapon.

A preliminary autopsy done on Dziekanski showed that he had no drugs or alcohol in his system, but a definitive cause of death has not yet been determined.

A coroner's inquest will be held in May.


With files from The Canadian Press

update: Hundreds honour man hit by Taser at airport

Again, I ask .. where were the EMERGENCY workers?

Where tasars used on a man having a PTSD attack?

Are people really that IGNORANT??


VIDEO: Hundreds pay respects to Taser victim
Grief, anger expressed at memorial service for 40-year-old Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski

Western Canada Bureau Chief

Kamloops, B.C.–Hundreds of people packed a funeral home here yesterday to both grieve and express their outrage over the death of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish man who died last month at the Vancouver airport.

Many of those attending the memorial service in Kamloops, the town where Dziekanski was supposed to start his new life in Canada, only knew him through the lens of a video camera.

Millions of people around the world saw the video of his last moments – a panic-stricken man barricading himself into the international arrivals hall before police shot him with a Taser gun.

His mother, Zofia Cisowski, wiped away her tears to quietly narrate a slideshow of Dziekanski's photographs shown during the memorial celebration of the 40-year-old man's life.

"That's my brother, that's my uncle, that's us,"
Cisowski whispered to pictures of her son, a smiling, swarthy man, arms wrapped around family in his native Poland.

Cisowski had worked for seven years to save up enough money to sponsor her son.

He was supposed to look after her and support her as she aged, according to Maciej Krych, Poland's consul general in Vancouver.

"The people in Poland are still in shock. They cannot believe something like this could happen in Canada,"
said Krych, who vowed that the Polish government will continue pressing the federal department of foreign affairs for answers.

Dziekanski was cremated following a private funeral two weeks ago. His mother, who plans to keep part of her son's ashes with her in Kamloops and return part to Poland, said she hopes some good comes from her son's death.

When Yuri Baltakis, a friend of Cisowski, got up to speak at the memorial service, he said a few words in Polish and nearly half the mourners raised their right hand.

"Most of you are confused and can't follow that simple instruction," said Baltakis. "That is what it was like for him for nine hours at the airport."

Mother and son were separated at the airport by just a few hundred feet behind frosted windows and security doors.

But because of language difficulties and poor signage, neither could find the other.

After hours of searching, Cisowski made the four-hour drive back to Kamloops hoping there would be a message waiting from her son.

Baltakis said yesterday that the airport should have had people on staff who could provide help or at least direct someone like Dziekanski, who had taken his first flight from Poland to Canada, to a phone where he could call for directions.

At the service, Joseph and Maria Drobina, who emigrated from Poland a year ago, said they had a similar experience. Just two days before Dziekanski arrived at the airport, Joseph Drobina's sister, who did not speak any English, could not find anyone to help her.

"She had travelled before but there was no effort from anyone at the airport to help her or help us try to connect," said Maria Drobina. "When we heard what happened to Zofia's son, we knew this will happen to other people, and pray to God it will not be the same tragedy."

Among the nearly 300 people who attended the memorial service, a handful were outside carrying signs urging the RCMP to ban the use of Taser guns.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has ordered a review of the weapon, but has resisted calls by critics galvanized by Dziekanski's death for a moratorium on the guns, which deliver 50,000 volts of electricity to their targets. Since 2002, Amnesty International, which has advocated banning Tasers, reports that 17 people have died in Canada as a result of the weapon.

A preliminary autopsy done on Dziekanski showed that he had no drugs or alcohol in his system, but a definitive cause of death has not yet been determined.

A coroner's inquest will be held in May.


With files from The Canadian Press

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