Braidwood Inquiry Case Study

Braidwood Inquiry
Although conducted energy weapons have been widely used by various law enforcement agencies throughout the country, the sudden death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport triggered a public outcry; a commission was led by Thomas R. Braidwood to determine the safety and training of officers in utilizing such weapons. After having consulted with numerous medical, scientific and legal experts, he recommended 19 changes be made regarding officers’ training and deployment of conducted energy weapons. These recommendations ranged from legislative changes and province wide standards to higher thresholds for weapons use and periodic testing of CEWs. For the purposes of this report, we will focus on the subject behavior
(p. 19) Prior to the above recommendations, there was no provincial regulation regarding when a CEW may be used and each police force was free to develop its own use-of-force model, without any guidelines to follow (Braidwood, 2009, 8, para. 2). Braidwood further states that the existing definition of ‘active resistance’, the current threshold, is not set high enough to warrant the deployment of CEWs. As such, a person who simply runs away from police, without causing injury, could be tasered (Braidwood, 2009, 16, para.
Tom Stamatakis of the BC Police Association states, “Accountability is both necessary and appropriate. But when it comes to the CEW, I think we have gone beyond the tolerance both for police services and for police officers who prefer to avoid what seems to be inevitable criticism, regardless of the circumstances that led to any deployment.” (SC, 2013, p. 20). He continues that because of the increased scrutiny regarding CEWs, officers are choosing not to use the weapon and are even letting their certification expire. Other reasons officers are reluctant to carry Tasers include varying levels of understanding CEW policies, deployment threshold considerations and a lack of trust (SC, 2013). Since 2007, Taser use has dropped a whopping 87%. BC police officers used their Taser 640 times that year compared to 85 deployments in 2011, due to stricter regulations and higher behavior thresholds. For the RCMP, the frequency of CEW discharges decreased by 83 percent from 2007 (390) to 2011 (65). Independent municipal agencies’ discharges decreased by 92 percent over the same time period (from 250 to 20). In fact, CEW use has decreased across all major law enforcement agencies including the RCMP “E” Division, Police Services Division, BC Sheriff Service Division and the Adult Custody Division (SC, 2013). It is important to note that the huge reduction in CEW use does not mean police are turning to their guns- a tool of last