Ethics Newsline®

OTTAWA
A recently released video that shows a man dying after being Tasered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has raised ethical questions about the Mounties’ use of force in the incident.

Amnesty International says it wants an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the October 15 death of Polish national Robert Dziekanski, CTV reports. Dziekanski, 40, who does not speak English, had become agitated after being held in a secure area of the airport for about 10 hours while waiting to meet his mother.

While he threw a chair at a wall and screamed, a video taken by a passerby shows that he appeared to have calmed down by the time police arrived. The video has been widely posted on news sites and circulated on the Internet.

Dziekanski was shocked twice with a Taser, a device that emits a stunning jolt of electricity, and subsequently pinned to the floor.

“I don’t know why it ever became a police incident,” retired Vancouver police superintendent Ron Foyle told CBS News. “It didn’t seem that he made any threatening gestures towards them.”

A similar view was expressed by Poland’s ambassador to Canada. “The reaction of the RCMP officers was unsuitable to the situation,” Piotr Ogrodzinski told the Canadian National Post. “What I’ve seen was that Mr. Dziekanski [was] a person who was agitated, frustrated, I think terrified, but not aggressive. He was not making a gesture that he intended to fight anybody.”

Canada’s minister of public safety last week said he was awaiting an RCMP internal report on the incident before taking any action, reports the Toronto Globe & Mail.

Political reaction was varied, according to the Globe & Mail report, with some supporting the use of Tasers and saying the RCMP appeared to act properly, but with critics arguing that the RCMP should not be allowed to investigate itself.

The incident follows a series of public embarrassments for the RCMP, including a probe that found the agency turned over faulty information that resulted in the arrest, deportation to Syria, and eventual torture of a Canadian national, as well as a recent parliamentary committee hearing into allegations of high-level corruption within the agency.