The 22-year-old man [Oscar Grant] killed by a BART [San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit] police officer early New Year’s Day was lying face-down on the train platform, his hands behind him waiting to be cuffed, when he was shot in the back, a lawyer newly hired by the man’s family said Saturday. …

The witnesses told him police handcuffed Grant after he was shot, but removed the cuffs just before news reporters arrived, [Attorney] Burris said. No weapons were found on Grant or anyone else involved in the altercation on the train.

And simply giving the transit cops Tasers won’t solve it:

Officials have not said whether the officer intended to shoot Grant. One source familiar with the investigation said BART is looking into a number of issues, including whether the officer had meant to fire his Taser stun gun rather than his gun. Alameda County prosecutors are conducting their own investigation, as is standard in officer-involved shootings.

Of course, the whole incident was captured on cellphone video:

Burris said he plans to file a $25 million claim this week against BART - a legal precursor to a civil lawsuit - because, he says, witness statements and video footage recorded by other passengers make clear that the shooting was unjustified.

You simply can’t do this kind of thing anymore without the expectation that within five minutes it’ll all be over the Internet. Deplorable, despicable, and disgusting.

Note: Racist or otherwise offensive comments will be deleted. Keep ‘em to yourself.

A 56-year-old man from the Midwestern US state of Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower in his garden because it would not start. …

Police officers said Mr Walendowski had told them: “It’s my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want.”

Apparently the charges are disorderly conduct and possession of a sawn-off shotgun, and (naturally) alcohol appears to have been a factor. And the worst part? Shooting the lawn mower appears to have been a violation of its end-user licence agreement:

A local retailer said that Mr Walendowski might now have difficulty getting his lawn mower repaired.

“Anything not factory recommended would void the warranty,” said Dick Wagner, of Wagner’s Garden Mart in Milwaukee.

You’ve got to admire the crazy libertarianism and independence of thought and action that have so defined Americans since the country’s founding in 1776. Actually, you don’t. Which is (partly) why, after a week back down in Portland at OSCON 2008, I will be returning to Canada tomorrow, where all we have to worry about is overzealous law enforcement killing Métis kids with Tasers. Full updates, resumption of normal blogging, etc. to happen in short order.

• A dispute over a parking space between a security guard and a private citizen in Colorado leads to a Taser duel.
  

  “(The guard) pointed a stun gun at my mother’s face and I immediately responded with my personal Taser,” Epstein said Sunday evening, within an hour of being released from Boulder County Jail. “And we shot each other at the same moment.”

• But it’s not all bleak news: the RCMP says it would be “willing to change its Taser policy”, partially in response to the Robert Dziekański Taser incident at Vancouver Airport a while back.

The old policy, adopted a year ago, caused a public outcry after it was learned through a Freedom of Information request that transit police had deployed a Taser on non-violent passengers, including a person who had not paid his fare and tried to run away from an officer.

The old policy stated: “A Taser may be deployed…to gain physical control of a non-compliant, suicidal or potentially violent subject.”

But it’s not at all certain just how much real change this alteration of terminology is really going to bring about:

Inquiry counsel Art Vertlieb asked [deputy transit police chief Ken] Allen if the new policy would allow a Taser to be deployed on a person fleeing police during a “fare blitz”—a check to see if passengers had paid fares.

“It would depend on the extenuating circumstances surrounding why the individual was fleeing,” the deputy chief replied.

In other words, Canada’s only armed transit police force not only gets to keep its Tasers, they get to keep using these potentially deadly weapons on “actively resistant” human beings who make the bad judgment not to pay their transit fare and the misfortune to get caught. If TransLink is so concerned about revenue loss from non-compliant individuals, they should install some fucking turnstiles on the SkyTrain instead of Tasering their riders.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.

Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

His death has rightly sparked outrage across the country, rising to the level of an international incident. It has prompted calls for reviews both specifically of how Dziekański’s case was handled and of how RCMP and other law enforcement agencies use Tasers in general. Every week, it seems, there’s another Taser-related death being reported in the media; recently Amnesty International figured that there had been at least 17 deaths directly linked to the use of Tasers since the weapons were introduced to Canadian law enforcement. I even heard a suggestion—a facetious suggestion, of course, but one that resounded particularly strongly among my local friends—that the newly introduced mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver didn’t really represent Canada or British Columbia as they exist today. What was the proposed alternative? A Mountie with a Taser. Bienvenue au Canada!

Seriously, though, this really does touch upon issues of language politics. Today, YVR released a preliminary report on how they would spend over a million dollars to improve security in the immigration area of the airport. If you’ve ever been to YVR—or pretty much any Canadian airport—you’ll know that all the signage is in both English and French, and at YVR there are many signs that are also printed in Chinese characters. Aside from the obvious ‘what good does French do’ question, which becomes somewhat more relevant the further away from Québec you go, a better question is ‘why aren’t signs in the Immigration section posted in more languages?’ This is something I’ve always wondered—even large airports in the United States, a country in which many states have notoriously anti-foreign language laws—post signs and employ interpreters for many different foreign languages. The rationale is obvious: how are you going to communicate with an immigrant—or even a resident—who doesn’t speak English if you don’t follow these steps? Yet YVR has been shamefully lacking in this department: although you have to be bilingual to work in the federal government, and therefore be a border guard/customs agent, ‘bilingual’ in this case means ‘both English and French’, and French is really not all that useful at the busiest airport on the North American end of the Pacific Rim.

Hopefully YVR will follow through and begin to employ more people with more varied linguistic skills than simply the government-mandated French and English. Such ‘biligualism’ across Canada, as advocated and established by the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, is a fine thing. Now that the country’s got it, it’s time to expand to other languages; hopefully we can avert the next Robert Dziekański with proper communication.