THE TASER DIDN'T DO IT

Medical expert delves into how agitated delirium contributed to
in-custody deaths

Energy weapon not likely linked to excited-delirium death: medical
expert It is highly unlikely anyone in a state of excited delirium was
ever killed due to being tasered, according to a leading researcher.

Dr. Christine Hall of Victoria is an emergency room physician and an
independent researcher on the topic of agitated or excited delirium.
She was recently in Prince George to teach RCMP members about this
often violent condition, since a lot of such cases end up in a police
confrontation. One of the byproducts of studying these aggressive
psychotic breaks is learning about the way the fatalities occurred.

"If taser use is to blame for people dying, I'll be the first one to
the microphone to get them out of use. I couldn't care less is taser
lives or dies," she told The Citizen.

However, she said, there are scientific questions to be answered
before decisions are made that run counter to the empirical data so
far, which is that tasers do not cause death, guns do, and if you take
tasers out of police hands there will probably be more use of guns to
deal with the surge of incidents of agitated delirium, which is
correlated, she said, to the surge in the use of cocaine and similar
street drugs in the past 30 or so years.

Medical doctors, pathologists and laboratory researchers first noted
agitated delirium by that name in the 1980s, although it has been
dealt with in the medical field for ages, said Hall. It has been
actively labelled and studied for the past three decades stemming from
more and more deaths seemingly at the hands of police across North
America, starting in Miami when, not coincidentally, that city was the
primary import point for cocaine.

She explained that these sorts of incidents and drug abuse were not
exclusive to Miami, however, and a lot of police forces were facing a
rising tide of these aggressive individuals who, inexplicably, died.

But people tried to explain the deaths by pointing to various exterior
factors in the close space of time around the death, like pepper spray
or handcuffing systems or taser use, and paid less attention to
autopsies that showed the cause of death usually being extreme
reaction to drug use.

"The similarities between these in-custody deaths are remarkable and
unmistakable, regardless of the methods of restraint involved," said
Hall.

"The incidents of in-custody deaths has not increased over the course
of the last decade, but the use of taser has rolled out to more and
more officers, and been used more and more times, in more and more
places. So that number has gone way up over the past 10 years, but the
number of those who died in custody has been two, one, three, two
consistently.

"There have been 29 deaths in Canada to date, following a taser use;
how many thousands of deployments have there been? That is the
question," she continued. "When someone does die after a tasering,
what was their condition before? You'll probably find it is the same."

Agitated delirium is not confined to the drug-using population,
either, she said. She has studied cases of people who died after
exhibiting these symptoms who were not users of drugs. There are
physiological and/or psychological factors that are still to be fully
understood but still have a deadly result.

In the case of Jason Doan in Red Deer, a non drug user who went wild
in 2006, and was tasered three times by police before dying in custody
soon after, he had a heart condition that set the incident in motion
and the autopsy showed no relevance to the taser, she cited.

In the highly publicized case of Robert Dziekanski who died when
police at the Vancouver Airport tasered him and wrestled him to the
floor during an altercation in October, 2007. The autopsy found no
conclusive cause of death. At the public inquiry going on into the
matter, and into the use of tasers in general, an expert witness in
the field of electrical engineering said it was theoretically possible
for a taser's jolt of energy to kill someone, but no definitive
evidence was presented to suggest Dziekanski did or did not die from
the conducted energy weapon, or from the stress of excited delirium.

"They (delirium fatalities) tend to have their cardiopulmonary arrest
at the scene," she said. "My first case, the scene was the hospital,
27 feet from the resuscitation room. And he didn't live. We don't know
why many of these people don't live in spite of resuscitative treatment."

She is not saying, she stressed, that tasers should not be studied
carefully for their effects. If they are the cause of deaths then
their use should be modified or banned. The public is owed an
explanation, she said, but you have to study down the roads of evidence.

"There is no medical evidence about positional asphyxia (inability to
breathe due to a body position) in regard to police in-custody
context. Sure you can kink off someone's airway, but putting someone
on their stomach with their hands tied behind their back has been
wholly refuted to cause someone's death. But people were dying in the
1980s when there was no taser, there was no pepper spray, etc.," she
said. "For a few short years in the '90s it was 'pepper spray is
killing people' until the research could eventually show that it did
not (trigger medical conditions like asthma).

Then along comes Taser at a time when police were introducing a
distance control mechanism. If you don't want to shoot the guy, you
have to go hand-to-hand and that isn't a great idea for a lot of
people, so along comes Taser in about 1999 for a lot of Canadian
police forces and what happened?

Some people - a low, low, low number, but you don't minimize even one
- - died and people rushed to think 'it's got to be that.'"

Her research is looking at literally every time there is a
public-police interaction in some places, just to make sure no factor
is slipping through the cracks.

"We have now collected data on, in one city alone (Calgary) over the
last three years, more than one million public-police interactions,"
she said.

"In a million such counters, police used force greater than taking
your wrist and pulling it behind your back 698 times, and that
included taserings. And nobody died. Now they have recently had one
in-custody death in Calgary, in October, and that is being studied but
we have this massive body of data and one conclusion you can make
already is, use of force is not that common, and deaths are really
uncommon."

Her visit to Prince George was not to instruct Mounties in the latest
taser practices, it was to educate them about excited or agitated
delirium, so they could make more informed choices when confronted by
these often violent but often vulnerable individuals. It is not a
given that they are going to suffer a heart stoppage due to their
psychotic break, she said, but any delay in seeking medical attention
will not help, whether someone in this state has been taserer, pepper
sprayed, punched and wrestled to the ground, or not.

"We never say never in medicine. It's like saying you can never be
killed with a fork. Sure you can," Hall said. "My interest is, if it
is the taser, boy we want to know about it, but we sure don't want to
rush around arguing about it if it is the wrong causal factor."