Mounties strip details from Taser reports!

OTTAWA, Canada - March 24, 2008 - The Royal Canadian Mounted Police 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 Canadian Broadcasting Company found the Mounties are 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.

Police Chief John Martin demonstrates a Taser in Brattleboro, Vermont, last year.

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

As Taser use escalates, however, the RCMP has tightened 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 to keep 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.

The RCMP cites the need to protect privacy and continuing investigations to justify removing basic details from other reports.

Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh scoffed at the explanation.

“That's hogwash. That's absolute nonsense,” the former attorney-general for British Columbia said in an interview. “Whether or not someone was armed ... how does that violate privacy?”