Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, committee members for inviting us to be here today and to present our version of events.
With respect to the case of Robert Dziekanski, Mrs. Cisowski's son, this was more than just an incident about tasering, and that's the point that I think is important to be made. It's important to be made from the point of view that this is, of course, a committee that deals with public security.
There are a lot of people who own a piece of what happened to Mr. Dziekanski, different agencies. Most important—just to review those, and they're in my submissions—first of all, there's the role of the RCMP in this.
Before we get into the issue of the taser, there are couple of other aspects to the RCMP behaviour in this particular case that need to be questioned and that there have never been answers for, the most important of which, in my submission, is the fact that, to begin with, after this event and after the tasering occurred, an RCMP spokesman came out on the following day and made a press release in which he said, among other things: Look, we had taken every bit of time that we could possibly take that was reasonable in the circumstances, and what we did on that particular day was we gestured to this man; we tried to communicate with him; we tried to deal with him.
The tape shows that it took 24 seconds from the time they arrived until they tasered him.
The point I make about that is that the public loses confidence in its police and in its institutions when those institutions are not forthright and straightforward and don't correct themselves.
This point has never been corrected by the RCMP, to my knowledge. That statement was hurtful to my client, but more importantly, it misrepresented what happened on that particular morning and placed the police in a position where they lose the public trust. They need to be brought up on that.
This is a democracy. We give great powers to our police officers. We give powers of arrest. We give all kinds of power to them. But we expect that they will act appropriately back. They cannot misrepresent circumstances and expect that they are going to have the public's support.
In this country, all the boys who are nine and ten years old still grow up and want to be policemen and firemen, but they're not going to want to be those things if our police don't stand up and do the right things and say the right things and are honest and straightforward. That's one of the points I make.
The second point is about how they handled this circumstance with respect to my client, Mrs. Cisowski. Mrs. Cisowski was on the phone with Canadian Border Services at two o'clock in the morning, because by this time she had gotten home from the airport. She had been on the phone with Officer Chapin, who was the last border services agent to be in contact with her son. He made arrangements that he would contact her. After his shift, he would go out and meet with Robert or look for him, and they would get on the phone and call Mrs. Cisowski.
In the meantime, they had advised her that he was there, and she was moving heaven and earth to get back to Vancouver. Those of you who are familiar with the trip from Kamloops to Vancouver at two o'clock morning know it's not a particularly easy thing to do, unless you're driving, but even to arrange a flight.
The point is that it was conveyed. This information had to be conveyed to the police officer, and it was dealt with, as I say, by the officer who helped find the papers and who had just been on the phone. Yet she went through this trip, being driven, taking herself all the way down to Vancouver in this expectation, hope, and euphoria of finally finding her son. Of course, when she got down there, she was advised that he had passed on. But she was given no detail.
The point to all of that is that this has increased the difficulty she has suffered personally. She suffers currently from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of matters related to this. She suffers from a condition that's related to intense grief that goes beyond normal psychological grief that you or I might suffer after the passing of a loved one. All this has been compounded by these various things that occurred.
Let's talk briefly about the taser, because I know that's what you were charged with more than anything else.
The simple point I would make about the taser, the use of it, and the way it was used in respect of Robert Dziekanski is that it has destroyed policemen as professionals in this context.
When the taser is a simple weapon, or people believe that it is a weapon of correction, a weapon that can be used to change someone's behaviour briefly, that it is a safe weapon to be used--in spite of the fact that it's a restricted weapon under the Criminal Code--and when the police are trained in this particular way and when they accept that behaviour, in my submission, they lose their professionalism.
I know there are some committee members here who were policemen. One of the things about police work that anybody who has ever done it knows is that it's an art form. It is not a simple application of putting handcuffs on somebody or the simple powers of arrest. It's artwork. It's knowing how to interact with people at the right time.
What we've done is take the artwork out of police work by giving these tasers to these police officers in these circumstances and saying, “You can use these things willy-nilly. They're safe. Go ahead. No one dies if you use these things.” In fact, in Canada we've had 18 people in these circumstances, and in the United States they've had 240 in circumstances surrounding the use of the taser.
The point is, if we allow the use of these restricted weapons, and arm the officers with them and give them carte blanche, they're going to use them. All it's doing is taking away from the professionalism that police officers have enjoyed in this country dating back to the time of Robert Peel, which is, historically speaking, when the police services really first started. And the point of police services was that you were only as good as the public you served, and you were only as good as the information the public was prepared to provide to you.
Well, the public is not talking to the police. The public is not happy. And it's got to stop here. You people have the power to influence the use of this particular instrument. It's not an instrument that should be used willy-nilly.
Police officers have to go back to basics--that is, using common sense. You don't show up on a scene, not interview a single suspect, and 24 seconds later, when there are four of you, overwhelm a guy who is really not in particularly great shape, not particularly large--although it's been reported that way. He was a guy of relatively modest size. In my estimation, after seeing him at the morgue, he was probably 5 foot 10 inches, maybe 5 foot 11 inches at most, and he might have weighed 180 pounds.
There were four trained police officers there. Not a single one asked a single question that day. Although they were told that he spoke no English, people thought he spoke Russian. Not a single attempt was made to try to communicate with him.
And this nonsense about gesturing that the police put out at the beginning is just totally unproven by the tape itself. And this begs the question again: If we didn't have the tape, what would the police be telling us about this incident today? That's the question the public has a right to have answered. The police have to come forward and explain why this mistake was made in the first place.
Now let's talk about the Canada Border Services Agency and what their role was in the Dziekanski matter. Mrs. Cisowski spent eight to ten hours at the airport that day. But ultimately she went to the Canada Border Services. And one of the things that we should remember in this particular case is that she was the sponsor of her son. She was responsible for her son while he was in Canada.
She had someone who spoke better English than she did go on her behalf. She says this happened about 7:30 or 8 o'clock, and that's also what the witness tells me, although Canada Border Services admits that it happened about 7 o'clock.
They say that this conversation took place with Officer Zadravec. We got that information from the disclosure obtained under the Access to Information Act. It wasn't anything that was willingly provided by Canada Border Services. It came out of access to information requests that had to be done by various interested parties. That in itself should tell you something. Six months later, that's the way the public has to find out about these things.
In any event, there's a simple question that's never been answered by Canada Border Services. Mr. Dziekanski went through primary customs at approximately 4:10. He would have been registered, you would expect, in a computer when he went through primary customs. From that point forward, he was met and dealt with by no fewer than seven Canada Border Services officers. Between four o'clock and when he was finally let go at midnight or one o'clock in the morning, seven different people had dealt with him. In fairness, one or two had dealt with him about four o'clock and determined that he didn't speak English. At that time, they still had an opportunity to get hold of a translator, even though the only translator available for a Slavic language at that time of day, as hard as this is to believe, was in Toronto. But that fellow still would have been around at four o'clock, had anybody taken the trouble to try to track him down and note that there was a guy having difficulty.
The more important point is this: when at seven o'clock they were asked about Mr. Dziekanski, which they admit, why didn't a Canada Border Services agent input his name into a computer and make the simple determination that some alarm bells should be going off? Here's a woman looking for her son who arrived at four o'clock. He went through primary customs. Where is he? Instead, no one bothered to enter his name or take any step. This is the benign neglect that surrounds everybody involved in this case. It goes from the airport authority to the police, and over to the RCMP. Rather than do the job properly, they decided to do it in a halfhearted way.
After all these disclosures, after all this information, after the Canada Border Services provided their public statement, and after I've asked publicly many times, where's the answer to this simple question? This committee ought to know, ought to be able to get that answer. He went through customs at four o'clock, presumably was entered into a computer. Why couldn't he be identified at seven o'clock? Why was she told he wasn't there?
The whole tragedy could have been avoided at that point. The answer she got—at seven o'clock according to them, at 7:30 or eight o'clock according to my witnesses—was that there was no Polish immigrant there that night, and that she might as well go home. But she didn't. She continued to hope. She went back to the airport authority.
We have seven, nine, or whatever it is, Canada Border Services agents. Nobody has disclosed their level of training. This was a weekend. Were these junior people? There were obviously acting supervisors. Were there students working? I've heard various rumours. But all these questions need to be answered. Why wasn't he dealt with more conveniently?
At the end of the day, they did the best they could. I'm not blaming any particular agent. But no one checked the computer. Officer Chapin tried to help him at the last instant. He apparently had some knowledge of Polish, but not much. He wasn't a native speaker. It doesn't even appear that he had a working knowledge. When he spoke to Mrs. Cisowski at two o'clock in the morning, they spoke English, not Polish.
At the end of the day, when they did finally release him, he didn't want to go. He made that fairly apparent. The reason he didn't want to go was that he had made an arrangement to meet his mother at the baggage claim area. She said, “I'm going to pick you up there.”
Now, I suspect, although I can't prove it, that he was never able to communicate that, because there was no one to communicate it to. He kept trying to. But, tragically, by this stage of the game, his mother had gone back to Kamloops.
This guy was a lost soul. Once the Canada Border Services were done with him--and I say this with respect--they should not be charged with looking after him once they've dealt with him, but there ought to be a facility they can turn him over to.
Here's a guy who clearly doesn't speak the language, doesn't want to leave because he can't communicate with anybody, and is trying to explain his circumstances, and yet there's nobody from the airport authority for him to be turned over to. They don't even have any security guards at that time of the evening in the area he's leaving. The oversight is unbelievable.
So here we have it. He slips through the hands of seven or eight different people. There's no one to speak to him. He's clearly giving the message that he's not ready to leave, because he's made this arrangement, and not more than 150 feet away is the mother passing on the same information to the airport authorities, not once, not twice, not even five times, more like ten times, begging, talking to them.
This is the point that I make in my brief about the airport authorities owning a piece of this tragedy. That's this. Here you have information desks. I understand that the committee was at the airport, and you would have had an opportunity to see where those information bureaus are. What's the point of having an information bureau that is hopeless and can't help you? Worse than that, they misled her into believing they were helping her.
She went to the first information bureau, which is located in the area that is closest to the doors where someone exits from international arrivals. It's a big, huge booth with green printing and writing, and it says “information booth”. She went there, and she explained right off the bat that she had a son who was on this plane, that he didn't speak the language, that he was worried about flying, that she was fairly worried about him, and she now realized that she had told him she was meeting him in there and that she couldn't get in there. What could they do?
They basically said don't worry, just wait a while, and he'll probably show up through the door. Well, after going back and forth there three or four times, she went up the escalator to the larger information bureau, where there were more people working and there were computers located on the desk. She spoke to them no fewer than four or five times, the last time being at ten o'clock.
In any event, here's the point that is the most important about this: she was misled during that period of time into thinking that they actually were looking for him. The reason she says that is that they wrote his name down; they had a form there; they had two computers, and they appeared to be looking in the computers, and she assumed they were trying to do something, and they were announcing his name.
Unbeknownst to her, but known to them, is the fact that that announcement doesn't go into the secure area. They knew that. She didn't.
Here they are leading her to believe that they were looking for your son, that they had the computers; they had the paper; they were tracking this. She went back there on numerous occasions and didn't quit even after she was told by immigration that he was not there. She went back there still, two more times, the last time with this friend who was driving her there. They were told at ten o'clock at night, “Hey, look, he's not here. Go home.”
If they had told them something simple like “We don't know, and it's not our job”, she wouldn't have gone home. She wasn't leaving until she found out. She left because she was told to go home. So this benign neglect turned into something more.
Then we have the whole notion of the lack of security. You've got these guys running around in uniform carrying out security. First of all, they appear to be totally untrained. I believe that if you ask the police candidly, they will tell you that these security people are totally untrained and are probably as much of an issue to the police as they are to us. And this is the point I make. When they finally showed up and interacted with Robert Dziekanski, which wasn't until chauffeurs who were there went running and looking for them, after phone calls were made, they had one simple interaction with Mr. Dziekanski. He was reaching for a computer and they motioned to him--you can see it on the tape--to put it down. He did. Then what did they do? They turned their backs on him. They didn't even try to interact with him. The most simple....
You don't have to be a trained police officer, you don't have to be a trained security professional, and you don't have to be a psychologist to know that if you turn your back on somebody in those circumstances, you're telling them you don't care and you're just adding to their level of frustration. And that's what happened here from the security point of view. So there's a huge issue about how these people who are working in our airports are trained, whether they're properly trained, and how they ought to be trained.
The tragedy was further compounded in this particular case because normally when you come out through the international arrivals.... And anybody who has used Vancouver airport will note that when you come through these big glass sliding doors where Mr. Dziekanski came out, there's a station for a security guard and there's normally somebody posted there. It shouldn't be lost on anybody that he actually walked out of the secure area. He was escorted out by Officer Chapin because Chapin thought he would eventually be able to meet up with his mother. I'm not saying that Chapin did anything wrong in those circumstances. He had no one to turn him over to. But there was no one out there guarding that post.
This is the entrance to the most secure area of the airport. This is where all the people we're trying to keep in...and we're trying to keep people from getting in there because there are doors that lock. You need a special pass to get in there, and there was no security guy there.
