Guelph residents don’t deserve lazy

(August 11) - If this is the safest city in Canada, why does our police force still want more Tasers?

According to Statistics Canada, Guelph had the country’s largest one-year decline in its police reported violent crime index from 2007 to 2008. All in all, it went down by 15 per cent. We also had the lowest total crime severity index.

They come up with these numbers by tracking all the crimes reported to police. Each is given a weighted measure, with a larger number to those that receive the most severe sentences in court. The higher the number the greater the mayhem. As an example, Brantford scored 104.3 to our 57.7 on the general crime index. In violent crime their 87.5 more than doubled our 41.5.

We don’t need StatsCan to tell us Guelph is a better place to live than Brantford, but it’s nice to have it confirmed. Fifty kilometres north on Highway 24 makes a big difference. We are a lot more civilized up here. We provide late night urinals for late night party people. We provide a safe place for environmental activists to rage against the city. We stop our cars and wait when a family of geese want to cross the road. We care for our salamanders. We plant our own flowers on city boulevards. We hold doors open for each other. We are nice people leading nice lives in a nice, safe city.

Even our protesters do the common, contradictory things that beset a lot of people. Go to a web site called digitaljournal.com and type Hanlon in the search box. Then click on the story about the police serving an injunction and scroll down to a photo of a young protester playing his guitar. On the ground beside him is a case of 30 Nestles water bottles. There it is, plain as day. Sitting under the tarpaulin structure built by these defenders of Guelph’s water supply. Plastic water bottles do more to damage to the environment than carefully controlled land development ever will. This is as good an example as you could find of how some people charge ahead without considering the consequences of their actions.

Of all the things we still need in Guelph, Tasers should be way down at the bottom of the list. Officers in the tactical squad already have them, as do police supervisors. The higher-ups on Fountain Street want each and every officer to have one. This is such a bad idea that it is difficult to imagine why it keeps being brought up by otherwise intelligent adults. We even have a constable on the force who started his own company to promote the safe use of these electrifying weapons. The general mantra in the Taser community is that they are a preferred alternative to the use of lethal force. Tasers don’t kill people, they say, excited delirium does. This is a condition recognized by more police officers than doctors. It is aggravated by a high voltage jolt to the heart muscles.

Lethal force is a euphemism for shooting someone dead. It should be a measure of last resort. I can’t think of when the Guelph police last used it. They have used their Tasers, though. These things quickly become weapons of first resort. There is a video on the Internet of police at an Oakland Athletics baseball game trying to remove a fan. He refused to leave. They zapped him. What was the alternative? To shoot him?

These weapons are the lazy way out of a nasty confrontation. The peaceful, law-abiding people of Guelph do not deserve lazy. We deserve careful and thoughtful.