Ontario Now Allowing Police To Carry Tasers

The Ontario government will allow all frontline police officers to carry stun guns following the fatal shooting of a Toronto teenager last month.

Community Safety Minister Madeleine Meilleur says it will be up to local police forces to decide whether to equip their officers with the weapons, and it will be up to those forces to pay for them.

Meilleur says the decision was made after an extensive consultation with police and coroners across the province.

“This is the right decision to make and it will increase community safety by preventing injury and death,” she said at a news conference announcing the change.

Up to now, only supervising and specialized officers were allowed to carry stun guns, setting police in Ontario apart from counterparts in several other provinces along with the RCMP.
Source

The teenager who was shot and killed by Toronto police was Sammy Yatim. He was shot 9 times and then tasered after being shot. Below is footage of that shooting.

The police officers using a taser on Sammy after he had been shot 9 times shows that the problem with police violence is not a hardware issue. It is a software issue.


Police are becoming more militarized everyday and with that comes the military “mentality”. Couple that with the fact that police officers are not receiving regular psychological assessments (as seen in the below video) and we end up with tragic situations like the murder of Sammy.

To simply put it. Changing hardware does not solve software issues. Regular psychological evaluations, support mechanisms, and a change in the training programs for front line police officers will help correct some of the police violence problems. Not different equipment.