p2pnet news | Crime:- Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police —- the famous Mounties —- isn’t the only law enforcement agency to be taking flak because of a death from unnecessary use of a weapon.

Canada is still being strongly criticised because a Polish man was tazered to death at Vancouver International Airport.

It’s far from being the only incident of its kind. Seventeen other people have died in Canada from Taser shots, but unlike the Vancouver case, none of them were videoed to show up online to all the world to see.

Now, “A police shooting of an unarmed young man drew an angry crowd in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Monday night and focused attention anew on the use of force by the police,” says the New York Times, going on:

Khiel Coppin, 18, died in a hail of 20 bullets fired by five police officers who had responded to his mother’s 911 call for help in a domestic dispute. The police said officers believed Mr. Coppin had a gun, but it turned out that he had been holding a hairbrush.

The New York Police Department says the officers who fired 20 shots at 18-year-old Khiel Coppin on Nov. 12 were justified in their use of force. The mentally ill teenager approached officers outside his mother’s home with a black object in his hand — the hairbrush — and repeatedly ignored orders to stop.”

In a second 911 call Coppin’s mother told the operator her son wasn’t armed, and after officers arrived she repeated that to them, says Associated Press, going on to list a number of similar killings.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
unnecessary use of a weapon – Video of man’s Taser death online, November 16, 2007
New York Times – Questions Over Police Shooting of Man, 18, November 13, 2007

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 6:35 am and is filed under Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

HOME

Viewed 4323 times