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Petti Fong

Vancouver
It has been almost a year  since the fateful events of October 14 at Vancouver International Airport, and the impending anniversary is one that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would rather forget.
Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski  had just landed after his first-ever flight. He was  visibly distraught as he wandered  the airport's security zone for hours, even as his frantic mother looked for him in the arrivals area. They never found each other.  The next time Zofia Cisowski  would see her son, he would be dead.
Nearly a dozen inquiries and investigations were launched by various government bodies after  his death. In Vancouver last week, one of the most public of those investigations appeared to have been stymied again by police reticence to discuss the incident.
The  RCMP were called to the airport when  Dziekanski, 40, started getting agitated at his inability to find anyone who could understand him. He began picking up and hurling furniture.
Less than a minute after the police arrived, one of the four officers at the scene made the fateful, and fatal, decision to shoot Dziekanski with a taser.
That split-second decision has haunted police ever since, triggering an unprecedented public outcry.
Video shot by a bystander showed quite clearly that Dziekanski was unarmed; particularly troubling, the video evidence directly contradicted the  initial police description of the incident.
Before the video was released,  the RCMP  said Dziekanski was behaving violently. Yet the only physical contact was when the officers piled on  him after he had been tasered - at one point,  an officer could be seen pressing his knee down on the man's neck.
The  British Columbia government initially refused to call an inquiry into the death but bowed under immense public pressure and appointed  former judge Thomas Braidwood  to head  one.
A second phase of the inquiry  was scheduled to begin just after the first anniversary of Dziekanski's death, but  Mr Braidwood has revealed that the RCMP  will not  participate.
It caps a year of foot-dragging by the RCMP.  With the matter   under criminal investigation, little has been revealed about  the fate of the four officers  involved.
Adding insult to the agony of  Ms Cisowski, Canadian police have spent time in Poland investigating her son and his actions  before  his arrival to Canada. That  prompted questions about the appropriateness of the RCMP  in effect investigating  themselves.
Earlier this year, an  opposition  member of the federal Parliament lashed out at the RCMP.
'I would like us to get to the heart of the matter,'  Serge Menard of the Bloc Quebecois said  after the RCMP  were called to testify - and instead of telling  politicians what happened at the airport, presented a report on police procedures and processes.
It now turns out that the RCMP were never planning to testify at the provincial inquiry. Commission counsel Art  Vertlieb  said that while the RCMP could be subpoenaed to testify, he was hopeful that measure would not be necessary.
The RCMP said  it could not participate until  it knew whether charges  would be laid against  their officers. And since that decision  will not be made until the second week of next month,  the second phase of the taser inquiry has  been  delayed until November 12.  All along,  the RCMP  has continued to resist demands for answers - fuelling public frustration. There is a growing sense that nothing less than a charge of murder will satisfy critics.
Tomorrow: New York



Anger mounts at taser inquiry