BPS stun-gun use rose during pandemic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2022 (1284 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stun-gun use by Brandon Police Service officers since 2015 peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since dropped off, according to statistics obtained from the City of Brandon.

Earlier this year, the Sun filed a freedom of information and protection of privacy request asking for the number of times police officers in the city brandished a stun gun but did not use it, pressed a stun gun up against someone to stun them, or deployed probes from a stun gun to stun someone, broken down by year.

The city found results for each year from 2015 to June 22, 2022.

However, records from 2016 could not be located, the city said.

In 2015, stun guns were deployed by BPS officers four times, deploying probes twice and brandishing them twice without using them.

BPS doesn’t have any records of stun guns being deployed at all in 2017.

In 2018, there were five uses of stun guns: three brandishings, one deployment of probes, and one stunning.

The numbers rose considerably in 2019. Of the 14 times BPS used stun guns that year, 10 resulted in probes being deployed, two involved people being stunned, and two times stun guns were brandished without being used.

Those numbers increased again in 2020, with 16 uses of a stun guns: 11 deployments of probes, three uses of the stun function, and two displays of a stun guns without being used.

In the second year of the pandemic in 2021, stun guns were deployed by BPS officers in only seven instances: five deployments of probes, one use of the stun function, and one display of a stun guns without it being used.

Halfway through 2022, stun guns have been used nine times by BPS officers: seven deployments of probes and two instances of stun guns being drawn but not used.

In 2020, the Winnipeg Police Service issued a use of force report that showed from 2017 to 2019, stun guns were drawn an average of 96 times a year, probes were deployed an average of 109 times a year, and the push stun function was used an average of 77 times per year.

With Brandon’s population around 6.7 per cent of Winnipeg, Brandon’s stun-gun use statistics are lower per capita than in the provincial capital.

In a phone interview Wednesday, BPS Chief Wayne Balcaen said stun guns are intermediate weapons that are used with the hope that they’ll be the least damaging in use-of-force situations.

“When I look at the numbers, knowing that there’s 94 police officers and we work around the clock, I don’t see these numbers as high,” he said. “In that time period, we’ve also seen an increase in violence against police as well as, I believe, an increase in weapons that people were having, as well. It also coincides somewhat with the pandemic and the fact that drug use has increased in our community.”

Brandon University sociology Prof. Christopher Schneider, who has written extensively about policing, said the data is too limited and lacking context to make definitive statements on the Brandon service’s use of stun guns.

“What we can surmise is that when [stun-gun] use spiked, the police were less successful at de-escalation techniques in their encounters with people,” he said. “Some of those years coincide with lockdowns, so perhaps we could surmise that police may have encountered people who were outside of lockdowns … and had to resort to the use of their [stun-gun] service weapons.”

» cslark@brandonsun.com, with files from Drew May

» Twitter: @ColinSlark