Really?!

May 26, 2007
Only Magazine, Vancouver

While the country’s media reacts in disgust to the RCMP’s cover-up in the death of 22-year-old mill worker Ian Bush in Houston, BC, there has been scant care or coverage into the Vancouver Police Department’s cover-up of the death of 44-year-old coke addict Robert Bagnell.

Two years ago, the VPD didn’t announce the death of Bagnell until a full month after he had been tasered in the Continental Hotel on
Granville. The police didn’t even tell Bagnell’s family about the Taser when they called them. The police said they suppressed the news because of the controversy surrounding the Taser—a “non-lethal” US-manufactured weapon that Amnesty International has linked to the death of 267 people in North America.

Seven weeks after the VPD dropped the bomb about Bagnell at a press conference (where they came prepared with a toxicology report and dragged out the president of the BC Schizophrenia Society to support their position), they magically changed their story and told everyone there had been a fire in the building and they were actually trying to rescue Bagnell. Really!?!

The country’s media is doing a good job of holding the police to
account over the death of Bush (a popular young man with a grieving family), but can’t be bothered to do the same for Bagnel (a poor drug addict with AIDS who had cut himself off from his family).

Bagnell’s sister has demanded the police stop using tasers and stop investigating themselves. Really No, actually, she’s fucking right.