Perception Becoming They Are Welfare Workers With Guns

When police action is life or death

Rosie DiManno

Five thumbnail sketches. Five investigations. Five un-easy pieces of policing:

THE OWNER of a Hamilton billiards club calls cops to report being struck by a man wielding a hatchet. Two officers respond and find the suspect at a nearby tavern, still with hatchet in hand. They order him to drop the weapon. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a knife, then suddenly runs towards one of them. Both officers fire their guns. The man dies as a result of two gunshot wounds to the torso. It all happens within 30 seconds.

Verdict: Use of force was "regrettably necessary," the victim responsible for escalating the situation.

A 911 CALL brings paramedics to a Sudbury house where family members say a man has fallen in the living room and needs medical help. While the paramedics try to assess the man's condition, he becomes aggressive and uncooperative, resulting in a summons for police to assist. Even after he's been pepper-sprayed and hit in the "open-handed technique," the man continues to struggle. He goes into medical distress. The paramedics on scene immediately begin resuscitative efforts, to no avail. The man is pronounced dead upon arrival at hospital.

Verdict: The "use-of-force options" applied were reasonable in this situation, "tragic outcome" notwithstanding.

LEAMINGTON POLICE stop a 30-year-old truck driver for undisclosed reasons. The man is arrested in a parking lot. He sustains a couple of broken ribs.

Verdict: Two officers are charged with assault causing bodily harm.

A 29-YEAR-OLD MAN leaves his Oakville home and checks into a Niagara Falls motel. He places two distress calls, claims unknown persons are chasing him. Niagara Regional Police locate him soon afterwards on a nearby street. The man – 5-11 and 313 pounds – appears "very agitated" and is "sweating profusely." Civilian bystanders later describe the man as "hyperventilating, screaming, running around in circles and making incomprehensible sounds." Six officers are unable to subdue him, the man breaking free, jumping over a parking lot retaining wall and striking his head on the pavement.

A prolonged scuffle ensues – police using batons, elbow and knee strikes to the man's arms, legs and torso – and the man is finally restrained with three sets of handcuffs, though he continues to swing his arms. The man spits up blood and police place him in a prone position, on his side, to avoid restraint asphyxia.

"In a further effort to subdue the man, one officer directed a short burst of pepper spray at him, but it had no effect." Paramedics, arriving at the scene, administer a sedative. He dies en route to hospital. A post-mortem reveals potentially lethal levels of an illegal substance in his blood. Multiple superficial blunt force injuries are determined not to have been factors in the death, which resulted from toxic effects of the aforementioned drug.

Verdict: Reasonable use of force against a man who "exhibited phenomenal strength in resisting officers' efforts to take him into custody."

TORONTO POLICE are assigned to the Riverdale Park area in anticipation of an increase in robberies on Halloween. Four robberies have already occurred that evening. With revolvers drawn, officers surprise two masked men in the act of holding up two other men. The suspects are ordered to lie on the ground but one flees. An officer, with service pistol still in hand, gives chase and catches the suspect, using the gun to strike him. They struggle and the suspect grabs the officer's pistol. "The officer could not pull the gun away and feared that he was going to lose control of it completely."

The cop fires one shot during the struggle, killing the suspect, who turns out to be an unarmed 18-year-old. His associate is found with a pellet gun "resembling a 9-mm semi-automatic."

Verdict: "This was a traumatic, dynamic and quickly evolving incident that occurred without warning, escalated quickly and happened at night." The subject officer had a "reasonable and honestly held belief that the man posed a real and imminent threat to the officer's life and safety and to the lives and safety of those in the vicinity; the use of lethal force was necessary in an attempt to end that threat."

Well, so they say, the "they" being the Special Investigations Unit, as summarized by outgoing director James Cornish in his 2007-2008 report, recently released.

It's impossible to analyze the findings of these five case studies – pulled at random for review within the report – without more details at hand, though even such bare-bones recaps raise more questions than they answer. What's obvious is how rapidly incidents can escalate into lethal situations, how ruinously people can behave – whether out of fear or drug-muddled thinking or mental illness – and how subjective is the judgment of responding police officers.

There was a time, in the '80s and '90s, when police shootings and in-custody deaths – at least in Toronto, were intensely scrutinized, not just by the SIU – which investigates all civilian deaths, serious injuries and alleged sexual assaults involving police, but also by the media.

We've taken our eye off the ball in recent years, as policing has become less of a politicized issue, the SIU settling more quietly into its mandate.

While we weren't looking, a year-over-year increase in such incidents has become the "new normal," according to this latest report from the province's police watchdog: a record-breaking 246 occurrences investigated by the SIU in '07-'08, resulting in 10 officers charged, five times as many as the previous year.

Does that mean the SIU is getting better at its job? Or are cops getting worse at theirs?