RCMP clears itself on pepper-spray complaint

By Pieta Woolley; June 26, 2008 - The Georgia Straight
http://www.straight.com/article-151230/rcmp-clears-itself-pe...

Last year’s [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] pepper-spraying of several Sechelt band infants, youths, and elders was "regrettable" but "appropriate in the circumstances", according to a police report obtained by the Georgia Straight. Then-chief Stan Dixon laid a complaint into the July 2007 incident with the Sunshine Coast RCMP detachment. Of the four allegations of misconduct the RCMP looked into—improper use of force, improper attitude, irregularity in procedure, and a driving irregularity—the investigation cleared the officers of every one, according to the 89-page report.

To combat any perceptions of unfairness in such cases, the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP had earlier that year introduced an "independent observer pilot project". In this case, after a request from the Sechelt band, First Nations Summit grand chief Edward John observed.

He said he’ll never do it again.

"You have the picture of that little baby on the front pages of the papers, and his eyes bloodshot from pepper spray," he told the Straight in a phone interview. "I don’t see how the report addressed this in any significant way, you know, so it’s troubling"

John noted that neither he nor his co-observer, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs grand chief Stewart Phillip, were able to ask questions or contribute to the deliberations.

"They [the RCMP] control the recommendations," John said. "They control the content of the report, and they choose to include what they want to at their discretion. So I don’t know if it provides for a high degree of confidence. I thought there was some reason for the complaints. And to find out now that those complaints are largely dismissed [is disappointing]."

This case, and how it was handled by the RCMP, "cries out for" a truly independent body—perhaps even a First Nations body—to investigate misconduct allegations against Canada’s federal police force, John argued.

On July 2, 2007, about 75 band members celebrated a youth soccer victory with a "parade" of pickup trucks and cars. The report stated that 10 youth stood in the back of one touring pickup, cheering. Local RCMP members tried to stop the parade using sirens, but the drivers didn’t pull over immediately. When they did, and the RCMP subsequently handcuffed and arrested driver and coach Troy Mayers on two counts of obstructing a police officer, the report notes, a confrontation ensued. An officer shot pepper spray into the crowd, and Mayer’s six-month-old son and wife were hit by the spray.

In a written statement for the investigation, Cpl. Max Fossum recalled: "The crowd was combative and I feared that they would start to fight the members [of the RCMP]. As soon as I sprayed Mayers, the male in the orange shirt broke through the members that were trying to hold the crowd away. The male was combative and he was sprayed. The female holding the baby was the same female I told to back off prior to pepper spraying Mayers. She had not backed off and went around the members. She tried to hit me with her left hand while holding the baby. She was sprayed."

The "female holding the baby" was Shannon Phillips, Mayers’s wife. A paraphrase of her statement included in the report states: "Shannon said that when she asked the older officer in plainclothes what they were doing, he straight-armed [pushed] her. She said that she had stumbled back and hit a red van that was behind her. She had been holding her son, Kaeden, in her arms. She was trying to get back up when she got pepper sprayed in her face."

Several witnesses interviewed in the report noted that this kind of parade is common in Sechelt and has a history dating back more than two decades. The RCMP’s only direct criticism of the officers was that they were unaware of the parade tradition.

The RCMP have an obligation to protect people’s safety, according to Joel Johnston, a Vancouver police officer and the province’s use-of-force coordinator. But what most citizens don’t understand, he told the Straight, is that the use of force is necessary less than one percent of the time—but then it’s really necessary. "Say that pickup truck had popped onto a curb and pitched one of those kids out," he said, "and they landed on their head on the curb or the asphalt roadway. Those officers would have been held to account for why they didn’t do their job."

Pepper spray, Johnston said, is a good choice for crowd control. He is "absolutely troubled" that the spray hit the infants and children, he stressed, but said that, ultimately, the parents put their children into an unsafe situation: allowing them to ride, illegally, in the back of a pickup. As for public perceptions of the Sechelt incident, he thinks they’re skewed. In his version: "A couple of people unfortunately exercised the use of their children to shield themselves from pepper spray, and it suddenly turned into a story of the RCMP pepper-spraying children and toddlers and so on, when in fact it was really a police officer trying to stop unsafe behaviour that he in fact is sworn to do as part of his job."

Paul Palango, who has spent much of his career reporting on the Mounties, heartily disagrees. The journalist’s latest book, Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP (due for release in October), delves into the RCMP’s self-policing challenges.

"This is a poorly trained police force," he told the Straight in a phone interview from Chester Basin, Nova Scotia. "It’s underfinanced, it’s undersupervised, and it’s largely unaccountable. You can’t expect to get any satisfaction from a complaint with the force."

The RCMP, Palango said, is not in touch with the communities it serves, the traditions of those communities, and so its officers don’t exercise suitable discretion. Palango called observer programs such as the one Grand Chief John was a part of, "a game". He thinks they’re a smokescreen, and that police forces will always find a way around civilian oversight mechanisms. What Canada needs, he said, is a system like the Police Integrity Commission in New South Wales, Australia, a truly independent body overseen by the state parliament. In B.C., Palango said, the local RCMP should at the very least be accountable to B.C.’s solicitor general, rather than to Ottawa.

The final comments of the RCMP report describe the episode as "regrettable" and "a well-meaning attempt to deal with road safety", which "quickly degenerated into a situation which placed police officers in danger, and forced other police officers to respond in an emergency fashion."

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B.C. Mounties cleared in native reserve pepper-spraying

by Linda Nguyen; Friday, June 27, 2008 - Canwest News Service

OTTAWA - The RCMP officer who pepper-sprayed a group of aboriginals, including a seventh-month-old baby, celebrating a soccer game win on the Sechelt, B.C., reserve last July has been cleared of wrongdoing, an internal RCMP investigation has concluded.

First Nations Summit grand chief Edward John, an independent observer during the investigation into the July 2, 2007 incident confirmed that the 89-page report absolved the RCMP of four allegations - including improper use of force, improper attitude, irregularity in procedure and a driving irregularity. The issue came out in a public complaint launched by the Sechelt First Nation band following an incident involving pepper-spray being released into a crowd that included children and a baby in the back of a pickup truck.

The police detachment have since issued a written apology for the incident.

John, along with Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs grand chief Stewart Phillip, had been asked to sit in on the RCMP investigative hearings that began last fall. The two were asked by the independent Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP as part of a pilot project to abolish concerns over unfair police investigations. John said Friday he and Phillip were both disappointed in how limited their roles were in the proceedings.

"We didn't know that we weren't allowed to ask questions during the interviews," he said. John said the report's conclusions were expected, considering it is the RCMP that essentially [is] investigating itself.

"This was a big black eye to the police, the way it was handled," he said. "Many communities in the coast here have ongoing soccer tournaments and when they win, they take a little tour through their community holding up trophies, honking horns, yelling and screaming in the back of pickup trucks. This happens in Vancouver too but I don't see Vancouver people stopping people and spraying them and arresting them and sending them to hospital. Why is it different in Sechelt?"

Shannon Phillips whose husband, Troy Mayers, was the one who was arrested, said the difference between Sechelt and Vancouver is quite clear.

"Basically I think it's an issue about natives against non-native and natives against police," the 38-year-old non-native said. "I just want to tell police: Just take responsibility." Their baby, Kayden, was also pepper-sprayed by police along with the two parents.

Phillips said there's tension between the reserve and the RCMP. "Nobody has respect for them, confidence for them anymore," she said. "People are really disappointed in the outcome of this."

A community meeting is scheduled to be held in the next few months to decide whether further complaint action will be taken. The community can either request an independent review of the report or ask for a second full investigation to be launched into the incident, said Kate McDerby, a spokeswoman for the RCMP complaints commission.

A spokesman for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said the community must try to move forward. "People don't have faith in the system where the police will investigate themselves," said the group's executive director Murray Molard. "An incident like this is perhaps a symptom of a larger issue of a relationship that needs to be improved. Sechelt is not the first community where the relationship between the First Nations and the RCMP needs work."

The RCMP would not comment on the case on Friday. Sechelt is located 70 kilometres northwest of Vancouver.