Police Encounters
July 3, 2020
I’m a Canadian Police Officer. I have been stunned and concerned with the very constant media coverage which has labelled policing in Canada as a racist and broken system. I’ve also struggled to understand the public backlash at Police Officers in Canada. This has made me step back and ask some tough questions of myself. Am I a threat to the people I am supposed to protect?
One of the narratives that has struck me most is the claim that minorities in Canada are being murdered by Police. It’s alarming and serious and is being pushed heavily by the media and is enraging people. “We are here because police continue to murder Black and Indigenouspeople. We are here because state-sanctioned anti-Blackness continues to be a threat. Because Black and Indigenous people are not safe in cities, including the city of Hamilton.” – Black Lives Matter Activists Canada. –
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/black-lives-matter-1.5595584
Is this true? Do police in Canada murder black and indigenous people? Are our Canadian Minorities safe? Are Canadian Police Officers a threat to public safety? Committing or witnessing racial violence or murder by police officers has never been my lived experience as a police officer in Canada. That being said, racism, brutality and bad behaviour exists in my agency and probably every other police agency in Canada. To deny that would be statistically improbable. But what is the risk level? What are the actual facts and numbers when it comes to this serious claim of police murdering Black and Indigenous people in Canada? I turned to amedia outlet I knew would not be soft or easy on the police and found a database created by CBC to assist in my understanding of murders committed by police in Canada.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform-custom/deadly-force
According to this database, from 2000-2017 Canadian Police Officers had fatal encounters with 461 people. Once I started reading through the database it became clear that some of the deaths included in this database are those who died as a result of natural causes, medicalcomplications, overdoses etc. while having an encounter with police. In a few of these cases no force was actually used during the encounter at all. Either way, let’s stick to the numbers and be objective when exploring the allegations that police are murdering Canadians. I began digging deeper and reading the case summaries, and this is what I have found so far.
Out of the 461 people who died during those police interactions, 43 were Black people. Out of those 43 Black people who died during a police encounter, 33 were armed with a weapon and 10 were unarmed.
A look at the 10 unarmed deaths should provide insight into the allegations of police murdering people for no reason. There are instances where armed people have been murdered by police (ex. Sammy Yatim in Toronto) but to truly investigate the claim that police are continuously murdering Canadians and to justify the rage and anger and fear that is directed at police, I looked into the unarmed encounters first.
Out of the 10 unarmed Black people that were killed;
3 were a result of a struggle with police in which tasers were used and the person later died (I noted that in each case the deceased had cocaine in their system) Police were cleared of wrongdoing in those cases and the taser (which is not meant to kill a subject) may have been a cause of the deaths in addition to complications from cocaine etc.…
4 were the result of natural causes, cardiac arrest and cocaine ingestion after being arrested by police (No force or violence was cited in the summaries and police were not deemed responsible).
2 were a result of a physical struggle in which the officer punched/beat the person while subduing them. (1 of those cases resulted in the officer being charged with manslaughter, aggravated assault and that case is still in court)
1 was a result of a gunshot wound which was ruled accidental while a police officer struggled to arrest a male who had broken into a pharmacy. In this case I noted CBC says the male subject was shot in the back. Further searches show the SIU investigation into the police officer’s action which say the subject was shot in the chest after grabbing the officer’s wrist which was holding the gun. The Officer was cleared of wrongdoing.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/siu-directors-report-case-08-tfd-036
Indigenous People Killed by Police in Canada Out of the 461 people who died in a police encounter during 2000-2017 in Canada, 69 were indigenous. Out of the 69 people, 12 were unarmed at the time of their death. Of the 12 unarmed people that died:
4 died as a result of an overdose and no force was used in the encounters.
5 died after a taser, beating or pepper spray was used during a forceful arrest. (Some of these summaries are troubling and I don’t see if the officers were charged or cleared)
3 died after being shot. (1 was shot after ramming a police vehicle with a vehicle. 1 after placing an officer in a headlock during a physical struggle in which a baton and pepper spray had no effect, 1 after several suspects ‘fanned out’ around a lone officer at a traffic stop.) The officers were cleared of wrongdoing in these cases.
After reviewing this data, I went to Statistics Canada website to see if this could shed some light on how at-risk Canadians are of dying during a police encounter whether justified, accidental or murdered.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00015-eng.htm
According to Statistics Canada, Canadian Police received 12.8 million calls for service during the 2017/2018 fiscal year. These are calls from the public to the police and does not include, proactive interactions with the public such as traffic stops, check stops, security at events,random patrols, school visits and street checks etc.… Let’s say the average call load per year is lower than 12.8 million, let’s say it’s 10 million calls for service. Let’s say for every call for service there could be one proactive encounter with the public. In my experience there would be far more of these but for arguments sake let’s say there are also 10 million proactive police encounters each year in Canada. That would mean there are 20 million police interactions with the public in Canada per year. Once again, I would estimate that there are far more and each interaction may be with multiple people at a time for example a traffic-stop with multiple people in the car, a noise complaint for a house party, a call for domestic or such with multiple people in the home. Police are likely encountering more than 20 million people per year in Canada.
If you take an average of 20 million interactions per year for 17 years you would have 340 MILLION police encounters with the public over that time period. Out of those 340 million encounters, 461 people died. That’s a 0.00013% death rate.
If you go further and look at the rate of unarmed Black people who died during a police encounter over that time frame it’s 0.000002% and around the same for Indigenous people.
461 deaths total. Including incidents which were not a police officer’s fault and no force was used. 461 deaths in 17 years. That’s an average of 27 deaths a year. That means out of the 37 Million People in Canada, 0.00007% OF ALL RACES die during a police encounter each year.
To give perspective:
About 10 people are killed by lightning each year in Canada, and the lighting season up here is rather short. If it lasted the full year, a Canadian of any race would have about the same chance of being killed by a Police Officer as being killed by lightning. –
Since March of this year, 8,175 Canadian have died of Covid 19. In just a four-month period, a Canadian is 315 times more likely to die from Covid 19 than during an entire year of encounters with a Canadian Police Officer.
–https://www.covid–19canada.com/
On a more human/systemic level, a Canadian is about 1,544 times more likely to die after encountering errors, mistakes, etc. in our Health Care System than by encountering our Law Enforcement system. “In Canada, medical errors and hospital-acquired infections claim between30,000 and 60,000 lives annually. Thousands more are injured.” –
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/kathleen-finlay/medical-error-deaths_b_8350324.html
After an objective look at the numbers, it is clear they do not support the claim that police “continue to murder” Black, Indigenous, or any people in Canada. The numbers do not support the claim that any Canadian citizen is at any real risk of dying in an encounter with a policeofficer, let alone being murdered in cold blood by one. The narrative being pushed by the media is not supported by the actual statistics in their own study.
Despite the hatred I see online, the misinformation I see spread by the media and the lack of support I feel from our leaders, I make this commitment to the people of Canada. As a Canadian Police Officer, I will continue to strive to ensure that I am in the 99.99987% of police encounters that do not result in the death of a Canadian; and I will strive to protect my life and the lives of other’s and exhaust every possible option before I am in the 0.00007%.
Smile it’s good for you
