National report details police-involved deaths in B.C. between 2000 and 2022 | 24CA News

A report into police-involved deaths throughout Canada mentioned 704 individuals have been killed or died throughout police use-of-force encounters since 2000, with 141 of them in B.C.

The report, named Police-involved deaths on the Rise throughout Canada, mentioned there had been a 66.5-per cent rise in deaths related to police use of pressure, evaluating stats from 2011 to 2022 with the earlier 10-year interval.

In B.C., 2022 had essentially the most police-involved deaths with 19 fatalities, in keeping with the statistics. The second most was 10 in 2015.

The main creator, Alexander McClelland, mentioned the report is the primary of its type with the aim of bringing extra transparency to the deaths.

“Due to ongoing systemic issues with a lack of access, transparency, and consistency in reporting data on police-involved deaths and killings across Canada, tracking this issue is an imperfect and challenging process,” mentioned McClelland, an assistant professor on the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University.

“While our data is limited, our findings indicate a steep rise in deaths. Police killed 69 people in 2022, setting a grim record with the highest number of known police use of force deaths in one year.”

The gaps in information are acknowledged by the creator, particularly information that addresses what precipitated the interactions with police, whether or not the individuals who died carried or used weapons or engaged in behaviour that threatened the officers’ lives.

McClelland mentioned the report is a step in the appropriate course, and he hopes the work carried out will encourage extra analysis and statistics to make clear the deaths.

“Surprisingly, there is no government body that tracks the number of police-involved deaths using force across Canada,” he mentioned.

“Other countries have systems that do this, like the U.K. and Australia.”

The report reveals the RCMP, in addition to Quebec and Ontario’s provincial police, are implicated in lots of the circumstances. In B.C., there are a variety of municipal police forces, together with Vancouver and Abbotsford, that function throughout the province together with the B.C. RCMP, which contributes to statistics.

A B.C. RCMP official mentioned the extra commonly-used time period throughout the regulation enforcement group for these kinds of deaths is “in-custody deaths” (I-CDs), nevertheless, it doesn’t embody deadly officer-involved shootings.

Fatal shootings quantity to 73 per cent of police-involved deaths since 2000 throughout Canada, in keeping with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a accomplice within the examine.

“We respect and acknowledge that real people were involved in all of these incidents and continue to be impacted by them,” mentioned B.C. RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark.

“Each situation has unique circumstances and complexities.”

“Ultimately, there isn’t a single issue that may be addressed to remove I-CDs as the general public security wants of our communities are ever-changing and evolving. Policing is an inherently harmful career and our officers are requested to cope with violent topics, overdose victims, psychological well being crises, and all the things in between, to maintain our communities protected.

“As a result of our officers’ training and professionalism, the overwhelming majority (99.9 percent) of all police interactions are resolved without injury, death or even the use of police intervention options.”

RCMP defines an I-CD as:

• An incident the place an individual died whereas underneath police care and management, arrest, and/or detention; or whereas in a police facility or transport.
• Police presence alone is just not sufficient for an incident to be thought of an I-CD.
• Not each encounter between police and members of the general public is a detention. Detention requires bodily or psychological restraint. Psychological detention happens when there’s a authorized obligation to adjust to a request from the police, or when an affordable individual would conclude there isn’t a alternative however to adjust to such a requirement.
• A demise may be outlined as an I-CD, even after an individual has been launched from custody relying on many elements, the place a hyperlink between their demise and earlier detention might be made.

The Independent Investigations Office of B.C. (IIO BC), the provincial police watchdog, which investigates each police-involved demise together with shootings, mentioned it’s arduous to attract conclusions from the statistics with out the context of each particular case.

“The data, with respect to the rates of use of force leading to death, is consistent with what we’ve seen in B.C., however, I’m not sure much can be drawn from it,” Ron MacDonald mentioned, IIO BC’s chief civilian officer.

“It is the case that the rates have gone up in the last three years. To be fair, in B.C. in the last year, we have seen a very significant increase in officer-involved shootings. Normally we see around seven a year and this year we will be around twenty-four, so triple the number.

“In a large number of those cases, we’ve seen people with firearms confronting police. What the cause of that is, is hard to say.”

The B.C. RCMP has additionally pointed to the IIO BC’s investigations into police-involved shootings as an indicator that in lots of the incidents police actions have been justified.

“It’s important to note that, in B.C., of the cases that have been investigated independently by the IIO, the vast majority of those investigations have concluded with their chief civilian director determining that they did not consider that any officer may have committed an offence under any enactment,” Clark mentioned.

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According to the nationwide report, whereas it acknowledges there are a “significant number of unknowns that exist” in the case of figuring out race of the sufferer, Black and Indigenous individuals are overrepresented within the variety of deaths.

Black and Indigenous individuals comprise 27.2  per cent of police-involved capturing deaths throughout Canada, regardless of making up just below 9 per cent of the inhabitants, the report mentioned.

“These numbers, these deaths, must be situated in a context of systemic discrimination within the criminal justice system,” Christa Big Canoe mentioned, Aboriginal Legal Services’ authorized director.

“While we have known anecdotally that Indigenous people are overrepresented in police use of force-involved deaths in Canada, this data provides us a clear picture of ongoing colonial racial injustice. While 5.1 per cent of people living in Canada are Indigenous, 16.2 per cent of people killed in police-involved deaths are Indigenous.”

The report and ongoing undertaking’s aim is to doc all deaths that happen throughout police operations, in addition to all deaths that happen in Canada’s jails, prisons, immigration detention, or forensic psychiatry centres. The report was carried out by Tracking in Justice.

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