It is the main exhibit at a trial that resumes Friday in a downtown courtroom, where Raymond Costain is seeking to get charges of drunk driving, assault and resisting arrest tossed out, alleging police used excessive force when arresting him in April 2010.
Twenty-one years after the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police was caught on camera, law enforcement agencies continue to confront allegations of excessive police force, from the Taser-related death of a Polish visitor in the Vancouver airport to the alleged sex assault of a female prisoner by an Ottawa police officer.
Last week, the Star reported that a Toronto man, James Bishop, is suing police for the way they arrested him for trespassing while he played basketball in an east-end gym.
“Putting someone on the ground and sitting on them or striking them repeatedly seems extremely unnecessary,” says Darryl Richardson, an Occupy Toronto activist who organized a march last week to protest police violence.
Yet Greg Brown, one of the developers of Canada’s use-of-force framework, believes police brutality is actually rare because of all the checks in place — including ubiquitous digital technology.
“There are probably a couple of million interactions between police officers and citizens in Canada on a daily basis. A very, very small fraction of those ever result in problems related to excessive use of force, which speaks to how good the training is. Are there cases where it’s problematic? Of course there are.”
Canada is the only jurisdiction that has a national model for use-of-force training, and all officers get annual training and refresher courses, he noted.
“It’s far superior to what it once was,” says Brown, head of the criminal justice department at Nipissing University.
Today, across the country, all use-of-force incidents, “no matter how minor, a push or shove, are all reported” in a use-of-force report. In Toronto, the number of reports filed dropped 30 per cent between 2008 and 2011.
Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack says the video age has opened the public’s eyes to “the actual physical demands that there are in effecting an arrest — that it’s not, as people assume, an easy thing to do.”
A videotape showing an officer elbowing a suspect might startle, but “there are times when officers have to strike, use elbow or hand strikes, to get somebody to comply,” McCormack said.
“We live in the real world where a lot of people do not want to be arrested; sometimes those people are under the influence of alcohol and drugs . . . it’s a very difficult and physically demanding job when you’re arresting someone who doesn’t want to be arrested.”
Of course, determining how much force is too much depends on your viewpoint, and opinions vary widely, as demonstrated in online postings commenting on the YouTube video of Bishop’s arrest.
“When he (Bishop) did not leave (the YMCA) they had to use the force necessary to arrest him because of his trespassing. That is their job,” a Star reader posted last week.
Others were disgusted by what they saw.
“Take the uniforms off and you are looking at an assault . . . plain and simple,” wrote another viewer.
Brown cautions against leaping to judgment in all cases based only on what can be seen in a video.
“You always got to question: ‘Did you see what happened before the video, did you see all the video footage, and is the video footage good enough that you can see what’s actually going on?”
The use-of-force training model teaches officers to “assess, plan and act,” and exposes them to what options are available and when each is appropriate, he explained.
There’s no one-size-fits-all.
“If you’re a female officer, 5-foot-4-inches tall and 110 pounds, confronting a male much bigger than you, how you assess, plan and act may be different than if you’re a 6-foot-5 male.”
While it is universally accepted that officers should try to “control” a situation through negotiation and communication, “sometimes there’s not much choice.”
“You can’t really look at situations and say, well, de-escalation should always happen, because, for example, in critical situations where weapons are involved, de-escalation might not be an option.”
In the case of Costain, lawyer Leora Shemesh has told Ontario Court Justice Ford Clements the arresting officers escalated a passive situation into a violent one because they wanted to “punish” Costain.
Last week, the officers testified they acted lawfully when they brought the 300-pound chef to the ground because he was fighting back and trying to escape, which he strongly denies.
“If he had simply complied, he would have been handcuffed,” Toronto police Const. Christian Dobbs, who delivered the 12 elbow strikes, told the judge. Added his partner, Const. Leslie Nyznik: “The unknown is the worst, and we didn’t know what to expect . . . maybe he had weapons.”
Costain is expected to take the stand Friday.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Betsy Powell
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