‘Extreme deception’

MOUNTIES IN B.C. CONDUCTED AN ‘ELABORATE’ UNDERCOVER STING ON A MAN SUSPECTED OF VANDALISM AND THREATS

Nilakshan Selvanayagam pleaded guilty to mischief and uttering threats after RCMP in Burnaby launched an undercover operation seeking a confession. in a suspect who had threatened the lives of police officers and civilians being charged and brought to justice.”

But Bozic said he’s troubled undercover officers would offer money, work and friendship to a man “struggling in life.”

“The state using this extreme level of deception is the kind of activity we would expect from security services in a non-democratic society.” suicidal Selvanayagam barricaded himself in his home and told police he had a loaded gun. He urged police to shoot him, warning he would otherwise shoot them.

It ended peacefully and police took him in under the mental health act. No weapon was found and no charges were filed.

A couple of weeks later, he was at it again — sending threatening messages to a psychiatrist who had assessed him and to an RCMP media relations officer. This time, he was convicted of uttering threats and received three years’ probation.

What really set Selvanayagam on a tear against police was their response to a domestic dispute at his parents’ home, where he lives with a brother, in November 2015. During a search of his room, police found a kitchen knife on a dresser and arrested him for breaching the terms of his probation.

Though the charge was stayed, Selvanayagam couldn’t stop seething. He filed a complaint against police, but it went nowhere.

That led him to strike out against the detachment. In May 2016, he smashed the window of a marked police pickup using a sparkplug. He then returned in the summer and keyed the two vehicles and left behind the threatening notes.

“I was pissed,” he recalled. An appeal court upheld that ruling.

“Vijay,” the undercover investigator who joined Selvanayagam in the hot tub on Oct. 19, 2016, said he was from Oregon and planning to open a restaurant in Vancouver.

Selvanayagam told Vijay he worked at the airport. In reality, he had been laid off months earlier as an airport dispatcher during a company takeover.

A few days later, Vijay invited Selvanayagam and his then-girlfriend to the Cactus Club in downtown Vancouver. Over dinner, Vijay said he was looking to buy a home Court of Canada laid out new rules for Mr. Big operations. While the top court did not ban their use, it placed a burden on the Crown to show that confessions were reliable and not overshadowed by inducements, threats or preying on suspects’ vulnerabilities.

Lisa Dufraimont, York University law professor, said the tactics used against Selvanayagam were not as coercive as a traditional Mr. Big sting and the new rules likely would not apply in this case. That said, the operation seemed “rather elaborate for an offence of this type.” Further, Selvanayagam’s “markers of vulnerability” should have given police pause, she said, referring to his suicidal past.

Terry Coleman, a former municipal police chief in Saskatchewan who has done extensive research on police interactions with people with mental illness, said he doesn’t understand why RCMP didn’t bring in Selvanayagam for a conventional interview.

“I don’t think I’d have gone as sophisticated as they did here,” he said, adding that undercover operations are used when “all else has failed.”

Tim Moore, a psychology professor at York University who has criticized Mr. Big operations, said he is willing to give RCMP the benefit of the doubt.

“Given what they knew of his history, it is understandable (to me) that there was a risk of significant mayhem,” he wrote in an email. That said, if Mr. Big-like operations proliferate in nonmurder cases, “a cost-benefit challenge would make a lot of sense.”

Bozic, Selvanayagam’s lawyer, said he wonders how such police deception affects an offender’s ability to relate to authorities later in life.

“I don’t know if (Selvanayagam) will ever know who to trust,” he said.

Selvanayagam, who is seeing a therapist for anger management and landed a job as a big-rig driver, said being “stabbed in the back” by police “traumatized” him.

Asked if threatening to shoot officers might not be traumatic for them, Selvanayagam didn’t disagree, but he insisted RCMP could have used another tactic.

“What I did was wrong, but I think going after someone who’s vulnerable … that’s just bullshit,” he said.

“I’m not trying to play the victim here.”