Police probe of Boushie killing reviewed

OTTAWA — A police watchdog is reviewing the investigation into the shooting death of an Indigenous man on a Saskatchewan farm.

The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP said Tuesday it will look into how the Mounties handled the death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie.

“I am satisfied that it is in the public interest to launch an independent investigation into this matter,” the commission’s acting chairman, Guy Bujold, said in a release.

Boushie, a member of the Red Pheasant First Nation, died in 2016 when he and four others in an SUV drove onto a farm near Biggar, Sask. Last month, a jury acquitted 56-year-old Gerald Stanley in Boushie’s death, a verdict that led to protests across the country.

Boushie’s family had been calling for a review of the RCMP investigation.

His mother has said that when officers came to notify her about her son’s death in August 2016, officers were insensitive, started searching her home without permission and asked her if she’d been drinking.

An internal RCMP investigation, done by a senior Indigenous officer, absolved the police force.

The commission will review the RCMP’s dismissal of the Boushie family’s initial public complaint.

It will also examine how the RCMP conducted the investigation and the events that followed Boushie’s death.