Front-line police waiting for bigger guns
High-powered rifles sought for crisis events
Hamilton’s front-line police officers are the only cops in a major Ontario service without access to carbine rifles — the same high-powered, short-barrelled weapons the RCMP was convicted of failing to provide to three Mounties gunned down in Moncton.
The Hamilton Police Association (HPA) has been asking for the rifles for three years, ever since the targeted attack in Moncton left three Mounties dead, two more injured and sparked a massive manhunt that shut down an entire community in June 2014.
The request by the HPA was made to then-chief Glenn De Caire and again to current Chief Eric Girt, according to association president Clint Twolan.
In fact, it’s been on the agenda of every health and safety committee meeting for three years.
These high-powered, short-barrelled rifles have a longer range and greater accuracy than the handguns carried by Hamilton police or the shotguns some specially trained front-line officers carry in their cruisers.
In the case of an active shooter with a high-powered weapon — as was the case in Moncton — a carbine rifle would allow police to take out the threat from a safer distance and with more accuracy.
The Hamilton police Emergency Response Unit (ERU) has the high-powered, short-barrelled rifles. But it is front-line patrol officers who are first to the scene. So Twolan wants several officers on every platoon to be
equipped and trained with the more powerful option.
“We are the last major police service in the province that does not have carbines for our front line,” says Twolan, a former ERU sniper.
Last month a Moncton judge presiding over a labour code trial about those shootings ruled the RCMP was guilty of failing to provide its members with adequate use-offorce equipment and user training.
Justice Leslie Jackson criticized the service for not making the highpowered rifles available to those front-line officers at that fatal scene.
“It is clear to me that the use-offorce equipment available to those members … left them ill-prepared to engage an assailant armed with an automatic rifle,” he wrote.
That New Brunswick ruling has no legal teeth in Ontario.
There is no legislation in Ontario that requires services to have the high-powered rifles, said Jackie Penman, spokesperson for Hamilton police. She confirmed only the ERU has access to such weapons.
“The implementation of a carbine program requires thoughtful consideration and examination of risk, training, application of the weapon in appropriate setting and the costs, before rolling out,” she said.
Penman was unable to say if that process has even begun.
The judge in Moncton ruled the RCMP took too long to “roll out” its carbine rifle program. The weapons had been approved by the service in 2011, but still weren’t in place three years later.
The standard carbine rifle used by most Canadian police is the C8. For at least 10 years, every front-line Ontario Provincial Police officer has had access to a C8 and has yearly C8 training, according to Sgt. Dave Rektor. That’s thousands of officers in more than 150 communities.
“We started this shortly after Columbine,” he says, referring to the Colorado school massacre in 1999.
There would be costs involved with the high-powered rifles, of course. A C8 costs around $1,200 and would need to be maintained. Officers would need to be specially trained on a C8.
Twolan says Hamilton police has told the association it is concerned about the optics of officers with “militaristic” weapons.
However nobody is suggesting that every cop will walk around carrying a C8 at all times. Like the shotguns, they would be mounted inside certain cruisers, to be taken out by certain officers, and only in a crisis.
“But is the need really there?” asked Rob Gordon, a Simon Fraser University criminology professor. “If you get behind the emotion of Moncton?”
ERU teams are better trained than any front-line officer can be and their response times are fast. He said there are few active shooter situations that can’t wait for the ERU and few where the high-powered rifle would be effective.
He said, for example, not even the best police sharpshooter would have been able to help in Las Vegas, where shots were raining down from the 32nd floor of a hotel.
Gordon, who was a police officer in England, Australia and Hong Kong, said militarized vehicles used by police — and he mentions Hamilton’s armoured vehicle — are less of a concern because they aren’t lethal and are “kept in the garage until needed.”
With the rifles, he is concerned that “police start to use the weapons, because they’re there.”
“This is the moment where a stand should be made by decisionmakers in Hamilton,” said Gordon. “Do they want a police service or a police force?”