Officers’ force was ‘severe’ but needed to control violent suspect, SIU says
By any measure, it was an extremely violent incident involving Niagara police and a possibly drug-impaired man suspected of attacking and stabbing a stranger.
But officers did not use unreasonable force or commit a criminal offence to subdue the man, who attacked them and once — and possibly twice — tried to grab one of their guns, the province’s Special Investigations Unit has ruled.
“I am satisfied that the lessthan-lethal force (the officers) used, albeit repeated and severe, was proportional to the threat at hand,” wrote director Joseph Martino, whose investigators interviewed six officers and six civilian witnesses for his report.
He said the suspect “never stopped fighting the officers even while being struck” and “exhibited incredible strength and seemed impervious to pain during the altercation.” The incident happened March 3, 2019, when Niagara Regional Police responded to a mid-afternoon stabbing at a Maple Street residence in Niagara Falls.
A man who lived there — later found to have high levels of cocaine, methamphetamine and opiates in his system — had broken into another tenant’s unit.
The SIU said the man tried to steal the tenant’s computer tablet and stabbed him in the abdomen.
The blade broke and stuck inside the tenant, who swung a wooden chair at his attacker. The suspect escaped by jumping through a window.
Six NRP officers arrived. The suspect maintained he had attacked the tenant because he’d seen the man viewing child pornography.
When officers interviewed the tenant and saw the knife stuck inside him, they tried to arrest the suspect.
The SIU said officers reported the suspect tried to flee but was pulled down.
“Despite the efforts of four officers,” the report noted, “the (suspect) was able at one point to grab hold of (one officer’s) firearm in its holster and pull up as if to retrieve it.”
The officer yelled to warn the other officers and tried to protect his gun. Another officer delivered “a flurry of punches to the (suspect’s) head,” about 20. Meanwhile, a third officer — he was holding a rifle — used the butt of his gun to strike the suspect’s hand four times. Another officer punched the man near the head four or five times, to subdue him.
The suspect finally released his grip on the gun, the SIU reported, but continued to “struggle strenuously.”
“Multiple and prolonged discharges” from conducted energy weapons, or CEWs, carried by two officers “seemed to have little effect” on the suspect, who struggled to his hands and knees.
After two officers delivered a series of knee strikes while another sat on his leg, the suspect was finally handcuffed.
The SIU reported he was still combative, and paramedics delivered two doses of sedative before he could be taken to hospital.
At hospital, he became aggressive and had to be sedated again. The 54-year-old suspect was found to have a fractured nose.
In court last December, the suspect, Mark Skinner, was sentenced to two years behind bars after pleading guilty to aggravated assault and assaulting police with intent to resist arrest.
In his report, Martino said he accepted that the man’s nose was broken by police, though it might also have happened during the altercation with the other tenant or when he jumped through the window.
In finding the officers’ force was “repeated and severe” but “proportional to the threat at hand,” he said “the stakes could not have been higher; moments earlier the (suspect) had almost killed a man with a knife and was now on the verge of controlling a firearm.”
However, Martino noted one issue his investigation couldn’t resolve.
Cellphone video, he said, does not show one of the officers using his CEW three times, as data downloaded from it indicates.
If the clocks in the CEWs used by that officer and one other were synchronized, he wrote, then the first of that officer’s discharges “may have occurred after the (suspect) was presumably under control and possibly handcuffed.” However, he wrote, he couldn’t determine whether the clocks were synced, and none of the officers or paramedics on scene said they saw any discharges after the suspect was subdued.