Waiving charges the right call in police shooting
I didn’t know Staff Sgt. Ian Matthews, the exceptionally wellregarded Hamilton Police officer who killed himself just before Christmas. The 47-year-old former homicide detective, called Blarney for his Irish roots (he still had traces of a lovely accent), shot himself in a locker-room at force headquarters.
As complicated a business as suicide always is, policing, says one who knows, is unique in that those who care about what they do “lose a piece of their souls every day they come to work.” How big a piece depends upon who you are, what the day brings, what other burdens you carry and the type of call, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that some of this wear-and-tear on the heart over Matthews’ 25-plus years on the job may have caught up with him.
Policing has changed dramatically over my lifetime, and if some of that is for the better — police forces are certainly more diverse — it also has made doing the job tougher, and here I refer to the various oversight and accountability mechanisms, both official and unofficial.
Consider, for instance, the case of Paul Boyd, a 39-year-old film animator who was fatally shot eight times Aug. 13, 2007, by Vancouver Police Const. Lee Chipperfield.
Boyd suffered from bipolar disorder, and while he usually managed the disease successfully and built an admirable career despite it, periodically he suffered periods of mania and depression, sometimes with paranoid delusions. He was in the midst of such an episode on the night of his death.
That was more than six years ago, but the case was finally resolved only this fall, when special prosecutor Mark Jette, a senior Vancouver lawyer, concluded Chipperfield shouldn’t be crimi- nally charged.
Jette had been appointed to review an earlier report in May 2012 by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which had been asked by the British Columbia justice minister to reinvestigate Boyd’s death after a previously undisclosed video, which showed 49 seconds of the last part of his confrontation with police, had surfaced.
The video captured the final three of the nine shots Chipperfield fired, and shows Boyd crawling, unarmed, on his hands and knees.
While the video didn’t show what position Boyd was in or what he was doing when Chipperfield fired the last and ultimately fatal shot, the sight of him crawling and vulnerable fuelled public outrage.
As the North Shore Schizophrenic Society, a local advocacy group for the mentally ill, said in its November 2013 bulletin, “Nobody who has seen the video of Paul Boyd crawling on the ground just before the final shot can have any reasonable doubt that Boyd was not a threat in the few seconds that followed, whether he still had the chain and padlock or not and whether there was a video recording of those last few seconds or not.”
But the special prosecutor, Jette, disagreed, and so do I. Jette’s reasons first.
His job required him to determine if there was a substantial likelihood of conviction — a variation of this test is used in all cases across the country, before charges are laid — which meant he had to consider possible defences open to Chipperfield.
Jette concluded there was nothing to contradict the officer’s claim he was acting to preserve life — his own and others’.
Boyd may have been defenceless in those last seconds, but he was a big, strong man, armed at one point with a hammer and at another with a bike chain and lock, and in a struggle with another officer who’d tried to subdue him with his baton, Boyd “had gained the upper hand,” Jette said.
Police and civilian witnesses alike described “a high-level aggression” from Boyd, and said he seemed so immune to the first shots Chipperfield fired that the officer wondered if he’d missed or if Boyd was wearing body armour and civilians thought police might be using rubber bullets.
Herschel Hardin, vice-president of the North Shore group, sent me the bulletin, which raises the spectre that if police doctrine is officer safety first and last, it may be “sometimes taken as licence to eliminate, with the use of a firearm” any “real or imagined risk at all in dealing with the mentally ill in crisis.”
Or, as the bulletin sharply concluded, “It’s all right to be triggerhappy.”
This appears to be a departure for the group, which works closely with the police and values them. The NSSS has been around for three decades; unusually for an advocacy group it also does front-line peer support for the seriously ill in crisis, and has fought a long battle against overly restrictive criteria for involuntary hospital admission. (B.C. doesn’t require that the mentally ill be pronounced dangerous before they are hospitalized involuntarily, as is the case in Ontario and Quebec, but the message hasn’t yet reached even all mental health professionals.)
But, as I wrote Hardin, if Boyd wasn’t a threat in those last few seconds, expecting an officer to recognize that, in the midst of all that stress and adrenalin and fear, may be asking too much.
Hardin and I may disagree on this particular decision, but where we agree, I think, is that too often, police are left to deal with terribly troubled people who have been abandoned by the healthcare system.
I’ve yet to see a video which captures emotional pain, whether anguish and sorrow, or mental illness, whether depression or delusion. And that goes for Paul Boyd, the officer who shot him, and Ian Matthews.