No benefit of video for officers
As the second-degree murder trial of Toronto Police Constable James Forcillo sashays along in the leisurely fashion of criminal trials, the jurors are getting smarter every day about what happened on the Dundas streetcar the night Sammy Yatim was killed.
Forcillo shot the 18-yearold eight times as he stood at the front of the open streetcar on July 27, 2013, brandishing a switchblade and refusing frantic police commands to drop the knife.
Tuesday, thanks to a witness named Gene Liscio, a mapping and measurement expert who has made 3D models of the crime scene, they learned that just before Forcillo fired the first shot, he and Yatim were 16.1 feet, or 4.906 metres, apart, Forcillo outside the open doors, Yatim just behind them, lurking by the first seating area.
Yatim took one step toward the doors (he moved, Liscio said, 50 centimetres or about a foot and a half) and his left leg was in motion for a second when Forcillo fired the first of the first round of three shots.
By then, the two were 14.9 feet apart, or 4.541 metres — a distance that Yatim, had he kept walking at the same average speed, would have covered in 10 or 11 seconds according to Liscio’s calculations.
It’s all fascinating and important, but at the risk of pointing out the obvious, the police didn’t have 3D models.
Neither did they have the benefit of the reams of video footage now before the jurors — from inside the streetcar, from a nearby store security camera, from bystanders’ iPhones — and special enhanced video (slow-motion, motion-stabilized, some with dialogue superimposed on the screen).
All of this is to say that the gap between what Forcillo, his partner, Constable Iris Fleckeisen, and their colleagues who arrived at the scene behind them knew that night and what the jurors know now isn’t a gap, but a veritable chasm, and it promises to only grow further.
When the police dispatcher put out “a hotshot” about the incident — based on what frantic passengers who fled the streetcar told 911 — she could give Forcillo and Fleckeisen only three solid pieces of information: one, there was a male with a knife on a streetcar; two, there were “no injuries to anyone at this time”; and three, the streetcar was now stationary.
Forcillo and Fleckeisen didn’t even know if the car was empty, as it appeared, or if — and this actually happened when one passenger couldn’t race to the front to escape Yatim and his knife and briefly cowered in his seat before dashing out the rear doors — there were still terrified people inside.
In fact, as Forcillo kept up his steady bark of “Drop the knife!” and Yatim his steady reply of “You’re a f--ing pussy!”, Fleckeisen was caught on audio asking the teenager, “Are you the only one on?”
It illustrates the stunning disconnect between cop and juror: The police didn’t know the streetcar was empty of everyone but Yatim and its magnificently calm driver, Chad Seymour; thanks to video, the jurors know which of the passengers got to the front first, saw the one fellow hiding low in his seat waiting until Yatim passed him, and probably what most of them were wearing that night.
The first person who was a passenger on that car, artist and painter Aaron Li-Hill, testified Tuesday.
Now 29 and based in New York, he was on the car with his girlfriend that evening, heading home to grab a few extra minutes together before she returned the next day to the States.
Shortly after video showed him tenderly kissing the top of her head, he said “out of nowhere I heard a shriek … one of horror.”
He saw a young woman pulling away from a young man, he said, and then she and her friends got up and raced past him. That’s when Li-Hill saw Yatim with a knife, walking deliberately up the aisle toward the front. He remembers him saying, “Everybody get off the f---ing streetcar!”
Li-Hill, who was travelling with his bike, turned it around and began slowly backing away from Yatim, using the bike as a shield, managing to get off the car.
At one point, he said, he asked Yatim, “Please just let us go, let us off the streetcar.”
It was Forcillo’s lawyer, Peter Brauti, who gently pointed out that while of course Li-Hill was telling the jurors the truth and speaking to the best of his recollection, he’d completely got the sequence of events wrong.
Li-Hill said the young women had run past him, and that only then had Yatim stood up; in fact, as the video clip Brauti played showed, Yatim was on his feet before they ran. (Other video shows him slashing suddenly at one girl, then standing over her with his exposed penis in one hand and the knife in the other.)
As Brauti put it to Li-Hill, “You’re being as honest as you can be, but because of the intensity of the experience, could you have misinterpreted?” Li-Hill, of course, agreed.
Video and 3D models made from video may make the best, incontrovertible and neutral witnesses, and they may make the jurors smarter, but even they can’t duplicate the human experience.
The trial continues.