Police officer red-flagged over gun use

Const. James Forcillo’s unusual reliance on his firearm brought him to the attention of a Toronto police earlywarning system the year before he fatally shot Sammy Yatim on a downtown streetcar.

Forcillo, whose fate is now in the hands of a jury, testified at his murder trial that he pulled his weapon about 12 times in three-and-a-half years on the job.

The “early intervention” process, as it’s called, is aimed at identifying officers who, in the words of the professional standards unit, “may be at risk of entering the disciplinary process.”

An officer who points his Glock .40-calibre semiautomatic gun at a person three times within a rolling 12-month period is the trigger for the early-warning system to kick in and issue an alert.

At the time, the 32-yearold officer would have been working in the downtown 14 Division almost three years.

It’s unclear what happened after the alert was issued late in 2012. Several sources suggest Forcillo was counselled by a supervisor, monitored for a time and perhaps even briefly reassigned.

Some of the suspects he used his gun to control, one source said, were people “you’d never draw your firearm on.”

But Peter Brauti, Forcillo’s lawyer, said neither the counselling nor monitoring happened.

Brauti said that after a second alert, a supervisor told Forcillo that the incidents would have to be reviewed.

After that, Brauti said, nothing happened so far as his client knows.

An officer’s internal record is presumptively inadmissible at trial, and in fact, prosecutors never tried to have any of this information go before the jurors.

Forcillo is pleading not guilty to one count of second-degree murder and one of attempted murder in the July 27, 2013, shooting death of the 18-year-old Yatim on a westbound Dundas streetcar.

Jurors in the case retired Wednesday morning to deliberate their verdict.

Forcillo, who testified in his own defence, told Ontario Superior Court Justice Ed Then and the jurors on Nov. 26 that he’d pulled his weapon “about a dozen times” in his three-and-half years on the street.

Usually, Forcillo said, it was because police had information that “the person we were looking for” had a weapon.

But he told Brauti, who was questioning him at the time, that only one of those 12 suspects actually had turned out to be armed.

Sources familiar with policing say that resorting to a firearm so often may be indicative of an officer who is either aggressive or fearful. Many officers go an entire career without ever drawing their guns.

Forcillo was one of 1,382 officers in 2013 whose conduct triggered an alert through some use of force.

The magic number for pointing a firearm is three times within 12 months; with other use-of-force options the number is five.

With an average of 5,285 officers deployed in 2013, it would mean if every officer pulled his firearm as often as Forcillo did — about 3.5 times a year — the force would have reported that police either drew or pointed their guns 18,497 times that year.

But Toronto police statistics for 2013 in fact show that officers that year pointed their guns at 1,037 people and drew them another 211 times, for a total of only 1,248 uses.

The early intervention, or EI, process is a confidential, non-disciplinary tool for management to guide or support officers whose performance or conduct has raised concerns.

The force began using EI alerts in 2003 through the risk-management arm of the professional standards unit.

Once an alert is generated, the officer’s performance and conduct history may be reviewed, as Forcillo’s apparently was after his second alert.

Forcillo testified that his only previous encounter where he drew his gun with an armed suspect was in June of 2012, in Toronto’s Kensington Market area.

It was, he said, “a drug ripoff,” where the person whose drugs were stolen had a knife and the thief also pulled a knife.

He was the first officer there and for a short time, the only one.

The two were facing off, he said, when, as he put it, “I drew my firearm and pointed it at them, and I told them to stop which they did, and I told them to drop the knife, which they did, immediately."

He ordered the two men to lie down, which they did, and Forcillo then waited for backup “until it was safe to move in and handcuff them.”

He received a commendation for his actions that day.

Forcillo was harshly criticized at trial for allegedly “abandoning” his training and failing to try to verbally de-escalate the teenager, who was on Ecstasy at the time.

Though Yatim had swung his knife, and exposed his penis, at a group of young women sitting at the back of the streetcar earlier that night, Forcillo and his partner, Const. Iris Fleckeisen, were unaware of it.