‘Technicalities’ in Montsion case don’t build trust

When a police officer is accused of killing a guy in the course of arresting him, seeing authority figures plead for understanding over their self-interested application of technicalities does not inspire faith.

But that’s what’s happened top to bottom with the case of Const. Daniel Montsion, the Ottawa officer facing charges of manslaughter, aggravated assault and assault with a weapon over his treatment of Abdirahman Abdi last July. Abdi, whose family says he had an unspecified mental illness, was acting out in a Bridgehead — groping at least one customer — when police arrived, chased him to the door of his apartment building, and took him down.

There’s a security-camera recording of it that hasn’t been seen publicly but that the Special Investigations Unit reviewed before charging Montsion. According to a woman who has seen it, because she’s involved in the organization that runs the building, it shows Montsion hitting Abdi after he was already under control. Abdi died in hospital.

Mayor Jim Watson was missing in action, staying on vacation and saying nothing for days. Police-union president Matt Skof declared immediately, without obvious justification, that racism played no role in a group of white cops’ lethal arrest of a black man — that even suggesting it was “inappropriate.” Chief Charles Bordeleau came cautiously to his officers’ defence, saying Abdi had been “assaultive.”

(André Marin, the former head of the SIU, explained in an Ottawa Sun column why it really would have been better for Skof and Bordeleau to shut up: Anything they said, anything they say, could skew the impressions of officers the SIU needed to talk to. Marin’s a harsh and combative guy but in many different watchdog roles, from Crown prosecutor to Ontario ombudsman, he’s not earned a reputation for being wrong.)

When the SIU charged Montsion earlier this month, he was processed at the Kanata OPP detachment and released without a court hearing. The police have that authority and use it all

the time, but not when someone’s accused of a homicide and two kinds of assault.

Now Bordeleau is racing to understand what’s going on with the gloves that Montsion had on during the arrest. Hardened with carbon-fibre plates, they appear to be the weapon the officer is accused of assaulting Abdi with. The Ottawa police have asked supervisors to report what their squads are wearing.

“Gloves are not part of any listed equipment that the (Ministry of Community Safety) regulates, nor are boots, nor are pants,” Bordeleau said Monday. They’re not treated like handguns or batons, which are tightly controlled as weapons for the purposes of equipping police.

But almost anything can be a weapon for criminal-charge purposes if you use it to hurt someone. Anything that does more damage than a bare hand could qualify, which means anything at all that you can throw. Criminal lawyer and Bordeleau antagonist Michael Spratt used Twitter to solicit surprising examples of objects police have called weapons in other cases and came up with a list that includes a granola bar, a teacup, a plastic plant and a kitten.

The gap between the two definitions is where Montsion’s gloves evidently land. Weapons and yet not-weapons, at the same time.

The provincial specifications for police gloves (there are some, in fact) are vague. The specifications are aimed at making sure cities kit their police out properly for specialized tasks. So publicorder units — riot squads — get helmets and boots and masks that filter tear gas, for instance, and not just flip-flops and wiffle bats. Gloves should be “situationally and environmentally appropriate,” the specifications say. Ottawa’s gang unit gets these ones with hardened knuckles for smashing glass during raids.

There’s nothing in the rules about officers using duly issued special-squad gear on ordinary calls. Nor is there any rule about issuing “assault gloves” with hard plating or, for that matter, about gloves with rusty nails driven out though the knuckles or boots with lead in the heels. And yet, having officers going out wearing perpshredders and curbstompers might seem like the kind of thing a prudent police force would avoid.

Just as there’s a gap between weapons police are issued and weapons you can be charged with a crime for hitting somebody with, there’s a gap between minimally acceptable behaviour and the praiseworthy. Each of these decisions, each of these acts by a person in authority, has a technical justification based on the letter of the rules and the laws. Technicalities are not the foundation for the broad and deep trust we’d like to have in our police force or the people who oversee it.