Cops who tried to download Loku video have no excuse
Two minutes.
Video cameras installed in the apartment hallway where Andrew Loku, 45, was shot and killed by police last summer, are meant to capture footage 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
However, for a fateful two minutes just after midnight on July 5, 2015, neither camera in that hallway recorded footage of Loku’s fatal police confrontation.
The cameras are programmed to record when they sense motion. The last thing one of the two cameras captured, at approximately 12:06 a.m., was Loku walking down the hallway, moments before police shot him. The other camera, which would have captured police entering the hallway and confronting Loku, mysteriously did not record anything until 12:08 a.m. By that time, Loku was on the ground after being shot twice in the chest.
The Special Investigations Unit, which probes fatal police encounters, says officers who responded to the Loku shooting “threatened to publicly compromise the credibility” of their investigation by attempting to access and download that video, in contravention of the Police Services Act.
Investigators couldn’t conclude that anything “nefarious” happened to the video before the SIU took it away for analysis. But in the interest of justice for Loku, and accountability in policing, the officers who tried to download the video should be fired.
Loku’s apartment is owned by the Canadian Mental Health Association. CMHA executive director Steve Lurie told me by phone on Wednesday that he’s having the cameras tested, to see if they fail again. Lurie confirmed that the camera manufacturers told the SIU they found no evidence the videos were tampered with.
The public would not have found out about the missing video footage, or police attempts to download it, without pressure and protest by Black Lives Matter Toronto. SIU reports are usually not released to the public, and even in Loku’s case, the provincial government only publicized nine pages of the 34page report. All we usually get is a summary of each report from the SIU director. Tony Loparco, who currently holds that position, did not mention the police’s attempt to download the video in his summary of Loku’s killing.
Loparco did note in the full report that Ontario’s police have a “recurring problem” of interfering with evidence in SIU investigations. In 2014, Peel Regional Police shot and killed Jermaine Carby, a 33-year-old black man whom they claimed advanced at officers with a knife.
When the SIU arrived, they didn’t find a knife, even though police said it was in Carby’s hand when he was shot and fell to the ground.
Several hours after the SIU had been investigating Carby’s killing, a Peel sergeant approached investigators with a 13-inch knife in a paper bag. He claimed one of the officers who responded to the Carby incident had, for reasons unknown, removed it from the scene.
When officers mess with evidence at crime scenes, they should be fired, if not charged with obstruction of justice. Instead, their superiors protect them. This week, Toronto police chief Mark Saunders defended the officers who tried to snag the video. He claimed his officers had a responsibility to “secure video evidence on the scene.”
This doesn’t explain why officers needed to review that video with the CMHA building’s superintendent, and then have the superintendent accompany them to the video server room, as Lurie and CMHA staff claim they did.
The heavily censored SIU report reveals other troubling facts. When police encountered Loku, he was carrying a hammer in one hand. Police repeatedly yelled at him to drop it, but appeared to make no attempts at de-escalating the situation, as they are trained to do. Additionally, the officer who shot Loku was not interviewed by the SIU until eight days after the incident.
According to Lurie, an additional and devastating revelation from the video is that police appear to have stood over Loku’s fallen body for at least 10 minutes before deciding to perform CPR on him, just as paramedics were arriving on scene. Such a delay is alarming and it’s worth knowing if more swift action might have saved Loku’s life.
A coroner’s inquest into Loku’s death may shed more light on important, unanswered questions. But we don’t need an inquest to know, as Loparco wrote, that “police should not be attempting to view or download video” of such an incident without the SIU’s explicit consent.
Saunders needs to hold the offending officers accountable and stop defending their clear misconduct. Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.