Inquest opens into three Toronto Police killings of mentally ill
Article content
TORONTOIt’s a pretty colour wheel taught to new police recruits to illustrate when a situation requires the use of force.
But glaringly missing from the diagram is anything about de-escalation or conflict resolution. And the trainer in charge of teaching those fresh recruits stubbornly insists that including such options in the 2004 model would be too “confusing.” Not only that, but John Weiler, from the Ontario Police College, said officers are instructed to tailor their response to the imminent threat — and not to the emotionally disturbed person who may be making it.
So, is it any surprise that rather than defusing the crisis in a patient, gentle manner, we are back at an inquest to examine the police shootings of three agitated people who were incapable of obeying barking commands to put down their sharp-edged weapons?
Or a surprise that there will eventually be yet another inquiry — this one into the gunning down of teen Sammy Yatim?
The combined inquest opened Tuesday into the fatal police shootings of Reyal Jardine-Douglas, 25, in 2010; Sylvia Klibingaitis, 52, in 2011 and Michael Eligon, 29, in 2012. Coroner’s counsel Michael Blain briefly outlined the background to their deaths: Jardine-Douglas’s family had unsuccessfully tried to have him admitted to the psych ward at Scarborough Hospital a few days before and he was acting so paranoid that they called 911 for help. By the time police arrived, the young man had boarded a TTC bus and when he wouldn’t obey their orders to drop the knife he’d pulled from his backpack, he was shot. And when he still had it in his hand as he lay on the ground, he was shot again.
His parents and sister sat stoically as the horrible details were related. Their lawyer, John Weingust, said they believe this was a “wrongful shooting.”
“What the officer should have done, I think, is talk to him,” he told reporters. “For emotionally disturbed people, a different procedure has to be adopted.”
Klibingaitis had wrestled with mental health issues in the past and almost checked herself into hospital a few days before she was killed. Her daughter’s moving to Chile seemed to be the tipping point. On the morning of Oct. 7, 2011, she called 911 to say she had a knife and was going to kill her elderly mother. After police arrived, she came rushing out of the house with the knife poised to strike and she was shot in the chest.
Finally, Eligon was killed in 2012 after he went AWOL from Toronto East General and stole two pairs of scissors from a nearby convenience store. All the officers who converged on the scene knew he was mentally ill, a hospital was a short distance away and still he was felled by three bullets.
Jurors were told that it’s not their job to lay blame. “The outcome is tragic. That doesn’t mean that anyone is at fault,” the coroner’s counsel told them. In fact, all the officers involved were cleared of any wrongdoing by the Special Investigations Unit.
Instead, this is about recommendations for the future. “Everyone wants to find ways to avoid deaths in similar circumstances in the future,” Blain said. Police lawyer Peter Brauti agreed. “Do we give them different tools?” he asked. “Do we give them training that will help deal with these situations better?”
People in crisis, for example, don’t respond well to shouted, aggressive orders. But Weiler, the use-of-force co-ordinator at the police college, seemed particularly resistant to any suggestions by Klibingaitis’s sisters or the lawyer for the Eligon family, Peter Rosenthal, that officers should be trained to better tailor their procedures for the mentally ill.
Weiler said you can’t start drawing up different use-of-force models for different groups. “Too confusing,” he said.
Why exactly?
If lethal force must be used, he was asked why police aren’t taught to shoot an arm or leg. Weiler said their pistols aren’t particularly accurate and there’s a danger of hitting a bystander. “We don’t train officers to shoot to kill, we train officers to shoot to stop,” he explained.
But it turns out to be the same thing: cops are told to aim for the upper chest. Not surprisingly, death is almost always the tragic outcome.
Read Mandel Wednesday through Saturday.
