Select a Design:

It’s wrong to have police investigating police shootings

Henry Aubin

Source: Montreal Gazette July 26th 2007

The adjacent article by Khadija Bennis is a moving appeal to end the secrecy over the circumstances under which her twin brother, Mohamed Anas Bennis, was killed by a Montreal police officer’s bullets in 2005. She is doing a public service by refusing to let the case blow over, as have so many similar ones over the years. Systemic silence over police-related deaths has no place in a modern democracy.

In the case of her brother, authorities won’t say why an officer had to shoot this pedestrian on a Côte des Neiges street. He had no criminal record and no discernible reason to be aggressive toward police. To be sure, police say the young man struck an officer twice with a knife on the neck and leg, but authorities say nothing more. What would have prompted his alleged attack? Who knows?

Such secrecy, sanctioned by provincial law, has three problems. First, as Khadija Bennis’s article all too poignantly shows, it is callously insensitive to the survivors of the deceased.

Second, it allows officialdom to exonerate the shooter without showing any reasons. Such silence can only weaken public confidence in the police.

And, finally, the secrecy makes no sense objectively. If Mohamed Anas Bennis had not died, prosecutors could have charged him with a crime. In court, the police then would have had to state their version of events, and Bennis could have had the opportunity to give his side. Everything would have been out in the open.

Think about the possible ramifications of this two-track policy – that is, the need for police to go public with their version of the facts if someone lives, but the licence police have to conceal the facts if that person dies. If you’re a cop and you wound someone without cause, you just might figure you have an incentive to finish the job. Killing the guy would keep the story from getting out and ruining your career.

Police will say such a scenario is appallingly cynical, but it’s precisely the sort of suspicion this policy of secrecy invites.

Indeed, such a scenario would help explain an otherwise puzzling trend in police shootings: The propensity of police to pump multiple bullets into people when a single bullet might do the job – that is, stop whatever threat the person might pose.

Could Bennis have been such a case? The coroner says two bullets struck his torso, hitting a lung, the spleen, the stomach, a kidney and the heart. But coroner Rafael Ayllon’s skimpy, twopage report doesn’t say which bullet did what damage. Nor does it say which bullet struck first. So you can’t tell if two shots were “necessary.”

A pathologist’s sketch is more insightful. It shows that the two bullets’ trajectories were downward through the torso, which suggests that Bennis was not standing erect. That does not make him seem too threatening.

Granted, it’s possible that – whether crouching, kneeling or prone – he was still dangerous. But the secrecy blanketing the case allows no such conclusion.

Note, too, that we haven’t seen Bennis’s knife. Nor have we seen photos of the officer’s injuries.

Quebec law requires an outside police force to probe cases in which people die or are seriously injured at the hands of police, but that is hardly reassuring. Police culture worships solidarity. In the Bennis case, the Quebec City police investigated and found nothing to warrant a criminal charge against the officer. (It is only when an officer is charged that the circumstances are made public.)

Ontario’s system is imperfect but better. Its civilian-led Special Investigations Unit has probed such cases since 1990. All of its 54 part- and full-time investigators are civilians, half of them former police officers. But even that watchdog needs watching: Responding to complaints that the unit had a pro-cop bias, Ontario’s ombudsman is now examining its record. Excellent.

All police-review systems are fallible. What you need are checks and balances. And Quebec has a glaring lack of them.

A final note: After I wrote about the Bennis case last year, a constable at the local police station sent a private response. She said the officer involved had been more substantially wounded than had been made public and subsequently suffered from nightmares and flashbacks.

Please understand: My criticism is not of the individual officer, whose conduct is impossible to evaluate. It is with the system that makes evaluation impossible.