The RCMP has rejected 86 per cent of the allegations it’s reviewed so far against a controversial unit created to police resource protests in the Fairy Creek watershed in British Columbia, an analysis by CBC’s The Fifth Estate has found.
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Considering the number of allegations against the unit, the RCMP saying that 12% were valid is rather troubling. Which 12% were valid and what corrective measures were taken?
The highlighted story is rather telling, too, with power tools cutting metal right next to her neck without any PPE.
Granted, the protestor locked herself with the bike lock around her neck deliberately, presumably to make arresting her more difficult, but the police still have a duty to reasonably protect citizens.
I can’t really imagine a situation where it would warrant rushing that arrest and putting the protestor at risk… Maybe if it was blocking a road for an ambulance and someone was going to die if they didn’t get to the hospital in time?
But this is a logging road in the middle of nowhere, so my charitable reading is that it was just too inconvenient to take a few minutes to get some protection in place. More likely, it was just a casual disregard for her humanity and they didn’t care about risking serious harm.
The less charitable part of me thinks that it was intentional to send a message that putting yourself in a riskier situation is just going to increase the chance you get harmed because the police are going to take the exact same actions. A way to deter people attempting it again in the future.
Or it could be that this was becoming so commonplace to the police that they had disassociated the risk of harm from the action they took over and over again.
In any case, some retraining and possible rotation is obviously needed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Catherine McClarty still has nightmares about her arrest two years ago during an anti-logging protest on Vancouver Island and her experience with a controversial RCMP unit that’s been accused of improper use of force, neglect of duty and more.
The Victoria resident was one of more than 1,100 people arrested in 2021 by the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), a specialized RCMP unit created in 2017 to police resource-related protests in B.C.
In her improper arrest complaint filed against C-IRG, she alleges the officers who attempted to remove the lock from her neck using a power tool showed little concern for her safety.
So whether they choose to informally resolve it or investigate is left up to the RCMP in terms of how they handle that," said Kate McDerby, the commission’s director of communications and stakeholder engagement.
It says it looked at four incidents related to C-IRG in Fairy Creek and Wet’suwet’en and found the individuals who lodged the complaints did not sustain serious harm or there was no connection between any injury and police action.
RCMP’s professional standards unit, said his officers are working in demanding conditions, facing off against well-organized protesters using sophisticated methods to slow down arrests.
The original article contains 1,664 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
