B.C. prosecutors have opted not to press charges against a Vancouver police officer who fatally shot a man holding a knife in a hotel on the Downtown Eastside three years ago.
The fatal confrontation took place on May 5, 2022, at the Patricia Hotel as police responded to reports of an armed man having a mental health or drug-related crisis and assaulting people.
Last year, B.C.’s civilian police watchdog, the Independent Investigation Office, submitted a report to Crown prosecutors after concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe an officer may have committed offences involving the use of force.
Global News obtained video of the fatal confrontation between a shirtless, shoeless man holding an object in one hand and three officers, one armed with a Taser, one with a beanbag shotgun and one with his service pistol.
The officers can be seen approaching a junction in the hotel hallway where they encounter the man. Within seconds, two of the officers fire and the man falls to the ground.
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In a statement released Tuesday, the BC Prosecution Service said the available evidence didn’t meet its charge assessment standard, and that there was no substantial likelihood of conviction.
According to the prosecution service, the man was holding a 22-centimetre knife, which he did not let go of when the officer holding the beanbag gun yelled at him to drop it.
That officer immediately fired three shots from the beanbag gun, while the officer with his service pistol fired three shots “slightly after.”
The prosecution service noted that officers are legally permitted to use force to prevent serious harm or death, and that Vancouver Police Department policy requires a lethal overwatch officer when police are using less-lethal options like beanbag guns and tasers.
The report concluded that the armed man could have reached the officer who fired within half a second.
“The nature of the location, an enclosed hallway, meant that the officers had no realistic or
safe options to retreat or otherwise create distance between themselves and the (armed man),” the report states, adding there was no room for the officer with the Taser to fire safely.
The report concludes that those facts, combined with officers’ knowledge that he man had already assaulted someone and had since obtained a knife provide an “ample basis” for a trial to conclude there was an “objectively reasonable basis for the (officer) to believe that the (man) then posed a risk of grievous bodily harm or death” and as such that lethal force was reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances.
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