A B.C. man is coming forward after an Abbotsford police officer deleted a video from the man’s phone that had showed her pointing her gun at him.
Navee Thandi said he was working at an industrial park on Peardonville Road at 4 a.m. on June 15 when he heard some shouting.
“Out of nowhere, I hear somebody shout, ‘Stop! Stop! Police!'” he told Global News on Monday.
He said he’d been wearing his headphones, so he just kept walking and looking at his phone. But he heard the shouting again and looked up to see a female plainclothes officer aiming a gun at him.
“Then I heard ‘Stop! Abbotsford police!'”
Thandi said he kept asking what was going on, but did not get an answer.
A second officer arrived, he said, and they told him to get on the ground. As he did, he started recording the encounter on his phone. He said he could see the female officer’s hands shaking.
“I was freaked out,” Thandi said. “Especially when somebody was shaking that hard, with their finger on the trigger, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
A third officer showed up, he said, and told him to “shut the f— up or he was going to shoot me with his beanbag gun.”
They put him in a cruiser, but after speaking to his coworkers and confirming he worked there, they let him go.
However, Thandi said the female officer deleted the video off his phone while he was in the back of the police car.
“I confronted them about it, on video, and they pretty much denied it. They said, ‘Leave us alone, we’re leaving’,” he said.
In a statement, Abbotsford police confirmed the officer did delete the video and had told her supervisor what had happened.
They said the officers had been called that morning to a report of a break-and-enter in progress and arrived to find that there had been a break-in, so they searched the neighbourhood and came across Thandi.
The plainclothes officer saw him pass between two buildings and said initially that he’d been “non-compliant,” the statement said.
Their digital forensic unit did try to recover the video from Thandi’s phone, it added, but were unable to do so.
The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner has launched an investigation into the officer’s actions.
“I just wanted to get it out there and let people know what’s going on,” Thandi said. “They just went right through it and deleted everything right off my phone.”