A report into police-involved deaths across Canada said 704 people have been killed or died during police use-of-force encounters since 2000, with 141 of them in B.C.
The report, Police-involved deaths on the Rise across Canada, said there had been a 66.5-per-cent rise in deaths associated with police use of force, comparing stats from 2011 to 2022 with the previous 10-year period.
In B.C., more people died while in policy custody in 2022 than ever before, with 19 fatalities, according to the report. The second-highest year was 2015, with 10 deaths.
Lead author Alexander McClelland said the report is the first of its kind with the goal of bringing more transparency.
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“Due to ongoing systemic issues with a lack of access, transparency, and consistency in reporting data on police-involved deaths and killings across Canada, tracking this issue is an imperfect and challenging process,” said McClelland, an assistant professor at the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“While our data is limited, our findings indicate a steep rise in deaths. Police killed 69 people in 2022, setting a grim record with the highest number of known police use of force deaths in one year.”
The author acknowledged gaps in the data, such as what precipitated the interactions with police, or whether the people who died carried or used weapons or engaged in behaviour that threatened the officers’ lives.
McClelland said the report is a step in the right direction and hopes it will encourage more research and statistics to shed light on the deaths.
“Surprisingly, there is no government body that tracks the number of police-involved deaths using force across Canada,” he said.
“Other countries have systems that do this, like the U.K. and Australia.”
The report shows the RCMP, as well as Quebec and Ontario’s provincial police, are implicated in many of the cases. In B.C., there are a number of municipal police forces, including in Vancouver and Abbotsford, that operate within the province along with the Mounties.
B.C. RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark said the more commonly used term within the law enforcement community for these types of deaths is “in-custody deaths,” though that does not include officer-involved shooting deaths.
Shooting deaths amount to 73 per cent of police-involved deaths since 2000 across Canada, according to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a partner in the study.
“We respect and acknowledge that real people were involved in all of these incidents and continue to be impacted by them,” Clark said. “Each situation has unique circumstances and complexities.”
No single factor can be addressed to eliminate the number of people killed while in police custody because of public safety needs in the community are always change, Clark said.
“Policing is an inherently dangerous profession and our officers are asked to deal with violent subjects, overdose victims, mental health crises, and everything in between, to keep our communities safe,” he added.
“As a result of our officers’ training and professionalism, the overwhelming majority (99.9 percent) of all police interactions are resolved without injury, death or even the use of police intervention options.”
The RCMP defines an I-CD as:
- An incident where a person died while under police care and control, arrest, and/or detention; or while in a police facility or transport.
- Police presence alone is not enough for an incident to be considered an I-CD.
- Not every encounter between police and members of the public is a detention. Detention requires physical or psychological restraint. Psychological detention occurs when there is a legal obligation to comply with a request from the police, or when a reasonable person would conclude there is no choice but to comply with such a demand.
- A death can be defined as an I-CD, even after a person has been released from custody depending on many factors, where a link between their death and earlier detention could be made.
The Independent Investigations Office of B.C., which investigates every police-involved death including shootings, said it’s hard to draw conclusions from the statistics without the context of every specific case.
“The data, with respect to the rates of use of force leading to death, is consistent with what we’ve seen in B.C., however I’m not sure much can be drawn from it,” the IIO’s chief civilian officer Ron MacDonald said.
“It is the case that the rates have gone up in the last three years. To be fair, in B.C. in the last year, we have seen a very significant increase in officer-involved shootings. Normally, we see around seven a year and this year we will be around 24, so triple the number.
“In a large number of those cases, we’ve seen people with firearms confronting police. What the cause of that is, is hard to say.”
The B.C. RCMP has also pointed to the IIO’s investigations into police-involved shootings as an indicator that police actions in many of the incidents have been justified.
“It’s important to note that, in B.C., of the cases that have been investigated independently by the IIO, the vast majority of those investigations have concluded with their chief civilian director determining that they did not consider that any officer may have committed an offence under any enactment,” Clark said.
While the national report acknowledges a “significant number of unknowns” when it comes to identifying race of the victim, Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented.
Black and Indigenous people comprise 27.2 per cent of police-involved shooting deaths across Canada, despite making up just under nine per cent of the population, the report said.
“These numbers, these deaths, must be situated in a context of systemic discrimination within the criminal justice system,” said Christa Big Canoe, legal director of Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto.
“While we have known anecdotally that Indigenous people are overrepresented in police use of force-involved deaths in Canada, this data provides us a clear picture of ongoing colonial racial injustice. While 5.1 per cent of people living in Canada are Indigenous, 16.2 per cent of people killed in police-involved deaths are Indigenous.”
The report and ongoing project’s goal is to document all deaths that occur during police operations, as well as all deaths that occur in Canada’s jails, prisons, immigration detention, or forensic psychiatry centres.
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