Winnipeg Copwatch

Good Boy is a new music video by Wab Kinew featuring Lorenzo and Troy Westwood in memory of 18-year-old Matthew Dumas, who was killed by a Winnipeg police officer on January 31, 2005.

Winnipeg Police Service Constables Peter O’Kane and Jess Zebrun, who had been charged with perjury for lying to a judge to get a search warrant, had their charges dismissed yesterday on a technicality. During the trial, prosecutor Robert Tapper forgot to have any of the witnesses identify the two police officers in the courtroom. The [...]

Last April, police confiscated the cellphone that Marlon Kautz, a member of Copwatch of East Atlanta, had been using to record them. When Kautz got the phone back, some of the footage had been deleted. He says police weren’t doing anything improper in the arrest they were carrying out. The confiscation of the camera was [...]

Ajamu Nangwaya has compiled a fact sheet with information about 35 cases of police violence against African-Canadians. One is from 1952, and the rest are since 1978. On August 10, 1993, 37-year-old Audrey Smith, a tourist, public sector worker and mother of five from Jamaica, was strip-searched “naked as the day I was born, on [...]

Despite the gross over-representation of crime stories in the news media and the constant push from the Conservatives for ‘tough on crime’ policies, Canadians still prefer a rational approach to reducing crime. According to a recent Environics Institute survey, 58% of Canadians prefer preventive strategies toward crime reduction, compared to 36% that prefer harsh punishments. [...]