Winnipeg Copwatch

Police violence is a systemic issue and not a series of isolated incidents, according to the Mar. 18 opening panel of the Forum on Police Violence, Incarceration, and Alternatives.

“On a daily basis police harass, they profile, they abuse people, they injure, they assault, they intimidate, they kill. This is police impunity. This is something that people live day to day,” argued community organizer Jaggi Singh.

See the full writeup on the Media Co-op’s site.

Yesterday, police in Montreal arrested 258 people at the International Day Against Police Brutality, roughly half of the participants.

In Toronto, a police officer was spotted on a rooftop with a sniper rifle (pictured) near a demonstration organized by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and others.

Halifax and Ottawa’s marches appear to have taken place without incident.

Today, on the International Day Against Police Brutality…

RCMP in northern Manitoba shot and killed a man in God’s Lake Narrows. The Winnipeg Free Press story says

The man shot dead by the RCMP is being identified as Paul Duck, a respected member of the community who was reportedly firing his gun in an attempt to scare off youths who gathered in the area.

One woman said the officers guarding the burnt-out home saw Duck with his gun and “shot him in the chest and killed him. It was an innocent man they shot,” she said.

Mohan Mishra and Marika Heinrichs published this article on community control of police, including immigration enforcement.

Demonstrations are taking place across Canada, including in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Halifax. Winnipeggers will march this Saturday.

Photo from Jenny’s blog taken at IDAPB 2006 in Toronto

We often get requests for links to our “rights cards”, which have information about encounters with police, and aren’t always easy to find on our website, so here are the links, for those who are interested.

• Rights card on interacting with police when taking footage or photographs
• Rights card with information on being arrested or detained

Winnipeg Copwatch is involved in a coalition that is planning three events in March to mark the International Day Against Police Brutality. Please pass on the info, come out to the events, and get in touch if you’d like to volunteer or have any questions!

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1. Panel Discussion: A Critical Eye on Policing in Winnipeg

Saturday, March 12 at 2:00pm

University of Winnipeg, 3rd floor, Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall.

Featuring: Macho Philipovich (member of Winnipeg Copwatch), Leslie Spillett (executive director of Ka Ni Kanichihk), and Jim Silver (professor and co-director of Urban and Inner-City Studies at U of W). This venue is wheel-chair accessible.

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2. March against police brutality

Saturday, March 19th at 12:00pm

Starting at 485 Selkirk Avenue.

Join us in the streets to march in solidarity with those who have experienced police abuse and to demand an end to police violence. We will march to the Magnus Eliason Recreation Centre (430 Langside Street) where you can join us for a delicious meal and an art project. Childcare and return bus tickets will be provided. The MERC is wheelchair accessible.

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3. Know Your Rights Workshop

Saturday, March 26th at 2:30 pm

Magnus Eliason Recreation Centre (430 Langside).

Winnipeg Copwatch members will give a free workshop about your rights with the police and how to assert them, and will be giving away Know Your Rights cards. There will be some light snacks, but childcare will not be provided. The MERC is wheelchair accessible.

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 police’s lawyers used the circumstance to have the case thrown out, and when Tapper asked Justice Brenda Keyser to let him reopen the case to make the court identifications, she refused.

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 illegal, and the Copwatch group was able to get the city to agree to retrain officers about the law and to pay them $40,000, which will be used on future Copwatch initiatives.

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 the street” in downtown Toronto. Audrey was accused of having drugs in her possession and immediately handcuffed and placed in a cruiser. After being detained and the cops ignoring her assertion that she was innocent, Audrey thought that her only option was to consent to a search, presumably at a police station. Instead Audrey was strip-searched on a busy Parkdale neighbourhood street. No drugs were found on her. The names of the White cops who were involved in this act of humiliation and public violence are Constables Tracey Peters, Michael Sommer and Michael Dulmage.

As if Audrey’s humiliation at the hands of Canadian authority wasn’t enough, Canadian “immigration officials ordered Air Canada to drag her out of the airport departure lounge in her native Kingston, Jamaica” in April 1994. The irony of this incidence was the fact that she was on her way to attend the inquiry into her 1993 strip-search complaint. Faulty intelligence was given as the reason behind her mistreatment at the airport. A three-person panel of inquiry cleared the three cops of discreditable misconduct charges in September 1995, while carrying out a hatchet-job on Audrey’s character and reputation. Audrey had this to say about the decision “Just because I stood up for my rights I have been called a prostitute, a drug dealer. They (the police officers) treated me like a dog. And now the panel is backing them. I can’t believe this. This is not justice.”