A use of Force Expert who reviews a brief video of the incident says he has questions about the actions of RCMP officers after a 10 -grade student was shot dead during a confrontation with the police in Surrey, BC, during the end of week.
But the union of the RCMP and a former Mountie say that officers must make difficult and divided decisions in high pressure situations.
The officers were called to a school patio in the block 7000 of 188 Street on Sunday at 2:40 PM PT after the reports of a person in trouble with a firearm, according to BC RCMP. The shooting occurred several blocks in a residential area after what the police are calling “an extensive interaction.”
The Professor of Criminology at the University of Alberta, Theitope Oriola, who specializes in surveillance and use of force, says that, while the police allow the law to use a variety of force for the lethal force, he asks If you could have done more to discourage the situation. .
Oriola observed security chamber images provided by CBC News that showed part of the police interaction with the adolescent. He said the interaction ended “too fast and apparently hurriedly.”
“It is absolutely possible that a few more minutes of verbal commitment and restriction on the part of the officers may have saved his life,” Oriola told CBC News.
The video, of less than a minute, shows a person walking through a patio, pointing out what appears to be a gun in his head.
You can listen to the police to scream and ask the person not to hurt, and at one point, the person points out what seems to be a gun in the police direction.
Then, the person moves behind a bush, out of the sight of the camera, and the footage shows that two officers are covered behind a police car.
Which seems that two shots can be heard in rapid succession before several officers rushed the framework towards the person.
Secondary Decisions
While many details have not yet emerged about the incident, including what happened between the courtyard of the school and the place where the adolescent was killed, Oriola is asking for a better training in decallation for RCMP officers throughout the country.
He says that officers could have tried to talk to the teenager for a longer period of time or have tried to distract him and take his weapon.
“My favorite approach … It would be to ensure that those who are recruited in police services throughout Canada have the necessary training, the educational training that is required for the surveillance of the 21st century,” said Oriola.
RCMP retired sergeant. Garry Kerr, who served in force for more than 30 years, says that officers have to make decisions of seconds when they face a weapon.
“At least one of the police officers must have thought that his life was in danger,” Kerr said in an interview with CBC News.
He says that while it comes to clashes with people in trouble, officers want to make every possible efforts to ensure that no one else is involved.
He says that in these situations, officers are focusing on not losing sight of the person in trouble and that they do not enter any nearby house or damage anyone.
“There are a lot of things in a very, very short period of time,” he said.
“It is the worst case for any police officer, but he has the duty to attend the call. Unfortunately, that ended very tragically in this case.”
The RCMP is not commenting on the death of shooting, since it is now being investigated by the BC independent investigations office. The Guardian dog will determine whether the police actions were “necessary, reasonable and provided in the circumstances.”
‘We are not a lot of jeans’
The officers involved are taking a break from the field to obtain support, according to Trevor Dinwoodie, director of the Board of the National Police Federation, the union that represents the members of RCMP.
“Situations like this can definitely affect your psyche … I don’t think anyone stuck their boots on Sunday morning thinking that they were going to face a threat like this and had such tragic consequences.” He told CBC News.
“Our hearts and thoughts are with all those affected, especially family and community.”
Dinwoodie, which was RCMP first -line officer for approximately two decades, says that officers try to use decallation techniques in all cases, but sometimes the threat is too large.
“Many of our officers work 30, 35 years in this outfit. Many of them are operational during all that time, and we never have to use lethal force,” he said.
“We are not a group of jeans that enter a situation thinking that we are only going to deal with that in the first 20 seconds.”
Oriola says that deaths similar to Surrey adolescent occur too frequently throughout the country.
