Nine police officers in Canada have been slain since last September. The big question is why now? (2023)

Article content

When OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique addressed reporters only hours after the shooting death of Sgt. Eric Mueller in Bourget on May 11, he released few details.

Mueller and two colleagues who were also injured were responding to a disturbance report from a resident “possibly hearing gunshots.” A 39-year-old man was arrested. A long gun was found at the scene. No one else was in the home at the time.

But Carrique was unequivocal about one thing — the three officers who responded were ambushed.

“When three officers arrive on scene and within minutes are shot — one is killed, one very seriously and critically injured and another injured to the point of requiring medical attention — I categorize that as an ambush,” he said.

Since last September, nine police officers in Canada have been slain in the line of duty, five of them in Ontario. The big questions are why and why now.

Is there a need to crack down on violent offenders, as police associations have argued? On Tuesday, Justice Minister David Lametti tabled legislation aimed at making it harder for repeat violent offenders to be granted bail. Last month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the province would spend $112 million to create “bail compliance teams,” including expanding a squad that tracks down those who have broken bail conditions or are at large unlawfully.

There are other factors that are making policing more dangerous, including fraying faith in police in the wake of incidents such as the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died when a police officer handcuffed and pinned him to the ground. More recently, in Ottawa, a judge agreed to publicly release 2021 surveillance video that shows a police officer allegedly stepping on Derek Weyman’s head and neck for more than two minutes until his hand goes limp amid a violent arrest.

Meanwhile, the pandemic and the events of the past three years — homelessness, addictions, a shredded mental health system, and long periods of social isolation — have simmered like a toxic soup.

The police are representatives of social order and are unfortunately being targeted not as mere individuals, but for what they represent or embody, said Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Alberta.“Each incident of killings of or by police makes the next police-citizen interaction more dangerous.”

Article content

Article content

The pandemic cannot be ruled out as a factor. The social isolation of the last couple of years has produced a cohort of individuals with limited social anchors, said Oriola.“It does appear that job losses and concomitant economic struggles, social isolation, and individual frustrations from the last few years are playing an important role.”

The current situation has been brewing for some time, said Rick Parent, a 30-year police veteran and retired associate professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University.

For the most part, Canadian police do an exceptional job under adverse circumstances, said Parent, who is an expert on police use of deadly force.

But the public is quick to criticize and judge police officers who utilize force during their day-to-day duties, while failing to understand and appreciate the risks that officers often take, he said. “Police are looked upon as an easy target for criticism and blame, for society’s failure to deal with complex issues like domestic violence, crime, the homeless and mental health issues.”

Article content

Police are more accountable than ever, and yet trust in the police has declined.

According to Statistics Canada in 2019, about 40 per cent of Canadians who reported a recent encounter with police were likely to say that they had a great deal of confidence in the police. But only a quarter of those who said they came into contact with the police in the previous year for emotional problems, mental health, or alcohol or drug use felt a great deal of confidence.

The distrust is more pronounced in racialized communities. As of 2020, 21 per cent of Black people and 22 per cent of Indigenous people had little or no confidence in the police.

“You have seen a pretty massive failure on the part of policing. The panacea is bail reform,” said Justin Piché, an associate professor in criminology at the University of Ottawa.

Article content

Piché hesitates to call the nine police deaths since September a trend.

“It seems to be a series of unrelated events that happened over a short period of time. Could we accurately predict any of these? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s a risk assessment out there that would have predicted any of these (deaths),” he said.

Before Mueller’s death, when the list of fallen officers had only eight names, Piché and his colleagues at the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project set out to find out if it was true that the number of harmful intentional acts resulting in the deaths of Canadian officers in the line of duty was indeed unprecedented.

They concluded that this was not the case. In 1962, 12 officers died. At the time, there were about 26,000 police officers in Canada. Today, there are about 70,000 police officers in Canada, which makes the death rate in 1962 significantly higher, said Piché.

Article content

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care. Yes, if we were to look at totals, what is happening would be troubling. It would be troubling if it were just one police officer,” he said.

There has been a significant push to introduce stricter rules for violent, repeat offenders, including bail reform. On Dec. 27, 2022, OPP Const. Grzegorz Pierzchala was shot and killed when he answered a call about a truck in a ditch near Hagersville. It was later reported that the suspect had missed an August court date on charges that included assaulting a police officer and illegally possessing a handgun.

But of the nine police deaths since last September, most of the officers died while attending to mental health crises, and only one suspect was wanted on bail conditions, said Piché.

Article content

Some Canadians have embraced movements in the United States without appreciating the differences in policing between the two countries, said Parent.

In Canada, about two dozen members of the public were shot by police every year since 1990. More than a thousand people are fatally shot by police every year in the U.S. Per capita, that’s three to five times greater frequency in the U.S., than in Canada, he said.

The ‘defund the police’ movement in Canada, based on actions of police in the U.S., has had a “profound negative effect” on policing north of the border, said Parent. “Policing is not seen as a desirable occupation by many. Recruiting for policing agencies is a real challenge and current police officers are retiring or transitioning to other occupations.”

Article content

Police have become increasingly delegitimized, said Greg Brown, a former Ottawa police detective turned sociology researcher at Carleton University.

“There was a time when family and friends would boast and be proud that someone was a police officer. It was considered a noble form of public service and an honourable profession. Now, it feels like it is something to be ashamed of,” said Brown.

“I know many of my fellow retirees, who did incredible work protecting the vulnerable, risking their lives to protect citizens and holding criminals accountable. Now, when asked about their previous career, respond with ‘I worked for the city’ or ‘I was in government.’ “

There has been a massive societal shift in the past decade, but it doesn’t make sense to brand all officers in Canada as ‘bad cops’ said Brown. “There are bad people in every profession. But it’s a pervasive sentiment. Police have brought that on themselves.”

Article content

This sentiment has become the catalyst for people struggling with mental illness, he said. “Mental health challenges have gotten worse. And no one is monitoring whether people get treatment.”

Looking back at a time when bank robberies were oncefairly common, police officers were shot or killed as a consequence of attempting to prevent a crime in progress, Brown explained. What is different now is the targeting of police officers because they are police officers.

Const. Andrew Hong was shot at point-blank range last September in a Mississauga coffee shop in what investigators described as an ambush.

The increasing number of police killed in these kinds of circumstances has “normalized” ideas about killing officers, said Brown, who points out that school shootings proliferated after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.

“I fear that things will get publicized and get more common and leach into the brains of people struggling with mental health. I’m very concerned that someone out there is looking at the news and thinking about this.”