Taser incident one of dozens probed by Law Enforcement Review Agency

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2016 (2735 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A female police recruit who was tasered by an unnamed Manitoba police officer before a ride-along filed one of the 139 formal complaints investigated last year by the Law Enforcement Review Agency.

According to LERA’s annual report, tabled Monday in the legislature, the woman met the officer at the police station before accompanying him on his regular patrol. There, she allegedly spotted an unsecured Taser device on a table in the common room.

At some point, the report says, the officer picked up the device, commented that it wasn’t “live” and “from a distance of three to four feet” pointed it at the woman. The probes struck her in the left thigh and groin area.

“She was very much shaken but she managed to remove the probes, bandaged the puncture wounds and continued with the ride-along,” according to the report.

But 30 minutes later she felt ill, her wounds hurt and she returned to the station. While driving home, she experienced tightness in her chest and difficulty breathing. She drove to the hospital, where she was treated, and then went home.

After she filed her complaint, the agency forwarded the matter to justice officials. It was investigated by an outside agency — the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team — and the officer was charged and convicted of assault. He resigned from his police department before his conviction.

LERA, an independent, non-police agency established in 1985 to investigate public complaints about police, did not name the officer or identify his police service in the report. Its jurisdiction extends to 12 police forces with 1,663 officers, including the Winnipeg Police Service, which accounts for 92 per cent of complaints made to LERA.

The number of formal complaints against Manitoba police officers in 2015 was virtually identical to the previous year, when 138 were received.

Of the 92 investigations that were completed, 52 were abandoned or withdrawn by the complainant, 17 were dismissed as being out of scope of the agency, 20 were dismissed by the LERA commissioner as not being supported by sufficient evidence to justify a hearing, one was resolved informally, and one resulted in a hearing before a provincial court judge who upheld the commissioner’s decision not to take the matter to a public hearing.

LERA did not complete its investigation on the complaint by the police academy member once a criminal charge was laid.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca