Front Burner - ‘Above the Law’ chronicles police violence in Calgary

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

In the last few weeks on this show, we've talked about a number of police forces under scrutiny across the country. But there’s a city we haven’t talked about, one that frequently has the highest number of police-involved shootings in the country -- Calgary. A new documentary streaming on CBC Gem examines the issue of police violence in Calgary. It's called “Above the Law” and co-director Marc Serpa Francoeur joins us today.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Josh Bloch. In the last few weeks on this show, we've talked about a number of police forces under scrutiny across this country. An emotional rally today outside the apartment building where police killed Ijaz Ahmed Chowdhury. Family members were told Moore was shot five times. I don't understand how someone

dies during a wellness check. DeFonte Miller, then 19, was beaten up so badly, he lost an eye. But there's a city we haven't talked about. One that frequently has the highest number of police-involved shootings in the country. Calgary. The more details we got,

the angrier we kind of became. Sure, but you need EMS. Negative, but the bad guy will. Who's the bad guy? The guy who puts an innocent guy in handcuffs, taser him, beat him up for no reason? Or the guy that needed help and got tortured? Who's the bad guy?

A new documentary streaming on CBC Jam examines the issue of police violence in Calgary and asks whether there's enough oversight to keep the force accountable. It's called Above the Law, and co-director Marc Serpa-Francourt joins me now. This is Frontburner. Hello, Mark.

Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. I want to start by asking you about Godfrey Adai Niamiche. On December 28, 2013, he says he was driving some friends home from a party. He was the designated driver, and their car gets stuck in the snow. What happens next? So two Calgary police officers arrive on the scene and, you know, this is sort of where the stories diverge. According to them, Godfrey is, for some reason that's not clear, very aggressive towards them. And as a result, they were forced to, you know, to take

him down quite roughly, as they acknowledge, and cutting his lip and detain him, put him in their van. According to Godfrey, he says these officers arrive and they sort of kind of sit there and sort of ask them Hey have you guys Tried pushing And keep in mind This is four black guys You know around What was you know

Not Godford's vehicles Friends vehicles A nice you know A BMW That they arrive And sort of kind of Start taking the piss Or whatever

And Godford basically says Hey you know If you're not going to help us Why don't you leave us alone To my surprise They wrestled me to the ground They put handcuffs on me Pulled me in the

back of their police van. I was just like, what are you guys doing? Like, I haven't done anything wrong. So where are you guys taking me? In any case, what's agreed upon is that Godfrey is handcuffed and put in the back of their van. They know where his house is because they've taken his ID and they go in the opposite direction and for some reason feel the need to drive him to this sort of large construction site. They took my handcuffs off and they told me to beat it. So they just got in the van and just drove off. Now this is approaching four in the morning in the dead of winter and it's minus 28 degrees

with the wind chill and they drop him off there and he's got no winter clothes, he's wearing a tracksuit and sneakers and that's it. There's no buildings I can go still warm. I'm scared. Like I was panicked and I was feared for my life. And they leave him there to fend for himself. So they drive him to this part of downtown Calgary, several kilometers from his home, tell him to get out of the car and just leave him? Yeah, so they dump him there. Godford, of course, is disorientated. We've found out recently through Freedom of Information requests that actually one of the officers at that point called dispatch

and basically said to them, hey, if you get a call from an angry guy, we've dealt with him. He's drunk. Don't worry about him. He's going to walk home. Godfrey, as you mentioned, maintains that he had not been drinking. And again, they know where his home is and they've driven him in the opposite direction. Right. So Godfred does end up calling 911. What happens next? Yeah. So Godfred, his phone had died. He had a phone that belonged to one of his friends and who had dropped it and he had held on to sit for safekeeping. And, you know, when you have a locked cell phone, obviously, who can you call? 911. So he calls 911, the first operator hangs up on him. He calls again after a conversation with this other operator.

Dr. Sleeth, what's the address of your emergency? Okay, a couple cops picked me up for no reason and just left me here. Left you where? I don't know, I don't know, they just left me here. Constable Trevor Lindsay arrives on the scene and you can hear in the end of the 911 call him approaching, and he sounds very aggressive, and he says, don't you effing, and the call cuts off. And at that point, Godfrey says, you know,

he's sort of this guy who's coming at him, and he says he saw the look in his eyes, and his first thought was, this guy's going to kill me. So he turns around to run away. Lindsay tasers him in the back. He put handcuffs on me, and I just remember this guy just beating me tasers him in the back he put handcuffs on me and i just remember this guy just beating me up punching me in the face knees to the back what did constable trevor lindsey the officer who arrested godfred say

happened in that incident he claims you know again godfred what came at him aggressively and he you know sort of had to defend himself he was forced to to push him down, forced to taser him, and then again forced to beat him. He put me in a police van, read me my rights, and said I was being charged for assaulting a police officer. So he's charged with assaulting a police officer after this incident. And this can be a really difficult case to get dismissed, you know, when it's a civilian up against the police. But in this case, Godfrey had something that a lot of people don't have, which is video footage from a police helicopter showing Godfrey being handcuffed.

It appears that he's either being pulled or dragged through the snow. And then you see him being punched and kneed multiple times in the neck and the back of the head by Constable Trevor Lindsay. How important does that video end up being in Godford's case? Oh, it's crucial. You know, so Joan Bloomer, who was his defense attorney at the time, you know, she says that the first thing that really struck her was when Godford came in. He kept saying that it's a construction site. There's got to have been some video there. There's got to, been some video there.

Somebody had to have a camera there. And so that was really remarkable for me. Why would he be encouraging me to try and get evidence of what he was telling me if he were making something up? That video is absolutely crucial. I mean, Joan, she says in the film, she says, where would we be without this video? The day of the trial, I felt scared for Godford. Three uniformed police officers

standing up under oath and telling their version of events and Godfred standing on his own. Godfred was ultimately acquitted of the charges against him. He'd also lodged a complaint with Calgary Police Services a month after the incident. I was like, man, I got to do something about this, you know. I can't just let them get away with this. I wonder if you could tell me what came of that complaint. He did indeed lodge that complaint. And I'll tell you, unfortunately, we still don't know what's come of it

because it's still in play. Six and a half years later, wouldn't you know, the complaint, original complaint hasn't been resolved and it spawned a whole other host of complaints, including related to the mishandling of the treatment of the complaints by the Calgary Police Service. So tell me a bit about Godfrey's life after this incident. I mean, how did things change for him after the night of 2013? Oh, man. So many ways, and it's, you know, each one's sort of more kind of heartbreaking than the last.

Godfrey, you know, immigrated from Ghana to Canada when he was in his late teens. And at this time, he was 26. So he'd been in Canada for about eight years. He'd always worked, had never had any problems supporting himself. At the time, he lived with a girlfriend. He had also recently applied to go to SAIT, which is sort of the technical college in Alberta, and studied to be a heavy duty mechanic, which is something he'd always been interested in. Godfrey ended up having serious challenges holding down a job. He has quite severe back problems that seem to be permanent. Hopefully they can be resolved,

in addition to, again, very severe psychological issues. If Godfrey was walking down the street and saw a police van, for example, it would create in him a need to flee or a need to react in some deep way that's fear-based. It's a horrible feeling. So the relationship sort of came apart. He was homeless for a period of time. Six months, he was sleeping on his friend's couch. I saw that couch. I filmed an interview with him there. It was not a good situation to be in for somebody with quite severe back problems,

so it's definitely been challenging for him. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. So, you were already making this documentary about Godfred's experience when in 2017, you heard this officer's name again, Constable Trevor Lindsay, this time in relation to another arrest.

And again, there's video footage in this arrest. What did it show? Yeah, I mean, this is another incident of a detainee in handcuffs, Daniel Haworth, who Lindsay had taken out from a cruiser. They're in the parking lot at the arrest processing unit, downtown Calgary, takes him out and he's got him against the car. And there's some sort of discussion going on. At this time, an altercation took place between one of the officers

and the man, resulting in the man being thrown to the ground while handcuffed. Sort of unclear why, but Lindsay proceeds to punch him repeatedly in the back of the head and throws him head first into the asphalt and you can just see that he's just knocked right out. And as a result he was left with a fractured skull and a brain bleed and a permanent brain injury that his family very much connects with his death of a fentanyl overdose eight months later. If you can remember things that you might have told him five minutes before I know it was hard on him when he was going to the rehab places and forgetting that he had

meetings and stuff. And learning of that really made us take a step back and say, wait a minute, Godford files a formal complaint a month after the incident. So that's January 2014. And here we are in May 2015 with this other incident. You know, why hadn't the Calgary Police Service responded to that complaint? Why was this officer still out on the street? So what did Constable Lindsay say happened in that incident? That Haworth had been spitting blood and that as a potential drug user

he was afraid that that blood might contain some sort of blood-borne illness that would harm him and his partner. The trial is underway for a Calgary police officer charged with aggravated assault. The Crown Prosecutor says a 2015 arrest by Constable Trevor Lindsay left a aggravated assault for his treatment of Daniel Haworth during that arrest. Godfrey Adaine Amiche attended the trial. I'm curious to know, what did Godfrey say when he finds out that this incident took place after he had filed a complaint about Constable Trevor Lindsay? Oh, I mean, I think, you know, Godfrey found this whole incident very upsetting on so many levels. This is the same guy that I filed a complaint against him.

The police force knew the evidence. They've seen the videos. They didn't do anything to protect the public. And this same guy goes around and beat up somebody in handcuffs again after he did that to me. We've been talking about these two arrests, but your documentary makes the case that this is a bigger systemic issue. And I'm curious to know what you learned about just how common police violence is in Calgary. Yeah, so that was, you know, and for us, this was part of what also compelled us to start looking at the bigger picture. In 2016, for example, it came out that Calgary Police Service had shot and killed more people than the next 10 largest cities in Canada combined. So that was quite striking to us. And then in 2018, we also saw

Calgary topping the list in the country, you know, in a similar fashion. I found that shocking when I read that as well, that in 2018, Calgary police shot nine people compared to Toronto, where police shot two people and had one fatality. And obviously, Toronto being a much larger city than Calgary. Well, absolutely. I mean, we've pointed out repeatedly, you know, policing is not a monolith. There's many different ways to police. There's many different ways to respond to, say, wellness checks, which is sort of, we see time and again that a lot of these incidents is somebody in some sort of mental health crisis. One of the main issues that critics seem to point to is this question of oversight. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about oversight in Alberta. Who is policing

the police in that province? Yeah, so in Alberta, you know, not all of the provinces in Canada have independent investigative bodies. Alberta has one called the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which was created in the 2000s when it was designed and founded. Amnesty International wrote sort of an open letter saying, wait a minute, you can't, the way you're doing this isn't acceptable. And what they were referring to is the fact that most of the investigators at the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team are in fact furloughed, or seconded is the term, from the very departments that they're investigating. So your Edmonton, your Calgary police, and your RCMP. The ACERT director says criticism the serious incident response team

is biased toward police is unfair. We are concerned that everybody gets fair treatment in this province. So the oversight body is actually made up of active police officers. Well, it's a mix. There are some retired police officers, there are a handful of civilians. And apparently, they do endeavor to kind of, you know, not have, you know, Calgary police or Edmonton police working on each other's cases. But people look at this, and they take issue with what seems to be a real potential conflict of interest there, in addition to the fact that there's this bigger question of police policing the police. So I'm curious to know what the Calgary police leadership has done to address some of these

systemic problems in the force. I mean, you spoke with Roger Chaffin, the former police chief, and it seems like he had some success with reforming the police force in Calgary. Tell me a bit about that. Yeah, I mean, Roger Chaffin came in and was sort of widely seen as somebody who wanted to reform a number of aspects, including, for example, importantly, and this is where he got a lot of friction, the naming of charged officers.

Tell them when I started that I will not be very popular if you're doing the things I'm going to do, but they must get done. And I'm hopeful I've worn a lot of that. There's a lot of pushback from the police association, which is the Calgary Police Association, which is the union. Well, what does the current police chief, Mark Neufeld, say he's going to do to address these issues?

So Mark Neufeld, and, you know, there's a bit in the film where he says, you know, it's not good enough to just say, oh, these are the problems of just one rotten apple. Where when something goes wrong, they hang out an individual to dry, and then they say, well, there we go. We dealt with that. Bob was bad, and we dealt with Bob, and now we're good. But I think this bad apples versus bad barrel, they're very different things.

To basically say that from the police chief saying we need to look at the bigger picture and see whether or not these are cultural factors, sort of internal or external to the department that are causing these problems. Now that actually translates to i mean that's a whole different question and i'll point out that you know part of what we're dealing with here there's there's bigger questions obviously in the in the discourse now to do with reforming police and uh you know and defunding the police and these type of discussions a lot of what we're dealing with here are even just behaviors that they're not controversial in the sense that, you know, these are behaviors that are demonstrably, you know, not acceptable within the current sort of rubric, however, you know, however insufficient or limited

that is. And it just doesn't necessarily seem that we're actually getting any sort of accountability even around those issues. We actually did just receive a response from the Calgary Police Services and it actually refers to your documentary directly. It says in part, quote, above the law underscores something our service has said many times in recent years. We need to do better. It should not take years to resolve complaints about police misconduct and the process needs to be consistent and fair for everyone involved. It then goes on to say we are committed to working with our community, the provincial government and the Mark, what's your response to that statement? to the content of the film, and I'm satisfied to see that there isn't some sort of, I don't see any challenge here to the sort of the factual basis of the film, which is always a good sign for us as filmmakers.

I don't doubt that there is a desire on the part of individuals at the Calgary Police Service to resolve these issues, to see a just resolution. It's just a question as to whether or not they as an institution and the other institutions that you know Oversee them can actually you know translate that into some sort of into meaningful outcomes you know there are So many aspects of the stories that we look at the film that are just not at all resolved And I think that there's a lot that the Calgary Police Service could do to see that there's some modicum of justice and some

Sense of or some tangible change that comes from, you know, those processes. Mark, I want to go back to where we started this conversation with Godfred Adaini Amiche. You started working on this documentary back in 2015, and you've been following Godfred Adaini Amiche. You started working on this documentary back in 2015, and you've been following Godfred for years now. How is he doing today? You know, Godfred, he keeps on keeping on, and he's a source of inspiration for us.

I mean, he's really, you know, I hope that he's been through the worst of it in terms of poverty. I mean, he's getting enough support from the government now that he's able to, again again have an apartment and subsist. And he's trying to figure out how to move forward. Hopefully one day all this will be over and take a trip back and go see the family. And he would like to perhaps one day have a business. And he somehow hasn't lost hope that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that there'll be justice in his case. And he is also suing the Calgary Police Services.

Yeah. And it names not only the officers, but also names the Crown Prosecution Service. I'm curious to know whether he's seen the documentary and his response to now really being the public face to the issues that you've been bringing up to now becoming a kind of whistleblower on the behavior of some officers within the Calgary Police Services. Oh, yeah. I mean, Godfrey has definitely seen the film. He's described it in a few different ways. You know, one is like on the one hand, it's re-traumatizing again to sort of, and bizarre to kind of see himself kind of, you know, walking us through what happened. You know, on the other hand, I think it's very gratifying for him in the sense that, you know, he has spent many years kind of this lone voice in the wilderness very much, you know, on his own trying to figure out again how to improve things for himself and also for others.

things for himself and also for others. And now that there is some attention, I think that that's something that really feels like that's really important to him, you know, that there's potentially some resolution. And again, there's just, you know, this was not a case that was covered widely in the media or anything like that. So I think he feels like perhaps this might help, you know, stimulate or encourage some change. Mark, it's a fascinating documentary. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thanks so much, Josh. Before we say goodbye, I want to share more from the response that Calgary Police Service sent us regarding the documentary. In an email, a spokesperson also added that CPS has been making changes to improve accountability,

including adding more civilian employees to deal with oversight, more resources to misconduct investigations, naming officers charged with a criminal offense, and publishing annual reports on all misconduct complaints. The statement also said that the Calgary Police Service had commissioned a retired chief justice to review their use of force in 2017, and that 80% of his recommendations have now either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented.

That includes more de-escalation training. And finally, the statement said that Constable Trevor Lindsay will face a disciplinary hearing this fall on non-criminal charges related to Godfrey's case, and that there's an internal investigation into why the other officers involved were not investigated. You can read more from the statement on our website, cbc.ca slash FrontBurner. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.