Front Burner - Dozens die in custody after public intoxication arrests

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

“Alcoholism is an illness, it’s not a crime and it certainly shouldn't be punishable by death.” That’s a message from Jeannette Rogers, whose son, Corey, died in police custody in Halifax in 2016. He is one of 61 people that a CBC investigation found had died after being detained for public intoxication or a related offence since 2010. In many cases, the investigation found that those arrested weren’t properly monitored, or their deteriorating health conditions were not addressed. Today, CBC investigative reporter Kristin Annable shares some of the stories of those who died, and talks about how deaths like these might be prevented.

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. A beloved carpenter nicknamed Dot Dot, a new dad on the way to meet his baby daughter, and an 18-year-old girl. These are just three of the 61 people a CBC investigation has found died in police custody since 2010

after being picked up for petty offences related to public intoxication. The 18-year-old, her name was Jocelyn George. That's her uncle, Matthew Lucas, describing her there. One day in 2016, Jocelyn was arrested twice by the Port Alberni RCMP for being intoxicated. After the first arrest, the cops let her leave the detachment in bare feet, with no attempt to reach a family member or friend who could help her get home safe. Shortly after, she was arrested again, put back in a holding cell.

She was given no food. She wasn't really checked on. When she still seemed out of it, 12 hours later, she was airlifted to Victoria, where she died in hospital of drug-induced inflammation of the heart. The forensic pathologist who did the post-mortem said Jocelyn had actually had a healthy heart. The problem was all the time she was left in the cell in medical distress. Her uncle questions why no one helped her sooner. Well, it makes us really upset. You know, we sit here and wonder, well, what does it take to be treated as a human being?

CBC investigative reporter Kristen Anable has gathered dozens of stories like Jocelyn's, and she joins me now to tell some of them and talk about how these kinds of deaths could be prevented. Hi, Kristen. Hello. It's great to have you on the show today and to talk about this really excellent investigation that you've done. And I was hoping you could start by telling me the story of John Etoway Capo. This is the carpenter nicknamed Dot Dot that I mentioned in the introduction. And could you tell me a bit about him?

So, yeah. So John grew up in Moose Lake and he's a member of Musaka Kaken Cree Nation. And that's an area in northern Manitoba. Now, when his kids were young, his wife left him. So he actually raised all of his children by himself. And his son Jeremy really remembers that time with his wife left him. So he actually raised all of his children by himself. And his son, Jeremy, really remembers that time with his father fondly. And he was a very, very skilled carpenter. I almost took carpentry, but I felt like it was a big shadow to fill. So I went in another trade.

But as Dot Dot's children grew up, Jeremy said his father fell into addiction. He began to live in the Paw, and that's sort of a town that's the main hub of the area near Moose Lake. And he mostly lived on the streets. He'd spend his mornings at the Friendship Centre, and his nights would be with his friends. And when we went to visit the Paw, it was just so clear how beloved this man was. Yeah, my dad, everyone spoke fondly of my dad. He was friendly. Everywhere we went, people knew Dot Dot, and they just said he was a kind person with a smile on his face. And everyone was just happy when they seen him, because he brought a smile to their faces.

And when he died, the manager at the Friendship Centre, she actually organized a service for him. And everyone came and we saw the book and there were just hundreds of signatures of people who just came wanting to say their final farewells to him. These are all the... Many family and friends that wouldn't say their goodbyes. Pages of families and friends. A lot of people knew my dad. Can you take me back to October 6th, 2019? What happened in the lead up to his death? So what we know is that Dot Dot had been out with some friends. He had been drinking and RCMP found him passed out outside of a local business.

So they picked him up. They brought him into the holding cells in their detachment for the night. And then when they went to wake him up in the morning, he was dead. Wow. What seems to have happened in the cell that he was held in to cut his life short? So initially, we really didn't know what had happened. And this is often the case with these in custody deaths, right? You get a police watchdog that is investigating them and, you know, they're often not even named. So we had heard about the death, but didn't know much about it. And then we had tracked down his son, Jeremy, and Jeremy had gotten a copy of the autopsy report and he had learned what had

happened to his dad. And what this report said was that Dot Dot was placed in this cell with two other intoxicated people. And at one point in the night, the leg of one of those men actually rolled onto Dot Dot's neck. And the security video shows that Dot Dot moved a couple times, almost as if he was trying to move the leg. And then he stops. And then you actually never see him moving on camera again and they found that leg was on there for 40 minutes and no one moved it oh my god they only they only found out because they reviewed the tape when they found he had died and the chief medical examiner said in the report that they cannot rule out that dot dot didn't get smothered to death by that leg i can't imagine how upsetting that must have been for his son to find that out.

Oh, Jeremy is absolutely devastated by what happened to his dad. I didn't really know officially until I got his report in April. What did you think when you read it? What did you think when you read it? It hurt. Because it showed that he was alive and that he obviously needed medical attention. Yeah, he was intoxicated, but he was still a human being. He needed help.

Jeremy, he lives in DePaul with his wife. They're going to teacher's college right now. They have a family themselves. And they had always saw their dad on around town. And he kind of always thought he had time to help his dad to get him the help he needed. And his dad was only 54 years old. And then this happens. And now he's just sort of left haunted by wondering, you know, what would have happened if he had gone to the hospital that night, anywhere, you know, but that jail cell. I miss him. I really do.

John's case is one of many that I know you looked at really closely, and I want to get to some more of those in a sec. But first, I was hoping we could zoom out here and talk about your investigation more broadly. You found 61 people who've died in police custody since 2010 after being detained for public intoxication or related offenses. But I wonder, what's the justification for detaining these people in jail just for being drunk in public in the first place? So every province and territory in Canada has some sort of law that allows police to do this. And the idea is that police need a mechanism to arrest somebody or detain someone if they see them as a danger to themselves or others. But in practice, what's end up happening is that police are being relied on to deal with and respond to what's often an addiction or a health issue.

on to deal with and respond to what's often an addiction or a health issue. And then in turn, communities are relying on these holding cells to act as a sobering center for the most vulnerable. But I think what our investigation has shown that it's not the ideal place for them. And across Canada, law enforcement use these laws to detain over 30,000 people each year. Wow. And so this is like a very minor offense, right? I think maybe the more familiar term for what we're talking about here is like being thrown in a drunk tank. That's right. And early on in our investigation, we actually made a decision that we weren't going to use the term drunk tank because we sort of looked at it as this demeaning way to look at how people were often dealing with addictions are policed.

It sort of brings up this image of the person who just had a wild night and needs to sleep it off. And it doesn't really, it doesn't look at the broader issue that these cells are being used frequently by people who are vulnerable, who don't have a home and suffer from an addiction. And it's because there are no other options. And then they're dying in these cells. 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 Couples. together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. I was hoping you could tell me about another case that you looked at. What happened to Corey Rogers in Halifax back in 2016? Yeah, so Corey Rogers, he was a new dad. He was actually outside of the hospital just going to visit his newborn daughter. And he had been drinking and he was picked up by Halifax police.

Now, he allegedly had spit at officers, so picked up by Halifax police. Now, he allegedly had spit at officers. So they put a spit hood on him. I don't know if you're familiar with what a spit hood is. Yes. But I wonder if you could describe it. I have an idea of what it is. So it sort of it goes over someone's head. And the idea is because, you know, spit can be dangerous. It can cause disease. So, you know, it goes over somebody's head. So this was placed on Rogers and he was taken to the police detachment and then put in the holding cell and they left the spit hood on. So this is now over his face. He's intoxicated. And now the two civilian guards, they were supposed to be checking on him every 15 minutes, but they didn't. Within hours, Rogers choked on his own vomit and died. Wow. That is shockingly horrible. I know that you talked to his family. What did they say to

you about his death? So his mother, Jeanette, has actually become a very outspoken advocate when it comes to how police treat people like Corey. As I've said before, alcoholism is an illness. It's not a crime. And it certainly shouldn't be punishable by death. She's come out to say she very much wants to see consequences for the officers who were involved in his arrest and for the people who were supposed to be guarding him. No reasonable person would have someone in their home, say on their coach, would have someone in their home, say on their coach, who was drunk, very drunk, and they wouldn't put a bag over their head and then leave them. But she also wants there to be a change where people see individuals like Corey as a human and look at ways in which his death could have been prevented. There's somebody's child or brother or

aunt or uncle or father, and you're right, they're people who are loved. And that's, they need to think, what would we do if it was our child? they need to think, what would we do if it was our child? I understand at least one of the cases that you investigated, the person who was put into a holding cell for public intoxication and died wasn't actually intoxicated at all, right? And can you tell me about that? That's right. And his name was Paul K. Yuryuk,

and he was found unconscious at a landfill in Baker Lake, Nunavut, back in 2012. RCMP assumed he was intoxicated and they took him back to their detachment. In fact, he was actually diabetic and had suffered a stroke. RCMP realized he needed medical help so that he had to be medevaced to Winnipeg where he died. And the inquest into his death later found, you know, he died of natural causes, but his medical care was delayed because they just assumed he was drunk. I think it's probably worth pointing out here that this man, Paul, also John and Jocelyn, were all Indigenous. And I wonder what that tells you about who is policed and how they're policed. Yeah, and in fact, we found that almost half of those who had died in police custody as part of this investigation were Indigenous, nearly half of them. And what that tells us, you know, Indigenous people do often live in communities where there are lesser, less social services and where our CMP is being, are being used as a replacement.

But what Indigenous leaders are telling us is that this shows there continues to be a bias when it comes to Indigenous people, that there's this assumption that they are drunk and dangerous and in turn, they're being over-policed because of it. You know, I suppose sort of related to this, it also strikes me that, especially in recent years, there's been so much public outcry about deaths at the hands of police when people are shot, for example. But I can't say I've seen the same amount of public attention given to these deaths in police custody, often in police stations of people who weren't charged with any crime who were ostensibly being held for their own well-being. And I wonder why you think that is. And you know what, that's something we

came across and was quite surprising, how often these deaths would go and were underreported, how often somebody would die in this manner. And we'd never even learned their names. Like there were people that we had to track down through obituaries because they had died in police custody, but there had never been any public inquest. So we just had never even known it had happened. Why that's happening? I guess because it's simply, I think, often written off as this idea that, oh, you know, they died of a natural cause or they died from a medical condition in police custody. This idea of maybe they brought it on themselves by being drunk or maybe that there was nothing

really that could have been done to prevent it when our investigation actually found that there were often times that you know there were many many ways that their deaths could have been prevented had they not been in police custody right i mean I mean, clearly, Corey, John, Jocelyn, Paul, they all died in different ways, but there are dangers. This investigation has shown very clearly that there are dangers in a jail cell when intoxicated people are there or when they're assumed to be intoxicated. So are there any protocols that currently exist to prevent people from

getting hurt or ultimately dying here? Yeah. Jurisdictions across the country, they have similar policies and procedures. The RCMP policy, for instance, says that someone detained in their cells should be checked on at least every 15 minutes. They also say if someone shows any sign of medical distress, you know, a guard or an officer is supposed to get them medical help. We found dozens of times where a procedure wasn't followed. And this was often found through looking through inquest reports that will happen sometimes years after the person has passed. But, you know, we'll find out, like we know from the autopsy report,

that Dot Dot wasn't monitored properly because no one removed that leg for 40 minutes. In the case of Corey Rogers, we know that guards actually testified that there were just too many people to ensure they were checking on him every 15 minutes. And it just points to a few issues. And it often just came down to resources. There weren't enough guards or officers to make sure everyone was looked after. We actually learned that a guard, an RCMP guard, is not allowed to go into a cell. Unless somebody is in absolute dire medical distress, they can open the cell. But if not, they have to find an RCMP officer to go into that cell to treat them. And that's for the guard's safety, right? The guard doesn't have a weapon and isn't trained to deal with use of force. But often you're dealing with these tiny communities where, you know, RCMP, there's a few RCMP officers and one guard,

and the RCMP officer might not even be in the building when something happens. Do the people that you've talked to, especially the families that you've talked to, even think that proper protocols in jail are really the answer here? Or is it possible that the issue is taking people to jail for public intoxication in the first place? So everyone we spoke to, and this includes police, agree that these holding cells are not the right place for a nonviolent intoxicated person. But what the problem is that in many of these communities, there isn't anywhere else to put them. And in some cases, you know, if you're a police officer

and you come across someone who's passed out in freezing temperatures, they need a safe place to put the individual. And often the cell is the only place for them. So I think what families want is to know that no matter where their loved one goes, they're taken care of. Don't just throw them in there and leave them. Keep an eye on them. Don't be mean to them. I don't want nobody else, family member, going the way my dad did. And that there's more of a push for better options so that it doesn't have to be a police cell.

I think he should have to be a police cell. I think he should have been taken to the hospital. I just believe he should have been anywhere else besides that jail cell. Do any better options exist anywhere? So there's places in Calgary, in Winnipeg, in Vancouver that offer, they have a thing called sobering centers. And these are 24 hour run facilities. And they have staff that are trained to deal with people who are intoxicated. And in many cities across the country, we have homeless shelters, but often they're dry shelters. So these are ones that will take in someone who's intoxicated straight from police. So police can just drop them off. A study of the

Calgary Sobering Center Alpha House, it found that when it was created, its clients had a 93% drop in the average number of days they spent in jail compared to the year before. And it found that the interactions between clients and police had dropped by more than 70% just by having this sobering center in existence. Wow. And I'm assuming that the people who got dropped off at the sobering center are monitored a lot better than they are in these jail cells. Correct. They're monitored. They're monitored by people who are more trained to deal with social issues rather than a police issue. And they're often medically trained.

And there's just, it's a better atmosphere. They have a bed. That's a big one. They have a bed. It's a comfortable place to be, but also it puts the person in an atmosphere where they can then access more services. Okay. Kristen, thank you. Thank you so much for this. Your investigation is so extensive. We couldn't cover everyone's story and every aspect of it on this episode. And I encourage our listeners to go and read it. But we're going to go out on something that Jeanette, Corey Rogers' mom said about what she wanted police to think about when they encounter intoxicated people, maybe even the same person over and over again. So, Kristen, again, thank you so much. You're welcome. I know that they get frequent flyers. I worked in psychiatry.

We had frequent flyers too, but you don't treat them inhumanely just because of that. You still try to help them rather than hurt them. The police are supposed to protect and serve. There was is all for today. If you like the show, please take a few minutes to rate and review it on whatever app you listen to. It really helps people find us. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and we'll talk to you tomorrow.