'MemeGate' disciplinary hearing to begin for 5 suspended Lethbridge police officers

A disciplinary hearing is set to begin for five suspended Lethbridge police officers who face a total of 32 misconduct charges for allegedly distributing offensive memes.

Lethbridge Police Service's co-called "MemeGate" disciplinary hearing is set to take place Tuesday, eight months after five officers were suspended after being accused of distributing inappropriate images.

While most of the memes are disrespectful to LPS leadership, some have racial or sexist undertones, according to sources who have viewed the images.

The officers, who are charged with numerous counts of discreditable conduct, insubordination and neglect of duty, are currently suspended with pay.

Not guilty pleas

One of the five officers, Const. Keon Woronuk, was already disciplined for spying on MLA Shannon Phillips.

In June, Woronuk, Const. Matthew Rilkoff, Const. Derek Riddel and Const. David Easter had all pleaded not guilty to each of their six charges which fall under the Police Act.

Sgt. Jason Moulton also pleaded not guilty. He faces the same charges plus two others.

The professional conduct hearing is set to take place at the Galt Museum.

The meme investigation began in 2018 and was conducted by Edmonton Police Service, which forwarded its findings to LPS in December.

'Cruel and reprehensible': Edmonton police sued after officer allegedly kicks Indigenous youth in the head


Seems reasonable. Show up at a disturbance call, kick a kid in the head so hard he needs a plate put in his skull to protect his brain.

Oh, wait . . .

Edmonton police withheld video of officer assault on Indigenous man for 4 months

For four months, Edmonton police withheld from prosecutors a private citizen's cellphone video showing a violent assault by an officer on an Indigenous man.

The video showed a police officer driving his knee into the back of a prone, defenceless Elliot McLeod during an August 2019 arrest.

Both Edmonton police and Mcleod's lawyer confirmed to CBC News in recent weeks that the video was withheld from prosecutors following McLeod's violent arrest.

After the video was disclosed, prosecutors stayed four criminal charges against McLeod, including resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

The Crown instead charged, and a judge subsequently convicted, one of the arresting officers for what the judge called a "gratuitous" assault.

Police arrested McLeod on Aug. 27, 2019. The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) received the video the next day from a private citizen. But EPS did not disclose it to Crown prosecutors until late December 2019, about two weeks before McLeod's trial.

Legal experts say police should have disclosed the video to the Crown and McLeod's defence lawyer as soon as possible. A former Crown prosecutor said the failure by EPS to immediately disclose the video violated the law and undermined McLeod's rights.

"The law is very clear that all relevant evidence gathered by the police has to be turned over to the Crown immediately, and then has to be disclosed by the Crown to the defence," said Paul Moreau, who is now a criminal defence lawyer.

. . .

About six weeks before police disclosed the video, prosecutors offered McLeod a plea deal of 65 days in jail and 12 months of probation. McLeod's former lawyer, Nicole Sissons, said he turned down the offer because he insisted he was innocent.

University of Alberta criminal law professor Steven Penney said full disclosure should be provided before a plea is offered.

"If there is a big piece of the puzzle missing — and this video is obviously a huge piece of that puzzle — you wouldn't want to see someone, for example, pleading guilty to something that they very likely were innocent of because that evidence was absent at the time," Penney said.

Former B.C. solicitor general says judicial review needed in Alberta police brutality case

Crown refused to prosecute assault charge against Edmonton officer laid by police watchdog

There should be a judicial review of Alberta Justice's refusal to prosecute an Edmonton police officer whose violent attack on a handcuffed prisoner was captured on video, British Columbia's former solicitor general says.

Kash Heed, who also served as West Vancouver's police chief during his 32-year policing career, said the attack by Edmonton Police Service Const. Dylan Awid on a truck thief in June 2019 was one of the worst incidents of excessive force by a police officer that he has ever seen.

"The justice minister has to take some accountability for this," Heed said.

A retired judge, he said, should "review this entire incident from the outset right to the decision of Crown counsel. And they should be guided by what that (judge) may find."

CBC News obtained civilian and security camera video of police swarming truck thief Kyle Parkhurst, who rammed two police vehicles after being hemmed in behind a downtown Edmonton apartment building.

The videos show an officer — not Awid — smashing Parkhurst with what appears to be a handgun, knocking him to the ground where he is immediately swarmed by officers.

While he was on the ground, Parkhurst was Tasered and stomped by several officers before he was handcuffed.

Awid looks over both shoulders — apparently to see if anyone is watching — before he kicks the handcuffed prisoner three times while he lies face down on the ground.

Awid picks up Parkhurst and slams him head first into a brick wall, and then rapidly marches him toward a police cruiser where he delivers an elbow smash to the back of Parkhurst's head, which ricochets off the vehicle's mirror. He then pushes Parkhurst hard against the cruiser.

None of the other officers intervened to stop the attack on the prisoner.

"They will say it is the same standard. But it is a different standard that they use for prosecuting police officers who assault citizens as compared to citizens who have been alleged to have assaulted police officers. And it is just a travesty."

The blue line and that double standard certainly makes me doubt the conduct of police officers when they claim they used an appropriate level of force.

Officers aren’t just told about the risks they face. They are shown painfully vivid, heart-wrenching dash-cam footage of officers being beaten, disarmed, or gunned down after a moment of inattention or hesitation. They are told that the primary culprit isn’t the felon on the video, it is the officer’s lack of vigilance. And as they listen to the fallen officer’s last, desperate radio calls for help, every cop in the room is thinking exactly the same thing: I won’t ever let that happen to me. That’s the point of the training.

The mystique that has helped cement the RCMP as a national symbol is also what renders it particularly, stubbornly difficult to reform

LATE LAST YEAR, Charlene Bagley shared an emotional video. In it, she calls her dad a hero and vows that she will find out exactly what happened to him. Her father, Tom Bagley, was one of the twenty-two people gunned down in Portapique, Nova Scotia, in April 2020.

In the nine-minute recording, Bagley speaks about the toll taken by eight months without her father and what it feels like to still have no concrete sense of how he died. “I continue to wake up daily with visions of what I think happened based on the very little information that we’ve received, trying to piece together the story that seems so unbelievable,” she says. “The story we’ve been told from the very beginning has changed many times. There are so many holes that one would wonder, ‘Is there something they’re trying to hide?’”

Late at night on April 18, a gunman attacked his partner in their home in the beach community of Portapique, about a ninety-minute drive north of Halifax. He burned the house down, killed his neighbours, and continued on a thirteen-hour killing spree while dressed in an RCMP uniform and driving a mock RCMP cruiser. The RCMP, which is in charge of policing in the area, relied on social media to alert the public, issuing a single tweet advising of a weapons complaint in Portapique at 11:30 p.m. Its next tweet went out shortly after 8 a.m. the following morning, this time describing the event as “an active shooter situation.” Rather than call in the nearby Truro police, the RCMP summoned its own reinforcements from Halifax and New Brunswick, both farther away. Meanwhile, the gunman’s rampage continued for several more hours before he encountered, in a bit of policing serendipity, an RCMP tactical team at a gas station in Enfield.

“There is an enormous amount of questions and uncertainty about what the RCMP did,” says Sandra McCulloch, a lawyer representing the families of the victims in a proposed class action against the RCMP and the attorneys general of Nova Scotia and Canada. The RCMP didn’t send out enough officers given the severity of the crime, their lawsuit alleges, and the force should have known it. “The RCMP failed to accept and act on credible information,” reads the statement of claim, which also condemns the force for using Twitter instead of the new provincial alert system, releasing tweets that didn’t match the information given in 911 calls, and failing to call in local police, who could have responded more quickly.

The proposed class action is led by Andrew O’Brien and Tyler Blair. O’Brien’s wife was killed; Blair’s father and stepmother were killed and their house was set on fire. Their criticism of the RCMP isn’t restricted to those critical thirteen hours of the rampage itself. They condemn the force for failing to investigate past allegations that the gunman possessed illegal weapons and that he had been physically abusive to women, including his long-time girlfriend. Their lawsuit alleges the Nova Scotia attorney general failed to ensure that there were enough RCMP officers in some counties and that those officers had sufficient resources to do their jobs.

They contend, too, that the RCMP’s communication since the attack has been “high-handed, self-serving and disrespectful and is deserving of punishment.” Specifically, they say families were misled about the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths and allege that, in one case, a car was returned with gun casings and body parts still inside.

Questions of accountability, timeliness, sensitivity to victims, and the RCMP’s ability to work well with other police forces have precedent: they all came up before Portapique, perhaps most famously in the case of Robert Pickton—the largest investigation into a Canadian serial killer, which spanned years and involved hundreds of investigators.

Pickton was arrested by Coquitlam RCMP in BC in 1997 and charged with attempted murder following a violent attack on a sex worker. At the time, both the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department were well aware that women from the Downtown Eastside were going missing and being killed at alarming rates and that many of the victimized women were Indigenous sex workers. The RCMP corporal handling the attempted murder case clearly believed there was a connection between Pickton and the missing women, so even after the Crown stayed the charges in 1998, he made surveillance requests premised on the idea that Pickton was picking up women in Vancouver and taking them home to kill them. Pickton “was the logical suspect,” an inquiry would later determine. But it took five years to charge him with the murders.

In 2010, Vancouver’s deputy police chief, Doug LePard, released a scathing 400-page report reviewing the force’s joint investigation with the RCMP. He wrote that much of the information Vancouver police had collected about Pickton—“sufficient to justify a sustained investigation”—was passed on to the RCMP for action that never followed.

“RCMP management appears to have not understood the significance of the evidence they had,” LePard found. When two Mounties did interview Pickton, in January 2000, LePard wrote, Pickton denied killing women but was cagey when it came to whether DNA from the missing women might be found on his property. Neither Mountie asked any follow-up questions. An offer from Pickton to search his farm was another dropped lead.

Overall, the investigation was “a disaster,” says Rob Gordon, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University. “The RCMP saw themselves as being cock of the roost, and these municipal forces were lesser mortals,” Gordon says. “That’s a well-recognized problem that keeps surfacing and then disappearing again.”

Lethbridge's police commission has rejected a call for a public inquiry into allegations that members of the Lethbridge Police Service threatened retaliation against NDP MLA Shannon Phillips and CBC journalist Meghan Grant for exposing misconduct within the force.

Rob vanSpronsen, the chair of the commission, said in a statement the circumstances around the request were "problematic."

"Not only do the anonymous communications lack specific information that definitively confirms they originate from LPS [Lethbridge Police Service] employees, the allegations contained in them lack any substantive supporting details," vanSpronsen wrote.

Michael Bates, a Calgary defence lawyer, called for the public inquiry in September. He represents Phillips and a woman who accused a retired LPS inspector of sexual assault, both of whom received anonymous whistleblower letters in June.

The alleged threats follow Phillips' revelations earlier this year that police monitored her while she was the NDP's environment minister.