Tag Archives: rcmp

Timeline of transit police shooting fits troubling pattern of fatal encounters with B.C. police

An independent body has found transit police should be cleared of any wrongdoing in the December 2014 fatal shooting of a 23-year-old First Nations man named Naverone Woods.
An independent body has found transit police should be cleared of any wrongdoing in the December 2014 fatal shooting of a 23-year-old First Nations man named Naverone Woods.

Today (May 16) new details were released about the death of Naverone Woods, a 23-year-old First Nations man who was shot and killed by transit police in December 2014.

A report by the Independent Investigations Office of B.C. (IIOBC)—which cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing—includes a time line for the shooting. It notes that one of the first officers on the scene at a Safeway in Surrey fired the shots that killed Woods within 60 seconds of their arrival.

At 8:03 a.m., Woods entered the Safeway, according to the report. At 8:07 a.m., 911 received a call wherein Woods was reported to be stabbing himself with a knife.

Two minutes later, at 8:09 a.m., two transit police officers arrived and entered the Safeway. That same minute, two shots were fired and Woods was on the ground.

He was pronounced dead at Royal Columbia Hospital at 9:27 a.m.

Helen Slinger is a Vancouver-based documentarian whose recent film Hold Your Fire focused on police shootings involving a person experiencing a mental-health crisis. She told the Straight that the time line of the Woods shooting resembles many cases she reviewed for her film.

“It is very much a pattern,” Slinger said in a telephone interview. “Police are going in too fast, too hard.”

In researching Hold Your Fire, Slinger and fellow journalist  Yvette Brend read hundreds of coroner reports from across Canada. In B.C. alone, they found that between the years 2004 and 2014, 28 people were shot and killed by police or RCMP while experiencing a mental-health crisis.

“After two years of research it took to do that documentary, it was the one thing that finally, really jumped out at me,” she said. “That in so many of these high-profile police shootings of persons in mental distress…police just do not take the time to back up.”

High-profile cases

Stringer listed off a number of fatal police shootings that she described as similar to the Woods case in that officers fired their weapons within less than three minutes of their first encounter with their suspect.

In November 2014, Vancouver police officers shot and killed Phuong Na (Tony) Du less than two minutes after they arrived to apprehend him at the intersection of Knight Street and East 41st Avenue.

In July 2013, Toronto police shot and killed 18-year-old Sammy Yatim within one minute of the first officer arriving on the scene.

In August 2007, a Vancouver animator named Paul Boyd was shot by police on Granville Street. Less than three minutes had passed since the first officer had intervened.

In 2004, Christopher Reid was shot by Toronto police, also within three minutes of their arrival.

Slinger also mentioned Robert Dziekański, who, although not shot with a gun, died after RCMP repeatedly tasered him almost immediately after meeting Dziekański at Vancouver International Airport in October 2007.

The pattern Slinger says she’s noticed in coroner reports from across Canada mirrors findings of the Straight’s own analysis for British Columbia.

In February 2015, the Straight published a review of more than 120 coroner reports that dated from 2007 to 2014. During that period, there were 99 incidents where someonedied during an interaction with police.

An update the Straight published in December 2015 looked specifically at deaths involving firearms. It revealed an increase in those incidents. And, echoing Slinger’s findings, the Straight’s investigation revealed that the first few minutes or even seconds of an encounter often meant the difference between life and death.

Difficult circumstances

The IIOBC’s report on Woods describes difficult circumstances for the first transit police officers who arrive at the Surrey Safeway that morning.

Multiple eyewitnesses are quoted there describing the young man as holding two knives, failing to respond when people tried to intervene, and repeatedly inflicting harm on himself.

Those anecdotes support one another in stating that police repeatedly shouted warnings before any shots were fired. “Drop the knife,”, “Get down,” and “We’ll shoot,” people heard the officers say.

The witnesses are also in agreement that Woods “lunged” or was “moving towards” the officers when they met him just inside the store’s entrance.

A Safeway security guard told IIOBC investigators he estimated the length of time officers had their guns drawn before firing was between 10 and 12 seconds.

Transit police spokesperson Anne Drennan told the Straight she couldn’t comment on specifics pending the completion of investigations by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner and the B.C. Coroners Service.

But Drennan emphasized that transit police officers receive the same basic training as every police and RCMP officer in B.C. She emphasized that this includes instructions on mental health and the appropriate use of force.

“Since January 2012, the province of B.C. sets binding standards to ensure that B.C. police officers are trained to use crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques,” she said.

The province requires that officers receive a refresher on those topics every three years. The IIOBC report confirms that both officers involved received that training in July 2014.

A larger problem

Doug King is a Pivot Legal Society lawyer who keeps a close eye on police-involved deaths. He told the Straight the fact that the IIOBC cleared the officers of any wrongdoing is actually indicative of a larger problem.

“We know that this is the legal standard, currently,” King explained. “That if you’ve got someone who’s presenting with an edged weapon and they are physically advancing on an officer, the legal test is, basically, that at that point lethal force is justified.”

King asked why the officers were not equipped with alternative weapons that could have been used without killing Woods. He noted the IIOBC’s report concludes with the same question.

Like Slinger, King told the Straight that details in the IIOBC’s report fit a pattern.

“I would say it’s almost déjà vu,” he said. “We see these cases where the officers are not able to contain the individual until the appropriate resources arrive.”

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on May 16, 2016.

B.C. RCMP officers at centre of sharp rise in fatal police shootings

The family of Naverone Woods, a 23-year-old First Nations man who was fatally shot by transit police, is still waiting for answers about why guns were used.
The family of Naverone Woods, a 23-year-old First Nations man who was fatally shot by transit police, is still waiting for answers about why guns were used.

December 28 marks one year having passed since the death of Naverone Woods, a 23-year-old First Nations man who was shot and killed by transit police at a grocery store in Surrey.

On the phone from Hazelton, B.C., one of two Interior towns where Woods grew up, sister-in-law Tracey Woods said the family is still waiting for answers.

“We just want to have some kind of closure,” she explained. “And to know that there was an investigation done, that this case wasn’t just pushed aside.”

Tracey, whom a neighbour described as “like a stepmother” to Naverone, said she has questions about what efforts were made to deescalate the situation before force was deemed necessary, and why guns were used at all.

“We always compare it to a big grizzly bear that they will shoot, put to sleep, and relocate,” she continued. “How come they couldn’t use a Taser or something rather than drawing their weapons?”

Woods was the eighth British Columbian to die in a police-involved incident in 2014, according to a database maintained by the Georgia Straight. So far in 2015, that number stands at 11, the most for any year since 2009.

Last February, the Straight reported that a stark pattern emerged from an analysis of dozens of deaths involving B.C. authorities dating back to 2007: of 99 police-involved deaths investigated by the B.C. Coroners Service or scheduled for investigation, 90 percent involved a mental-health component, substance abuse, or both.

Now a review of that database updated for 2015 reveals another pattern: as deaths have increased, so has the frequency with which guns were involved in those incidents.

In 2015, there were seven fatal police shootings in B.C. That was up from five the previous year, two in 2013, four in 2012, five in 2011, three in 2010, and seven in 2009.

Six of those seven shootings in 2015 involved the RCMP. That compares to two during each of the years 2014, 2013, and 2012, and four in 2011, three in 2010, and five in 2009. Fatal RCMP shootings were geographically dispersed across the province. One exception is Surrey, where RCMP officers have shot and killed seven people since 2009.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said that, to an extent, the data simply speaks for itself.

“These numbers suggest a doubling of police-involved deaths in the last three years in B.C.,” Paterson told the Straight. “The number of people shot and killed by the RCMP have risen to the highest level in over 10 years. While these numbers don’t allow us to draw a conclusion as to why this is happening, they raise an alarm and require us to ask hard questions.”

The B.C. RCMP and the B.C. Ministry of Justice refused to grant interviews.

Steve Schnitzer is the police-academy director for the Justice Institute of B.C. He called attention to courses that focus on crisis intervention and deescalation tactics and how best to respond to emergencies involving a mental-health component. Those lessons were made mandatory in 2012 following the 2007 death of Robert Dziekański at Vancouver International Airport and the subsequent Braidwood Commission of Inquiry.

“That is a policing standard now,” Schnitzer emphasized. “It [training] changed significantly after the Braidwood commission report came out.”

Statistics compiled by the coroner’s service suggest that there is still room for improvement. According to the organization’s annual report for 2010, just 40 percent of coroner’s recommendations related to police-involved deaths were adopted by the agencies involved in those incidents (2010 being the most recent year for which such statistics were included).

Doug King, a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, said there is one factor that can make all the difference in how a police encounter plays out: time.

“There is a huge correlation—based on our work and what we see—with police-involved shootings and first responders,” he said.

King explained that when police officers fire their guns, the weapon is almost always discharged by an officer who was first on the scene and during the first few minutes of a confrontation.

“To me, that indicates there needs to be better training and a greater emphasis on what someone can do to contain an individual until help can arrive,” King said.

The death of Naverone Woods remains under investigation by the Independent Investigations Office of B.C., a public body created in 2012 to examine police incidents involving death or serious harm. Once that review is complete, the case will likely proceed to the coroner’s service.

King said that investigation is one of three he’ll be watching in 2016.

The second, he continued, is that of Phuong Na (Tony) Du, who was killed by Vancouver police at the corner of Knight Street and East 41st Avenue in November 2014. The third is Hudson Brooks, a 20-year-old male who was shot by Surrey RCMP in July 2015.

“These three shootings are all really problematic, from what we’ve heard, and really beg explanations,” King said.

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on December 23, 2015.

Varied takes on marijuana turn Metro Vancouver into a patchwork of unpredictable enforcement

Sarah Bowman was handcuffed by Burnaby RCMP after smoking a joint.
Sarah Bowman was handcuffed by Burnaby RCMP after smoking a joint.

Late one evening last February, Sarah Bowman was on her way home when she was approached by two RCMP officers at the Edmonds SkyTrain Station in Burnaby.

She had just smoked a joint, Bowman recounted in a telephone interview, but she didn’t think she was in real trouble. Bowman explained that she had a doctor’s prescription for the drug and had obtained it with that document at a medicinal-marijuana dispensary in Vancouver.

“I saw police officers making the rounds, so I threw my joint away,” she said. “They walked straight up to me, a gentleman showed me his badge, grabbed my hands, and handcuffed me without me even responding.”

Bowman sat on the ground as officers searched her bags. They didn’t find any marijuana and eventually located both Bowman’s prescription for cannabis and her dispensary membership card. But the RCMP officers dismissed those documents as irrelevant.

They argued that under existing laws, medicinal marijuana must be obtained via mail order from a certified Health Canada supplier. That is accurate (with exceptions) and remains true today.

On November 13, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau issued a mandate letter that stated the Ministry of Justice should “create a federal-provincial-territorial process that will lead to the legalization and regulation of marijuana”. But Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould (MP for Vancouver Granville) has yet to act on that directive.

Both the Justice Ministry and the RCMP refused to grant interviews. Cpl. Janelle Shoihet, a spokesperson for the B.C. RCMP, did however confirm officers are still enforcing cannabis laws including those that prohibit possession.

Dana Larsen is vice president of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries. He told the Straight that although the country remains in a period of transition on marijuana, municipal jurisdictions are policing cannabis as they see fit. Larsen suggested that situation has turned an urban region like Metro Vancouver into an unpredictable patchwork where some jurisdictions zealously enforce drug laws while others turn a blind eye to petty crimes like possession.

“In B.C., it totally depends on the mayor and the mayor and city council,” he said.

Bowman was travelling from Vancouver to New Westminster but stopped in Burnaby to visit her boyfriend. The Vancouver Police Department has long maintained it does not consider marijuana possession an enforcement priority. Meanwhile, in 2014, the New Westminster Police Department recorded a seven-year low for drug offences (going as far back as data is publicly available). But Burnaby is policed by the RCMP.

“They left me shaking uncontrollably and terrified,” said Bowman, who was eventually released without charges. “I used to think that police officers were there to help. Now, I’m paranoid. I’m afraid of police.”

Murray Rankin, opposition critic for justice and NDP MP for Victoria, told the Straightthat stories such as Bowman’s should serve as a warning. He said cities like Vancouver and New Westminster may not consider it a priority to go after someone with a joint but anecdotal evidence suggests the situation is different in jurisdictions covered by the RCMP.

“It’s quite a varied landscape out there,” he said. “We want a coherent position across the country.”

Rankin added that the situation on Vancouver Island is similar to that of Metro Vancouver. The City of Victoria (which has its own municipal police force) has tacitly accepted marijuana storefronts and is drafting regulations comparable to those Vancouver adopted last June. Meanwhile, Rankin continued, in Nanaimo (where the RCMP patrols the streets), marijuana is still getting people into trouble with law enforcement.

Barely an hour after Rankin’s call with the Straight, the RCMP issued a news releasestating they had executed search warrants at three marijuana dispensaries in Nanaimo.

Rankin acknowledged that legalizing marijuana—that is, creating a framework for sales similar to rules that cover tobacco—will be complicated and take time. But he argued it would not be hard for the federal government to decriminalize possession of small amounts of cannabis. Rankin noted the Liberals have discussed this as a likely first step, and he wondered when that will happen.

As few as seven percent of B.C. marijuana violations result in charges, according to a 2011 analysis published by the University of the Fraser Valley. But according to B.C. Justice Ministry numbers, from 2003 to 2012, police across the province recorded 173,157 offences related to cannabis.

Larsen emphasized that even without a charge, an apprehension such as the encounter with RCMP Bowman experienced is usually entered into a police database, where it can remain for years and create problems for someone when the apply for a job or travel to the United States.

Like Rankin, Larsen said he accepts that full legalization will likely be a long process. “But there is no reason to continue arresting people for possession,” he said. “Especially when those charges are likely going to be dropped in a few months anyways. What’s the point?”

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This article was originally published in print and online at Straight.com on December 2, 2015.

CBC doc Hold Your Fire reveals B.C. police shot and killed 28 people experiencing a mental-health crisis

A new documentary scheduled to air on CBC examines a number of deaths involving police, including that of Paul Boyd (left), a Vancouver animator who was shot and killed in 2007.
A new documentary scheduled to air on CBC examines a number of deaths involving police, including that of Paul Boyd (left), a Vancouver animator who was shot and killed in 2007.

Research behind a forthcoming CBC Television documentary includes new data on Vancouver police encounters with people experiencing a mental-health crisis. It suggests despite progressive training, many incidents still end with an officer deploying lethal force.

For the period 2004 to 2014, investigative journalists Helen Slinger and Yvette Brend analyzed hundreds of coroners’ reports from jurisdictions across Canada.

In British Columbia, they found evidence police or RCMP officers shot 28 people who were experiencing a mental-health crisis, Slinger revealed in a telephone interview. That was out of 72 such incidents for the country as a whole.

The filmmaker added that according to a “very conservative estimate”, nearly 40 percent of all fatal police shootings in Canada involved either a person with a mental illness or an individual experiencing a mental-health crisis.

Slinger noted distinct themes emerged in those coroners’ reports.

The first was that when a police officer did fire a weapon, that usually happened almost immediately after they encountered a person in distress. The second was that training could be clearly traced to make a notable difference in outcomes.

“It comes down to what happens before police arrive at the scene,” she said. “If you are trained to approach with a command and control attitude, that could very likely backfire with someone in mental distress.”

The documentary is called Hold Your Fire. It was produced by Bountiful Films and is scheduled to debut on CBC Television as part of the network’s Firsthand program on Thursday, October 22.

The hour-long film looks at a number of police-involved deaths across the country. Those include the case of Sammy Yatim, who was shot by Toronto police in 2013, and Paul Boyd, a Vancouver animator who police shot and killed in 2007.

With video footage of those deaths plus interviews with family members, Hold Your Firemakes the case that neither young man needed to die.

“The police were the cause of the violence that night,” Boyd’s father says in the film.

Slinger’s findings mirror those of the Georgia Straight’s own analysis for British Columbia.

In February 2015, the Straight published a review of more than 120 coroners’ reports that dated from 2007 to 2014.

During that period, it was found there were 99 incidents where someone died in the custody of the RCMP or police.

Of those cases, the Straight determined 17 deaths involved a mental-health issue, 59 involved substance abuse, and at least 13 involved both drugs and a mental-health component. (The Straight’s analysis differed from Slinger’s in a number of ways. For example, in addition to looking at cases involving a mental illness, it also included situations where a person struggled with a serious addiction issue.)

Again echoing Slinger’s findings, the Straight’s investigation revealed that the first few minutes or even seconds of an encounter often meant the difference between life and death.

It’s those brief windows that Slinger focuses on in her documentary.

“We started out looking for that moment, asking, ‘how do you pull back?’” she said. “And what I felt was really obvious is it is how the particular unit goes to that call that makes all the difference.”

Slinger said if there is one message she hopes people take from her documentary, it is that police officers need to slow down when responding to an individual experiencing a mental-health crisis.

Hold Your Fire presents tangible lessons for how that can be accomplished without significantly adding to the risks that police officers face on the job.

While Slinger described the Vancouver Police Department as a force where there is “still lots of room for improvement”, she also said it stands “among the most progressive police forces in the country in terms of their programs for people with mental illness”.

She suggested what’s at play within the VPD and other departments across Canada is a sort of competition between old and new schools of police training.

For example, the documentary explains that in North America, many departments train officers to respond with lethal force if a person perceived to be a threat moves within 20 feet of an officer. That lesson, which can be engrained to a point where it can play out almost as a muscle reflex, can come into conflict with training for how one can de-escalate a potentially violent situation without using lethal force.

“Vancouver has kept moving in that direction with a number of programs that are very progressive,” she said. “I think it just hasn’t made its way through the entire force yet. But I do think things are changing.”

In 2014, Vancouver police recorded an all-time high for apprehensions it made under the Mental Health Act, a law that permits officers to detain individuals deemed to have a mental disorder and to pose a threat to themselves or others. Officers apprehended 3,010 people under the act, a number that has increased each year, up from 2,278 in 2009.

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This article was originally published online at Straight.com on October 6, 2015.

RCMP record reveals a long list of calls to Kinder Morgan properties in Burnaby

RCMP officers drag an opponent of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project away from a November 2014 demonstration atop Burnaby Mountain. Jackie Dives photo.
RCMP officers drag an opponent of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project away from a November 2014 demonstration atop Burnaby Mountain. Jackie Dives photo.

How much time does the Burnaby RCMP spend policing Kinder Morgan properties?

It’s a question politicians are asking again after RCMP records obtained by the Georgia Straight shed some light on how many calls the force receives in relation to the pipeline company.

“There are a whole lot of calls in 2014 and 2015, more so than other years,” said Burnaby city councillor Sav Dhaliwal. “I think that is a result of activity relating to the expansion project. That has brought Kinder Morgan into the public arena.”

Dhaliwal was referring to the company’s plans to twin an existing pipeline that carries heavy crude oil from Alberta to a port in Burnaby. Last November, the RMCP arrested dozens of people when they refused to leave a protest on Burnaby Mountain that aimed to disrupt survey work Kinger Morgan was conducting in the area.

Those sorts of heightened tensions around environmental concerns are driving the increased volume in calls, Dhaliwal suggested.

“The last couple of years, the activity just suddenly picked up,” he continued. “I think Kinder Morgan bears the responsibility for any additional activity for the RCMP on the financial side of it.”

RCMP data supplied in response to a freedom of information request provides basic details for 53 calls the force received in relation to Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby Mountain facilities and the company’s Westridge Marine Terminal from 2010 to March 2015. However, the record is not complete and the actual number of calls the RCMP received could be much higher.

The RCMP withheld information on an unknown number of calls citing sections of the Access to Information Act. Those pertain to disclosures of information obtained or prepared in the investigation of a crime or enforcement of the law.

In a brief telephone interview, Burnaby RCMP Cpl. Daniela Panesar declined to discuss specifics. The spokesperson for the force clarified that the list displays calls to police and does not state whether any call resulted in an officer or officers being dispatched. Panesar also declined to provide any context or opinion indicating whether the volume of calls to Kinder Morgan facilities was in any way atypical.

Documentary filmmaker David Lavallee has a rough idea how much time went into each of those 53 calls.

In a telephone interview, he recounted one afternoon last November when he recorded video of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Marine Terminal using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lavallee is producing a film about unconventional energy reserves and that terminal is a key transit point for bitumen mined in Alberta.

Two days after filming, Lavallee told the Straight he received a voicemail message from the RCMP. Two weeks after that, two community RCMP officers knocked on his door and left a business card while he was out.

In a subsequent telephone call with a third officer, RCMP national security investigatorGregory Haasdyk, Lavallee asked how authorities came to know of his interests in energy infrastructure.

“He [Haasdyk] said, ‘We got a call, a complaint, from Kinder Morgan, who had called in your [licence] plate,” Lavallee said.

In a recording of that conversation, Haasdyk maintains a friendly tone and answers Lavallee’s questions.

“Kinder Morgan does make a lot of complaints,” Haasdyk says. “And if we don’t know who they are complaining against then, yes, we do have to go and find that out.”

After reviewing the RCMP record obtained by the Straight, Lavallee noted he could not find his own encounters with the RCMP listed there. Another incident missing from the document is a March 6 call the RCMP received about an SFU professor named Tim Takaro. On that date, Takaro caught the attention of a Kinder Morgan security guard by taking a photograph of the Burnaby Mountain property. Five days later, he too received acall from the RCMP.

Lavallee said those two missing dates make him suspect the actual number of calls the RCMP fields in relation to Kinder Morgan is much higher than 53.

“Certainly, in my case, it was an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,” he added.

In a telephone interview, Kinder Morgan spokesperson Ali Hounsell said any call the company makes to the RCMP is a matter of public safety.

“When our security folks do report something, it is because there is something suspicious,” she emphasized.

Hounsell noted Kinder Morgan’s private guards will engage a person before calling police. She cited a recent encounter with a CBC National News crew where guards asked journalist Chris Brown why the group was filming adjacent to company property.

“Those are normal conversations that happen, I would say quite regularly,” Hounsell said. “It’s just when it’s something unusual that it does get reported to police.”

Meanwhile, a number of other RCMP documents have come to light in recent years that use dramatic language to describe environmentalists and First Nations people.

“There is a high probability that we could see flash mobs, round dances and blockades become much less compliant to laws,” reads an RCMP document dated December 2012. “The escalation of violence is ever near.”

A 2014 RCMP intelligence assessment similarly warns that in British Columbia, “there is a coalition of like-minded violent extremists who are planning criminal actions to prevent the construction of the pipeline.”

B.C.’s lone Green party MLA, Andrew Weaver, described the sort of government surveillance revealed in those documents as “carried away”.

On the RCMP call list obtained by the Straight, he asked the same questions posed by Dhaliwal.

“I don’t want to second guess it [the RCMP] but it does seem like a lot,” Weaver said. “It really begs the question: why? Why were the RCMP being called so many times? What for? What could possibly warrant it?”

He also asked if citizens were getting in trouble for simply wandering to close too a fence, and warned that could constitute an infringement on their civil liberties.

Weaver revealed such an incident happened to him, though under different circumstances. He recounted travelling Europe for a summer with a friend named Tony.

“Tony saw this amazing power plant, which was so archaic that he wanted to take a picture of it,” Weaver recounted. “So he took out his camera to take a picture. And security guards came running up with sub-machine guns.”

“But this was in East Germany,” Weaver said with a laugh. “I would have loved for it to have been 1984 but it was 1982. So this is the direction we are heading.”

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This article was originally published online at Straight.com on October 3, 2015.

In Canada, officials keep close watch on environmental activists

Protesters are led to a police van after being detained by RCMP officers during a demonstration against the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline protest on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia on November 20, 2014. Ben Nelms / Reuters photo.
Protesters are led to a police van after being detained by RCMP officers during a demonstration against the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline protest on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia on November 20, 2014. Ben Nelms / Reuters photo.

This article was originally published online at Al Jazeera America on August 5, 2015.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — On July 16, James McIntyre, 48, was shot and killed by police outside a public meeting about a proposed hydroelectric dam in Dawson Creek, a small town in northeastern British Columbia. The dam, called Site C, is controversial among environmentalists and First Nations people, and the night McIntyre was shot, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were responding to reports that a protester was disrupting the meeting.

Little is known about the circumstances surrounding his death, but in a video taken immediately after the shooting, his blood can be seen pooling on the sidewalk and dripping into the street. Eventually, two officers approach his slumped body and place restraints on it while a third policeman keeps his gun drawn.

A day after the shooting, it emerged that McIntyre was not the person who interrupted the meeting, though he was reportedly wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding a knife. Five days after McIntyre’s death, Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney responded to questions about the incident at a press conference in a Vancouver suburb.

“I’ve said clearly in the past, there are many ways, in this country that enjoys freedom, to express our democratic views,” he said. “I invite those who want to express their views to use democratic ways. Those who don’t expose themselves to face the full force of the law.”

According to Sean Devlin, an activist who has spent the last two years working on a documentary about Canadian government surveillance, both the shooting and Blaney’s remarks are consistent with a larger government crackdown on environmental activists. “They are using violence to intimidate those who oppose [projects like the Site C Dam],” Devlin said, adding that what the country’s conservative government tolerates as legitimate dissent is shrinking.

Nowhere is this tension felt more acutely than in British Columbia, where the province’s premier, Christy Clark, has staked her legacy on transforming the region into a global hub for liquefied natural gas. In addition to megaprojects like the Site C dam, two pipelines are under discussion that would carry massive amounts of heavy crude from the Athabasca oil sands in central Alberta to the coast of British Columbia. The scramble for natural resources has turned Canada’s westernmost province into a battleground for conservationists, and First Nations people have led the way in fighting these efforts.

The environmental movement in British Columbia is diverse and gaining public support. It enjoys the backing of Vancouver’s mayor, for example, and rallies attract thousands, including families. Occasionally, there are confrontations with police. In November 2014 dozens of people were arrested when they refused to leave a protest camp erected to prevent survey work related to a proposed pipeline expansion. But that incident eventually ended peacefully, without violence or accusations of police brutality.

Meanwhile, evidence has slowly revealed that several Canadian security agencies are monitoring the activities of pipeline opponents, demonstration organizers and First Nations people involved in related activities. Documents released in response to freedom of information requests present a picture of state surveillance that activists say is stifling dissent. In the wake of McIntyre’s death, these tensions have only heightened.

Widespread surveillance

One afternoon in March 2015, Tim Takaro, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and a self-described activist, was out for lunch with his teenage daughter when her cellphone rang. On the other end was an RCMP officer who wanted to know her father’s whereabouts.

After she handed the phone to him, the officer said he was calling about photographs Takaro took of a property owned by Kinder Morgan, an oil pipeline company. Takaro acknowledged that one week earlier, he had had a brief interaction with a security guard working for Kinder Morgan. But the incident was nothing serious, Takaro recounted. He was simply asked to stop taking pictures. Takaro thought it was all a misunderstanding until the officer continued to press him. “Then he said, ‘We also saw your car at a protest in November,’” Takaro continued. “And then, ‘But don’t worry, there are no criminal charges.’”

“It was definitely intimidation,” Takaro concluded.

Over the last several years, stories like Takaro’s have corroborated documents released through freedom of information requests that outline the extent to which law enforcement agencies are monitoring environmental activists. These files are notable for the language they use to describe protesters and the level of detail they include on the activities of organizations and the lives of their members.

An RCMP internal document dated December 2012 compares the First Nations movement Idle No More to “bacteria,” warning, “it has grown a life all of its own all across the nation.”

“There is a high probability that we could see flash mobs, round dances and blockades become much less compliant to laws,” it continues. “The escalation of violence is ever near.”

Two years later, a separate RCMP intelligence assessment warns, “violent anti-petroleum extremists will continue to engage in criminal activity to promote anti-petroleum ideology.” The 44-page document, made public by Greenpeace in February, calls attention to British Columbia, saying, “there is a coalition of like-minded violent extremists who are planning criminal actions to prevent the construction of the pipeline.” Yet with rare exceptions, there are almost no reports of existing environmental groups engaging in illegal actions. When asked for examples, RCMP representatives usually cite a series of attacks that occurred in the 1990s. (These were the actions of one man, Wiebo Ludwig, who in 2000 was convicted of sabotaging oil and gas infrastructure in northern Alberta.)

In March, declassified documents revealed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s equivalent of the CIA, was involved in helping local law-enforcement agencies track protesters, particularly in British Columbia. That memo also described the role of the Government Operations Centre, another federal agency, in compiling a “risk forecast” report for the 2014 “spring summer protest and demonstration season.” A previously released Government Operations Centre document includes details of more than 800 demonstrations throughout Canada since 2009.

The names of well-known Canadian environmental groups appear in these documents. Among them are Greenpeace, Tides Canada, the Sierra Club, the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Wilderness Committee and Idle No More.

Creating paranoia

In November 2014, David Lavallee, a Vancouver-based filmmaker, used a small unmanned aerial vehicle to record footage of an oil tanker marine terminal that serves as the endpoint for a Kinder Morgan oil pipeline. Lavallee is producing a documentary about unconventional energy sources such as the oil sands, and the facility he videotaped receives significant amounts of diluted bitumen from Alberta.

Two days later, he received a voice mail from a local RCMP detachment. That was followed by a visit from two local police officers and a visit from officers with the RCMP’s anti-terrorism unit.

In a subsequent telephone call, an officer warned him, “What you are doing could be seen as a precursor to terrorist behavior,” Lavallee said.

“I’m not a terrorist,” he told them. “I’m a kindergarten teacher.”

Lavallee wasn’t surprised when he learned about the Dawson Creek shooting, saying that it was only a matter of time before a violent confrontation occurs between protesters and police. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he said.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, a former organizer with Idle No More, now works as an campaigner on indigenous issues for the climate change group 350.org. Documents made public by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in October 2014 reveal that the RCMP has monitored his activities since at least 2010.

“A known member of the Indigenous Environmental Network will be heading to northern B.C. tomorrow,” reads a reference to Thomas-Muller that appears in an RCMP occurrence report dated July 7, 2010. “We would like to anticipate and monitor any protests in order to keep you informed if these protests happen in your detachment areas.”

On the phone from his home in Winnipeg, Thomas-Muller said he suspected that the government was monitoring him. He recounted how RCMP officers often acted as if they were familiar with him when they saw him at public demonstrations, making clear they knew his name and face.

“These things are designed to create paranoia. They are designed to create mistrust. They are designed to affect your confidence in your cause,” he said.

The Canadian Ministry of Public Safety and the RCMP refused repeated requests for interviews. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service did not respond to emails or voice mail messages. An emailed statement supplied by RCMP spokeswoman Annie Delisle claims the force respects the public’s right to peaceful demonstration. “Security operations balance individual rights and freedoms with the need to maintain public safety, peace and good order,” it reads.

Stewart Phillip is the president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and a prominent figure in the province’s environmental movement. He described the federal government’s monitoring of environmentalists as part of its focus on the development of the Alberta oil sands and pipelines.

He called attention to the controversial anti-terrorism legislation Bill C-51, which was passed into law on June 18. He warned that several aspects of Bill C-51 could be used against environmentalists. For example, the bill broadens the definition of an “activity that undermines the security of Canada” to include anything that targets the country’s “economic or financial stability” or “critical infrastructure” — including energy projects such as pipelines.

Activists such as Takaro worry that this legislation could be used to expand what he sees as overreaching federal oversight. “The thing that is most concerning to me is that with Bill C-51, my taking a picture could actually be construed as a criminal act, because it could be construed as interfering with critical infrastructure,” he said.

“If they are really after you,” Takaro continued, “you’re not paranoid, right?”

This article was originally published online at Al Jazeera America on August 5, 2015.