May 15, 2008 | In Law |
Willow Kinloch, a teenager arrested and hogtied by Victoria City police in May 2005, has been awarded $60,000 in damages for false imprisonment and cruel and unusual punishment by a BC Supreme Court jury.
Although I cringe on behalf of local taxpayers, I must ultimately lend my support to Ms. Kinloch, given the outrageous facts of this case. Having observed the proceedings of this trial at the Victoria Law Courts over the past 10 days, I am of the opinion that the police constables involved in this case made all the wrong choices at every juncture.
Ms. Kinloch was arrested at around midnight on May 6, 2005, and freely admits that she was drunk at the time. She apparently provided her address to the arresting officers who could have made the compassionate choice and taken her home (just three blocks away). Instead, they booked her into police cells for about four hours, after which she was described as “calm, cooperative, and sober.”
At this point, police officers drove Kinloch to her apartment, but arrived at the wrong entrance to the building and refused to let her out of their vehicle, then drove back to the police station without giving her access to a police cell phone (which they carried as a matter of necessity, despite our city’s $17.5 million dollar investment in the ineffective CREST police radio system.)
Police constables then re-booked Ms. Kinloch into custody claiming that she was a “child in need.” After expressing her frustration with this, Kinloch was thrown against a cell wall, taken to the ground by two officers each more than twice her size, then handcuffed, bound at the ankles, and tied to the cell door. All of the officers involved finished their shifts a little over half an hour later, then headed for home without so much as a thought for the “child in need” they had tied and abandoned a few minutes before.
One constable later testified that Kinloch was left in a “safe” and “comfortable” environment. On cross-examination he admitted that she remained tied up on a hard cement floor for about four hours, and that this “wasn’t like a sofa chair.”
Police defended their actions claiming that if they hadn’t forcefully restrained the 5-foot-tall, 100 lbs. teenager, they might later have needed shields, riot gear, and pepper spray to control her (within a 7′ by 6′ padded cell.) As a citizen, I would have to say that this doesn’t inspire much confidence in the abilities of our local police officers.
The success of Kinloch’s civil suit was primarily based on s. 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which prohibits any form of “cruel and unusual punishment.” It is clear and apparent from the testimony and video evidence in this case that police did what they did more out of a desire to punish an individual that they found annoying than to ensure the safety of anyone. The jury ruled that this punishment was “cruel and unusual,” in that it was “so excessive as to outrage standards of decency.”
On the evening of May 6, 2005, Ms. Kinloch was drunk on alcohol, but the police officers who restrained her were drunk on something far worse — power. This has all-too-often been the case in the past few years, as is demonstrated by many recent events. The monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a society, like any other monopoly, can easily lead to abuse and recklessness. The only solution to this is meaningful personal responsibility.
$60,000 in damages, paid for by the taxpayers, might induce some public pressure on police to be more reasonable, responsible, and honest, but it will also remind those who are mistreated (or think they’ve been mistreated) by police that the courts provide a possible redress. If police officers continue using unreasonable force and abusing their power, citizens should demand changes to the Police Act and other similar pieces of legislation, requiring that officers themselves are more frequently held financially accountable for their actions.
The odd lawsuit involving an innocent mistake might be part of the legitimate cost of policing, but the consistent malicious misconduct of police officers that we’ve been seeing in recent years is not. We the people should not have to pay for the obvious mistakes of those whose salaries we already provide.
We give these people power so that they may keep us safe. But when they abuse this power, we should make them pay. Before they act, we should make them think.
