Victoria police have been cleared by B.C.’s civilian police-watchdog agency of any wrongdoing in a 2022 incident that left a woman with a broken right arm from being shot with a beanbag gun.
Beanbag guns are one of several “less-lethal” options that police use in some situations rather than conventional weapons.
The decision by the Independent Investigations Office, which looks into police-related cases involving death or serious injury, said that officers dealing with the woman “were clearly trying to apprehend her without harm.”
According to the decision from chief civilian director Ron MacDonald, police responded to a Sept. 9, 2022 report that a person on the edge of Beacon Hill Park was yelling and seemed to be under the influence of drugs.
The incident began about 7:30 p.m. when police arrived to find a woman near the intersection of Park Boulevard and Heywood Avenue in possession of knives and believed to possibly be suicidal, leading to the deployment of two crisis negotiators who talked with her for three hours.
The Emergency Response Team was then called to the scene with a plan to use “gradually increasing force” to apprehend the woman under the Mental Health Act and take her to hospital. Use of the beanbag gun and the woman’s injury followed soon after.
Witnesses told police the woman had been sitting in the park and yelling for some time, and had been seen in the area for a few days prior, the decision said. It said an officer who approached the woman heard her talking about wanting to be killed and saw her hold a knife to her throat. She stabbed at the ground with a knife and swung a second knife as if trying to ward off attackers.
Another officer said she appeared to be “in full psychosis.”
A noise-making device was used first by the Emergency Response Team in an attempt to disorient the woman, but she responded by saying “Is that all you got?” the decision said.
Pepper spray and then a conducted-energy weapon had little effect, and were followed by rounds from a beanbag gun.
Beanbags hit her in on both arms, and she responded by hunching forward and starting to cut at her left forearm.
An officer approached with a shield and held the woman to the ground. He said he felt “bone-on-bone grinding” near her shoulder in the process and determined her arm had been broken.
“By now, [she] was reportedly not combative, not yelling or screaming, almost catatonic,” one of the officers said.
First-aid was given and the fracture was determined to be “consistent with an impact from a beanbag round, which had penetrated the skin.”
The decision said that the “optics” of the incident were “not the best,” since it involved 14 officers with an armoured vehicle, but police were in a “difficult predicament” involving a woman who appeared to be a threat to herself or others.
“When it became apparent that some level of force would be necessary to get [the woman] to drop her weapons, that force was applied incrementally,” the decision said. “It cannot be said, in the circumstances, that the force used by any officer was outside the reasonable range.”
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