Campbell River RCMP are investigating an alleged racist attack in a parking lot that sent one woman to hospital Thursday evening.
“At this point we’re not really providing any comment about it,” Const. Maury Tyre said Monday. “All the parties have been identified and spoken to. The investigation still has a few steps left to go in it. Obviously, there’s a heavy scrutiny on this and we take any file where these kind of accusations have been made very seriously.”
Some of the people involved have posted about the altercation and identified themselves on social media, said Tyre.
“It immediately becomes a major Privacy Act issue where we can’t really share anything,” he said.
The altercation began over a parking incident. The alleged victim, a First Nations woman from Kyuquot on west Vancouver Island, posted that around 6:30 p.m. she parked outside Boston Pizza and picked up dinner for her daughter. When she came back to her truck, she discovered that a man had parked behind her, blocking her in, and a woman was yelling racial slurs at her teenage daughter.
A fight broke out. Someone called 911 and a number of RCMP officers responded. The woman was sent to hospital, accompanied by her daughter and her nephew. Her injuries are not life-threatening.
Tyre could not say whether anyone has been arrested.
“We’re continuing to look at it and reviewing it to see if charges can be generated. A lot of that ends up being passed to Crown counsel to determine,” he said. “If charges can be recommended, we will recommend charges.”
Campbell River RCMP have a robust restorative justice program modelled on Indigenous justice programs, he said.
“Oftentimes, restorative justice has been used as an option. Typically, it’s used for property crimes or for incidents which can’t necessarily be resolved through the legal system,” Tyre said. “It tends to get resolution at the end of it.”
Sometimes, during investigations, there are two different stories and nobody is lying, he said. “It’s based entirely on someone’s perception of what was going on at that time.”
Tyre said police forces are dealing with incidents that are over-escalations of relatively minor situations. “People are stressed right now. They are keyed up and they are doing things that they typically wouldn’t do.”
On Sunday night in Campbell River, for example, one driver wasn’t happy with the way another person was driving and gave them the finger. The first driver followed the other driver around the entire town until they ended up in the detachment parking lot, Tyre said. Both were convinced the other person would harm them.
“These are things that don’t happen on a normal basis,” he said. “We’re definitely seeing stuff that’s escalating beyond the norms right now, which is unfortunate.”
