B.C.'s police watchdog has cleared officers of wrongdoing after a Lumby man suffered a self-inflicted wound as police were trying to arrest him in January 2024.
The police officers did not commit an offence in the process of arresting the man more than a year ago, the Independent Investigations Office of B.C. (IIO) said in a decision published Jan. 24.
According to the decision, the man called his spouse while he was in the middle of a standoff with police, sitting in his parked pickup truck on a country road outside of Lumby on Jan. 3, 2024. He was telling her that he didn't want to go back to jail, and his spouse could hear him telling officers to "get away from the truck" in the background.
He told her he was going to jail because his truck was not insured, but his spouse found this explanation odd, thinking there was more to the situation, and drove to the scene of the stand-off.
The man had been brought to the attention of police that day by a civilian witness, who reported a truck that had been blocking his driveway. Police checked the licence plate of the truck and found the man was on a release condition not to loiter in a parked vehicle. The first officer on scene confirmed the man was arrestable for breach of probation. He ordered the man to exit the truck, but instead the man drove away 200 metres down the road to a dead end. A spike belt was deployed across the road as a precaution.
Police learned from the man's spouse that he had previously attempted suicide and that his current behaviour was not unusual for him. Police asked her to stay on the phone with him to keep him calm and get him to comply with police.
One officer was familiar with the man, having arrested him on a previous occasion, and said during that arrest he had noticed knives, machetes and loose firearm ammunition in the man's truck.
Another officer who was a member of the Integrated Crisis Response Team told the IIO he usually works with a mental health nurse, but the nurse was not available that day so he came by himself, hoping to de-escalate the situation.
That officer got to within five feet of the truck and tried to converse with the man.
The man refused to cooperate and said he was "not going to jail," that he did not want to hurt anyone aside from just himself, and that "he would be dead before he would leave his vehicle."
The man eventually attempted to flee in his truck, but an officer used his vehicle to push the truck into the ditch, where it got stuck.
At that point, the first officer broke the driver's window of the truck with a glass breaker. Another officer, who had a Taser at the ready, said the man was staring at him blankly with a "thousand yard stare," and his hands were not visible. The officer believed the man was about to harm himself, so he deployed his Taser through the broken window.
About two seconds after the Taser deployment, the officer with the Taser saw that the man appeared to be in pain, "in a way that did not seem to be a normal reaction to the (Taser)," the decision states.
"Shifting his position slightly, the (officer) said he saw that (the man) appeared to have stabbed himself in the abdomen."
Officers grabbed the man's arms to prevent him from doing himself any more harm. The man was later removed from the truck and taken on a stretcher to an ambulance that had arrived on scene.
In its decision, the IIO said investigators had established that the man's injuries were self-inflicted and not caused by any of the RCMP officers, who were "acting in lawful execution of their duty."
The IIO found that the man was "adamant" that he would not cooperate despite efforts to de-escalate, and pointed to him saying he would rather die than surrender to police.
"The evidence indicates that the officers' swift actions prevented (the man) from making that self-inflicted injury worse."
Accordingly, the IIO did not refer the matter to Crown counsel for consideration of charges against any of the police officers.
