The Saskatoon Police Service finds itself in another crisis, courtesy of a recently released review of a 14 year old case involving the freezing death of 17 year old Neil Stonechild. The CBC bio paints a picture of a artistic, enthusiastic, “popular” young man who attended his AA meetings faithfully, was well loved by social workers, who painted murals on the walls at the detention center. Absence and political correctness make the heart grow fonder. A friend whose son went to school with him remarked that their first reaction to news of Stonechild’s demise was “good riddence”. The AA member was found with a blood alcohol level of 1.5.
Riding the media frenzy, U of Sask business professor Colin Boyd has called, through a piece in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, for the dissolution of the Saskatoon Police Service, suggesting the force be replaced by the RCMP. Quite apart from the logistics and costs in firing over 370 city police, the problems incorporating the RCMP’s different operational paradigm, is the wonderment that someone in academia would make such a bold suggestion without surrendering himself to the troubling inconvenience of fact checking. The Police Act requires Saskatchewan communities of over 20.000 to provide their own policing.
This CBC report summarizes the current crisis, while this covers the accusations and chain of events.
Justice David Wright’s final report concluded Bradley Senger and Lawrence Hartwig had Stonechild in their custody 4 days before his frozen body was found in a field on the north end of Saskatoon. Senger and Hartwig maintain they were called to investigate a complaint about Stonechild causing a disturbance, but that he was gone by the time they arrived. Justice Wright was suspicious that the two officers did not seem to have any recollection of having looked for Stonechild, despite the discovery of his body a few days later.
From the report;
I cannot accept that Cst. Hartwig simply forgot about the search for Stonechild when he learned of the death, or that he failed to recognize the complaint might have some significance to the investigation into Stonechild’s death. In all of the circumstances, his assertion that he did not recall what happened is simply not credible. I conclude that he recalled what happened, and his assertions are a deliberate deception designed to conceal his involvement.
His conclusion defies logic. These two officers would have been fully aware that their call to the complaint about Stonechild would be part of dispatch, CPIC, other Saskatoon Police Service Reports – and their own notebooks. To purposefully deny knowledge in hopes of covering up their involvement would be patently absurd. Why pretend to forget, when remembering carried no more weightier implicatiion than the official police record?
And why might they forget? Earlier in the report, Justice Wright mentions that these two officers – one with 3 years experience, the other a rookie, had performed the task of informing a woman her husband had taken the lives of himself and their sons earlier in that same evening.
I also found puzzling the judge’s contention that he cannot believe that some details of that evening would be remembered clearly by the officers, while others were not. Memory doesn’t function in the way that a tape recorder does – rather, it’s better described as a process of re-creation, the brain drawing on stored information and incorporating it with global knowledge. It’s the reason that “false memory syndrome” exists, memory recovery through hypnosis is virtually useless and eyewitness reports notoriously unreliable.
Wright’s decision to discount their testimony seems to be solely based on this forgetfulness and the testimony of a friend of Stonechild, one Jason Roy;
“A police car pulled in front of me and Neil was in the back, and the moment he saw me he was very irate, he was freaking out he was saying, ‘J[ason] help me. Just help me. These guys are going to kill me.’
Jason Roy was busy compiling a fine criminal record of his own. He didn’t come forward with his story about the cry for help until after receiving visualization therapy at Kilborn detention center for juvenile offenders.
Autopsy photos
In addition to believing that Roy was more credible than the police officers, Wright discounted the testimony of two trained forensic pathologists who expressed doubt that marks photographed on Stonechild’s body were caused by handcuffs. He suggested that the testimony of Dr. Lew – a forensic pathologist for Dade County, FL – wasn’t credible and that she was “enhancing her opinion”.
“I shared the same experience as other observers at the Inquiry: I could not see any striations of the sort described by Dr. Lew. If I stood alone in this failure I might feel differently.”
I wasn’t aware that Justice Wright had company on the bench. Considering that his final report recommends a review of the coroner system, Wright seems unpreturbed about his own lack of expertise before discounting the opinion of trained pathologists.
Justice Wright doesn’t seem to take as much issue with the coroner – a retired general practitioner with no forensic background, whose original report bears little resemblance to the story of the body being “beaten and dragged” he told a reporter 12 years later. (Coroners require no training at all in Saskatchewan – a hangover from the exodus of doctors during the early days of medicare.)
Today, Chief Russ Sabo is to announce his decision on the future of the two officers accused.
Those who have been calling for their heads caution that Wright has “not accused Bradley Senger and Lawrence Hartwig of causing Stonechild’s death”. Justice officials have stated that there isn’t enough evidence to sustain formal charges. (The Wright inquiry was not conducted under the normal rules of evidence.)
Well, I’m afraid this “they had him, not saying they killed him” disclaimer falls right through the middle of the logic gap.
If the two officers did have Stonechild in their custody, then we know they not record his arrest at the time the apprehended him, indicating that they intended to discharge of Stonechild in a manner beyond the normal police protocols the moment they spotted him.
That’s pre-mediitation.
The media and Justice Wright need to be pushed off the fence on this one. If one is to accept that Senger and Hartwig had Stonechild in their custody, then criminal charges should be laid. Why? Because, their current position is unsustainable and grossly unfair. They stand “convicted” at arms length, of causing Neil Stonechild’s death – without the benefit of a bona fide court of law and the normal rules of evidence – while the public has been encouraged to connect the dots.
To those calling for the dissolution of the service because of the very real possibility of a police “mutiny” – put yourselves in the position of every police officer in Saskatoon, facing the profound realization that the day could come when they are called to the stand to account for the whereabouts of a suspect they never located, on a night in which they answered over 50 calls, based on the late-breaking memory of a convicted felon, 10 years after taking a complaint.
A great many people have suggested that had Neil Stonechild been a white kid from a “good” family, without a criminal record, the investigation into his freezing death would have been much more enthusiastic – and I agree. I suspect police investigate violence against the innocent with more zeal than they do the deaths of drunk drivers, too.
But if Neil Stonechild had been a white kid with no criminal record, found frozen with alcohol in his system, we wouldn’t have seen a racially charged public inquiry into it 14 years after the fact, either. It would have remained on the books as just another case of death by misadventure.
Stonechild report
update – Officers Hartwig and Senger have been dismissed. They are expected to appeal the decision. Stay tuned.
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Taylor Field, Regina, SK.