Judge releases cellblock video of alleged mistreatment by Ottawa police

July 28, 2011
Steve Rennie, Canadian Press (via Globe and Mail)

A cellblock video has been released that captures the arrest of a woman who claims Ottawa police injured and strip-searched her before leaving her naked in a cell without medical attention.

Roxanne Carr was arrested and charged with assaulting police, obstructing police and damaging property in 2008. Those charges were dropped in April.

She is now suing the police department over their treatment of her during her arrest.

Several media outlets, including The Canadian Press, went to court to have the video released. Last week, an Ontario Court judge agreed to release the footage, but court workers couldn't find the video in the case file. A duplicate copy was released Thursday.

The incident is broken up into 26 video clips showing Ms. Carr's arrest from several different angles.

In the videos, officers drag a handcuffed Ms. Carr, who is wearing a black tank top and dark pants, from a police car through the hallways of the cellblock.

Ms. Carr's arms are cuffed behind her back. She does not appear to resist.

Two officers hold her by the elbows and lead her into a room with a counter. They lower her head-first onto the floor. Her head comes off the floor and falls back onto it as they shift her body.

She is lying face down when the officers remove her handcuffs. Then, they take two objects from her hair or neck and toss them onto a nearby counter. One officer kneels on Ms. Carr's back as the police wrap a strap around her arms. They then hoist her to her feet and walk her to a cell.

The videos do not have any sound.

There is no camera inside Ms. Carr's cell. At one point, a white gown is tossed from one of the cells. Later, an officer leads Ms. Carr, who is now wearing a white gown, from her cell to retrieve her clothes from a bin. She gets changed in another room.

The video shows Ms. Carr, again in the black shirt and pants, standing at a counter signing documents. She leaves the cellblock, stops in a stairwell to put her hair in a ponytail, and leaves the station.

It is not clear from the videos if she is in any pain.

She claims her arm was broken during the arrest and that she was dropped on her head.

None of the allegations have been proven in court.

“It's clear from the video that there's not an instance, not a muscle of resistance. And despite that, there's six police officers hog-tying her and then leading her on a leash to the cell, taking her clothes and leaving her naked for at least an hour,” said Lawrence Greenspon, Carr's lawyer.

“It's a very disturbing video. I shudder to think if people treat people like this when they know they're on video, how do they treat people when they know they're not?”

In a statement released this week, Ottawa Police Acting Chief Gilles Larochelle noted the Ontario Special Investigations Unit and the Ottawa Police Service's Professional Standards Unit both probed the incident and did not lay charges or find any misconduct.

“I am satisfied that cellblock officers handled the custody of Roxanne Carr with the utmost professionalism, especially when faced with a crisis in the cell,” Mr. Larochelle's statement says.

The Carr case has similarities to another case in which an Ottawa police officer was charged with sexual assault after a woman's much-publicized arrest.

The Special Investigations Unit was called in after video showed a special constable kneeing Stacy Bonds while she was being booked at police headquarters Sept. 6, 2008.

The video also showed male officers holding Ms. Bonds down while another officer cut off her clothes the night she was arrested for a liquor offence.

Ms. Bonds was subsequently charged with assaulting a police officer, but Ontario Court Justice Richard Lajoie stayed proceedings in her case after seeing the video.

Other elements of the Ms. Bonds video, along with several other videos showing different cases of alleged police brutality, are still under investigation by various agencies.

The disgrace of Ottawa’s Third World police force

July 22, 2011
Chris Selley, National Post

On Tuesday, a judge ordered the release of police video that, according to Roxanne Carr, shows her being roughed up and left naked in a cell by Ottawa police officers. The ruling came over strong protests from both police and the Crown, and with the support of both Ms. Carr and local media outlets, who argued, correctly, that the public needs to see what happened in the lockup — not least because the charges against Ms. Carr have inexplicably been dropped (likely because of what’s on the tape, the judge concluded). It’s especially important to see the video because the local police have gained a reputation for doing to people exactly the sort of thing Ms. Carr alleges was done to her. Indeed, one of the officers she accuses has been charged with sexually assaulting another woman while she was in police custody in 2008.

Unfortunately, in what an Ottawa Citizen editorial called a “weird twist,” the DVD in question has gone missing from the court file. Shucks, don’t you just hate it when that happens? There are other copies, of course, but it’s not like the Crown or the police would just release theirs without a fight. Sure, we pay all their salaries, and for the cellblock and the camera. And Ms. Carr wants the tape released. And there’s no conceivable reason for either party not to release the tape except that it would embarrass or implicate themselves.
But who knows how trustworthy those copies might be? In court, police lawyers argued the missing DVD raised questions as to the video’s “integrity.” Well, sure. A nefarious defence attorney might have somehow gained access to the copies and CGI-ed in a police officer dropping a grand piano on Ms. Carr’s head, for example, or chasing her around the cellblock with a flamethrower. You can do amazing things with a laptop these days.

To be fair, this isn’t necessarily a sad-sack coverup. The video might have been innocently mislaid. Maybe they’ll find it behind a radiator somewhere, its “integrity” hopefully intact. But if you read about, say, the Russian or Indonesian justice system misplacing a video that could implicate a favoured member of society in the mistreatment of a less favoured member, and then the prosecution and the police refused to provide their copies, would you assume everything was on the level? I’d think not.

In the aftermath of the G20, we all know the extraordinary lengths to which police forces and officers will go to spare their fellows even the lenient punishments they usually face for doing wrong. And the recent scandal over police helping Crown prosecutors vet jury members confirms the two are very interested in preserving each other’s reputations. Knowing what we know about the Ottawa police and its recent record, this thing smells to high heaven.

But assume whatever chain of events you want. What’s missing from this story is a sense of panic, of utter mortification. Everyone involved in the chain of custody, and everyone involved in the case (other than the defence and Ms. Carr) should be frantic with worry. None should sleep until an answer is discovered. The judge should be apoplectic. Jobs should be on the line. Canada’s justice system isn’t the same as Russia’s or Indonesia’s. That’s why it’s so awful when it looks the same.

The nonchalance is baffling. As much as people still call police, and rightfully trust them, in a crisis, there is a growing sense among law-and-order types that police really aren’t on their side — that they’re just another self-interested public-sector union, albeit more heavily armed. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who’s as cartoonish a cop-lover as you’ll find, has discovered that cutting police complements, salaries and perquisites might be a pretty easy sell.

If we aren’t in a full-blown crisis of confidence in Canadian policing and justice, we’re heading towards one, and nobody seems intent on stopping it. Police forces should count on politicians not even trying to stop it until it’s far too late, then concluding it’s not worth it and throwing the cops under the bus. Releasing the cellblock video might help the Ottawa police claw back a bit of respect.

National Post
cselley@nationalpost.com