Use of force expert Bruno Poulin believes the officers who responded to the death of Riley Fairholm in 2018 did everything they could under difficult circumstances.
“We have little wiggle room when someone points a gun at us,” the expert said Monday afternoon during the coroner’s hearings into the 17-year-old’s death.
Coroner Géhane Kamel has been looking into the circumstances that led the police to fire on Fairholm in the middle of the night at an intersection in the city for several days. In a state of crisis, the teenager was screaming while holding an air rifle in his hand. However, the police believed it was a firearm.
Mr. Poulin, who is a consultant at the National Police Academy, had been mandated by the coroner to follow the hearings to assess the actions of the police in this case.
His conclusion is clear: the police acted appropriately all along the line, even though it took them barely a minute after their arrival before they fired.
Certainly, he said, the police who intervene with people in a state of crisis must seek to lower the level of tension and to provoke a “de-escalation”. However, in this case, they never had the “window of opportunity” to do so.
It was not possible for them, for example, to move away from the suspect to calm things down because the young person was in an open place, exposing other citizens to danger.
From the outset, from the moment Riley Fairholm pointed his gun in the direction of the agents, it was justified that they fire, he mentioned. Earlier in the hearings, the officer who fired the shot claimed he had been “patient” under the circumstances.
His conclusions would therefore have been very different if the young man had been in a closed place or if he had had a bladed weapon in his hand instead of a firearm.
More details will follow.