The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) said Thursday that no charges would be filed against the police officers who shot dead in 2021, in Repentigny, Jean René Junior Olivier, a black man in the grip of a mental health crisis.
The use of force and firearms was justified, decides the DPCP which had to analyze the file prepared by the Bureau of Independent Investigations (BEI), mandated to investigate when a citizen loses his life during a police intervention .
In short, according to the DPCP, “the analysis of the evidence does not reveal the commission of a criminal offense by the police officers of the Service de la police de la ville de Repentigny (SPVR) involved in this event. »
She was the mother of the 38-year-old man who dialed 911 on 1er August in the morning to ask for help. She was worried about her son: he claimed to see people around him, who wanted to hurt him, and she feared that he would hurt himself.
“I’m calling for help and my son was killed,” she summed up the next day, speaking to reporters outside her residence. A few days later, at a demonstration in front of Repentigny city hall, she said: “my son is dead because he is black. »
He didn’t have a gun and “he wasn’t dangerous,” she insisted. He had a knife, but finally threw it on the ground after several requests from the police: “and that’s where he was shot”.
“Making tough decisions”
According to information sent by the DPCP in its press release on Thursday, four police officers had been dispatched to the scene. Mr. Olivier is then in front of the residence in the company of two other people. The police see the knife clearly and try to convince him to put it on the ground, as do the two people with him. Then a fifth policeman arrives, armed with a conducted energy weapon (commonly known as taser). He shows it to Mr. Olivier and demonstrates it by activating the bits, while encouraging him to put down his knife.
According to this summary of the facts, the officers speak calmly to Mr. Olivier for 15 minutes so that he puts his knife on the ground. This he does several times without ever moving away from it and taking it back in his hands in the following seconds or minutes.
The last time he puts it down, he “picks it up without warning”, “the blade pointed forward and he runs and jumps over a short low wall to get to the officers” who are five meters away from him. Two shoot and hit him with their guns. According to family members, he was shot three times in the stomach. His death was pronounced shortly afterwards in the hospital.
The DPCP recalls that the police are authorized to use necessary and reasonable force in their interventions, in particular to disarm a person who presents a danger to themselves or to others. They aren’t bound to perfection, he says, because they’re often put in situations where they have to quickly, sometimes in a split second, “make tough decisions.” »
Note that an ambulance driver filmed the scene: the images and words captured correspond to the account of the witnesses involved, it is indicated.
“Given the particularly imminent danger they faced, the man being armed and repeatedly refusing to obey orders, each of the two police officers involved had reasonable grounds to believe that the force applied to the man was necessary for their protection against serious bodily harm or death and that the use of their firearm was the only means of ending this threat”, writes the DPCP.
Thursday afternoon, the mother of Mr. Olivier was in no condition to speak to journalists, said a relative joined at her home.