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 a Sûreté du Québec agent 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 six police officers deployed on the spot believed that it was about 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. A few days earlier, during the hearings, the officer who had fired had maintained that he had been “patient” in the circumstances.
The conclusions of Mr. Poulin’s report 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.
No dialogue between the young person and the police
In this case, the family of Riley Fairholm had criticized the police for having acted too quickly without taking the time to dialogue with the young person so that he calms down.
Monday morning, a former police officer specializing in intervention with people in crisis, Michael Arruda, argued that three ingredients must be met to calm an individual: be sincere and transparent, see the human behind the disorder and take his time.
“The sinews of war is how to communicate with people,” said Mr. Arruda, who is campaigning for mandatory training in this area for aspiring police officers.
However, the evidence in this file had revealed that the sergeant who spoke to Fairholm at the scene of the tragedy had taken refuge in his vehicle because he feared for his safety. From this place, it was impossible for him to hear if the young man was answering him.
Questioned on this subject, the expert in the use of force Bruno Poulin, agreed that it would have been preferable to be able to dialogue with him, but did not find any fault in this regard.
It should be noted that the Bureau of Independent Investigations (BEI) has already investigated this case and that no charges have been brought against the police officers concerned.