Thursday, August 27, 2020

Korchinski-Paquet case is not one that merits protests

The SIU investigation into the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet back in May has published its final report, and some people are predictably upset.
Coming as it did just two days after the very public death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, Ms. Korchinski-Paquet's death was always going to be highly politicized, and there were immediate accusations that her case was another example of systemic anti-black racism and police brutality, even though the immediately-available facts made that seem extremely unlikely.
The SIU report makes it clear that Ms. Korchinski-Paquet fell to her death while trying to hop from one balcony to another from her 24th floor apartment, well away from any police officers or their influence. If anything she was trying to escape from being taken to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which is what her mother was requesting. The report confirm that the police officers involved did not inflame the fraught situation, and indeed tried their level best to de-escalate it, and were nowhere near the woman when she fell to her death. There was no evidence of bullying or peremptory behaviour on the part of the police.
So, no police brutality, no obvious racism at work. But that will clearly not satisfy some people, though, who see this as a racism issue regardless of any evidence to the contrary. There will probably be protests and demonstrations and expressions of outrage regardless. There has been no shortage of recent events, both in Canada and the USA, where the police are quite clearly at fault, and these should be called out and protested. This, however, is not one of those events.

UPDATE
Given all that, what was NDP leader Jagmeet Singh thinking when he tweeted, "Regis Kochinski-Paquet died because of police intervention. She needed help and her life was taken instead. The SIU's decision brings no justice to the family and it won't prevent this from happening again."
This is tone deaf, inflammatory talk, ignoring the finding of what appears to be a well-run and comprehensive investigative report. If Singh persists with this line, he merely comes across as anti-police, and decreases his own credibility.

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