An unsettling incident involving a Burnaby RCMP officer last fall has a local man calling for Mounties to take this opportunity to educate the department on what it truly means to respect its citizens.
Burnaby resident Bjorn Stime was on Burnaby Mountain last November for a vigil organized on the first day of the Kinder Morgan protests – when the injunction was put into effect. He was there with his infant child strapped to his back, his wife and his in-laws.
Stime and his brother-in-law had some questions about some of the technicalities regarding police escorting employees of a private company to a work site, so they approached two nearby officers to get some answers.
“We introduced ourselves and asked them for their names, and one officer identified himself and he had a badge on – the other didn’t and refused to give his name,” Stime said. “We thought that was kind of strange, so we pressed the issue and asked, ‘We want to know your name and if not, at least a badge number.’”
Stime said the officer repeatedly refused his requests for his name or badge number. He eventually told them his name was Stan Smith – a generic name Stime’s brother-in-law thought must be fake.
“I just thought, ‘This isn’t right.’ This is a tense situation up on the mountain. This is an officer, armed and in a uniform, who is refusing to identify who he is,” Stime said.
His brother-in-law spoke with on-site representatives from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and told them what the officer had done, while Stime followed the two officers over to a third officer. He asked the third officer, who hadn’t witnessed the earlier discussion, what the so-called “Const. Stan Smith’s” real name was and he told him his real name.
Stime continued to be bothered by the behaviour of the officer days later. He told the NOWhe felt disrespected and that during such a tense situation, Burnaby RCMP officers should be interacting with residents with the utmost respect. So he lodged an informal complaint through the RCMP’s Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, hoping the Burnaby detachment would take the opportunity to educate Stride, as well as all other Burnaby officers, on the sections of the Police Act that specifically outline an officer’s duty to identify himself.
Then, Sgt. Derek Thibodeau of the Burnaby RCMP’s professional standards department contacted Stime and offered two options – he could either let the RCMP deal with the complaint through a formal avenue involving the detachment’s officer in charge or Stime could come up with a way Stride could make amends.
“(Thibodeau) suggested things like he (the officer who gave the false name) could come to my house and apologize to me and my family for falsely identifying himself, which I don’t feel really addresses the real issue,” Stime said. Stime suggested the officer write a report on how the detachment could better encourage junior officers to respect the public when interacting with them in tense situations like the Kinder Morgan protests.
Thibodeau responded to Stime and said his request wasn’t something the officer could do because he lacks the years of experience and required knowledge to even begin to write such a report.
Thus began a back and forth between Stime and Thibodeau.
Stime told the NOW he felt the RCMP sergeant was trying to push thecomplaint down a more formal path, which would likely result in some sort of punitive action against the officer, rather than addressing the problem through education.
Stime added that the officer he dealt with wasn’t the only officer he had heard refused to identify himself during the protests. This problem appeared to be part of the culture at the Burnaby RCMP, Stime said and he had hoped the detachment would take his complaint as an opportunity to educate its officers.
When the NOW last spoke with Stime earlier this week, he had received what appeared to be a final email from Thibodeau explaining that his complaint was now under review by the officer in charge of the Burnaby RCMP.
The NOW contacted the Burnaby RCMP for a comment but was told the detachment couldn’t say anything about the complaint or resulting disciplinary action as these matters are private.
“Discipline is covered by the Privacy Act so we are not able to provide further comment at this time,” Staff Sgt. Maj. John Buis, spokesperson for the Burnaby RCMP, told the NOW. “Public complaints are part of a well-defined process, and it would be inappropriate for me to talk about it with anyone other than the complainant.”
In the meantime, Stime hopes Chief Supt. Dave Critchley, officer in charge of the Burnaby RCMP, decides to go the route of education rather than punishment.
