Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General says a judge will conduct an independent review of the province's three police watchdog agencies, including the Special Investigations Unit.
Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur released a statement Friday afternoon saying she has asked that the review consider whether past SIU reports should be made public in the future and to prioritize recommendations on how portions of SIU reports could be publicly disclosed.
The review will be led by Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Michael Tulloch and will be complete by March 2017.
Along with the statement, the province released a portion of the SIU's 34-page report on the killing of Andrew Loku by Toronto Police in July 2015, a document that police critics have been urging authorities to release for months.
The report released Friday does not name the officer who shot and killed Loku, a key demand made by Black Lives Matter demonstrators who camped out in front of Toronto Police Headquarters for several weeks.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Sandy Hudson said only six of the 10 pages released Friday have any “substantive, meaningful language” in them.
“What are they hiding from us,” Hudson asked of the disclosure of the heavily-redacted document.
Hudson said that if they wanted to, the provincial government could effortlessly release the name of the officer that shot and killed Loku.
If they did name officers who shot and killed people in the line of duty, Hudson said the public could see whether the officers named “had a history of negative interactions with the public.”
“Why wouldn’t you look into the history of the people who are involved,” Hudson said. “Maybe it’s on the remaining pages that haven’t been released.”
In the partially-released SIU report, police and civilian witnesses told the Special Investigations Unit that Loku was marching down his apartment hallway towards Toronto police officers with a hammer lifted over his head, goading them to shoot him when he was shot and killed last July.
“What you gonna do, come on, shoot me,” Loku was heard saying, according to SIU Director Tony Loparco’s 34-page report.
Police had initially been called to the apartment in the area of Caledonia and Rogers roads for a report of a man threatening to kill a woman with a hammer around midnight on July 5, 2015.
The report says police arrived at the scene at 12:05 a.m. and rushed up to the third floor where the commotion could be heard.
The close quarters of the officers’ position in the apartment hallway made it impossible for the police to back away and create more distance, the report says.
Loku closed in from eight or nine metres away to within two or three metres of two Toronto police officers before he was shot twice in the torso. Loku was shot at 12:07 a.m. and pronounced dead at 12:26 a.m.
Loparco found the officers were acting reasonably to preserve their lives and the lives of others when Loku was shot.
“From that moment, it was a matter of seconds until the shooting, at which time I have no doubt that (the subject officer) feared for his or her life and that of his or her partner,” he said in the report.
The timing of the release of the report and its heavily-redacted state drew the ire of writer and activist Desmond Cole.
“I really wonder at Kathleen Wynne right now,” Cole said in an interview on CP24, referring to the fact that only a third of the SIU report was made public, and it was released on a Friday afternoon, typically a time when government activity receives less media scrutiny.
“That doesn’t seem to me like someone who’s looking to have accountability; it looks like somebody who’s trying to make the issue go away.”
Cole also questioned the characterization of Loku in the report, citing a neighbour who said Loku was not goading police to shoot him, but was “incredulous” at the notion they would even feel it necessary to point their guns at him.
“He was kind of shocked at the police response and that they were drawing their weapons at him,” Cole said. “The police’s interpretation, just like their interpretation of him rushing at them with a hammer, is disputed by a number of witnesses.”
Loku, a 45-year-old migrant from South Sudan, suffered from mental health issues and lived in an apartment subsidized by the Canadian Mental Health Association.
But the SIU report suggests “there was no indication Mr. Loku’s mental health was the reason that he acted in the way that he did.”
Instead, the report says Loku was intoxicated at the time of the encounter with police, and his blood alcohol level was 247 milligrams for every 100 millilitres of blood, more than three times what the legal limit would be for someone operating a vehicle.
Loparco also found that the Canadian Mental Health Association made a point of not disclosing to police where its subsidized housing is located, so as to not create a stigma for residents.
The SIU said it obtained the notes from both the officer who fired his or her weapon and his or her partner’s notes, as well as notes from nine other witness officers, audio of radio communications of the incident, as well as interviews with 15 civilian witnesses.
The report also touches on the troubling actions of a police officer after the incident.
Loparco also found in his report that a police officer not involved in the incident “saw fit to attempt to review and download the video recordings captured by cameras” in the apartment hallway.
“I have not as yet heard an adequate explanation for the officer’s conduct,” Loparco wrote.
The video of the incident also contained gaps – something that has raised suspicion among police critics.
However the report says that SIU investigators found that the cameras simply did not record the shooting incident, and had not been tampered with or had their memories erased.
“That explanation however, becomes much more difficult to accept when police unduly insert themselves in the post-incident investigation, as they appear to have done in this case,” Loparco wrote.
“Why would the police want a video from where Andrew Loku was killed before you or I could see it,” Cole said.
