At a Best Western hotel this morning in Dartmouth, after some tech delays, a panel of three white adjudicators listened to two white lawyers argue about whether or not a white cop, Halifax Regional Police constable Nicole Green, was justified in her tasering of an unarmed Black man. The HRP had already decided Green was in the wrong and gave her a slap on the wrist punishment; she appealed that decision in hopes of getting a Nova Scotia Police Review Board hearing. She was successful, which is why she is at the Best Western in front of three white judges at a hearing scheduled for the next three days.
Most of the Wednesday, May 25 morning was spent establishing facts, with various witnesses testifying about what happened on the afternoon of Dec. 14, 2019. What’s known for sure is that a Black man we’ll call Fred cashed a cheque at the TD bank on Quinpool Road that day around 3:30pm. (In order to prevent re-victimization by Google, we are not using Fred’s real name.) Fred left the bank, got into his truck and started driving away. Then, turning right from Monastery Lane onto Quinpool, he hit two other vehicles. Or maybe he didn’t hit anything.
Constable Green happened to be driving in her patrol car on Quinpool at this point, and it appeared to her that Fred did hit another vehicle. But she could be wrong, because the ticket he got that day was for making an illegal lane change, not causing an accident, and even that lane change ticket was thrown out. Either way, Green ends up tasering Fred.
The drivers of the other vehicles involved were let go, they never got tickets. Around 4:10 Fred got a ticket, then was ”jumped” by three police officers. In the scuffle, according to evidence, Green’s taser delivered a charge for five seconds, five separate times in the minute of 4:12. The HRP officer who gave this testimony, staff sergeant Ross Burt, stressed that this evidence only shows when the taser was provided a charge—it doesn’t mean Fred actually got tazed, just that the taser had power. Here’s a video of the incident.
During the hearing, Halifax Regional Municipality lawyer Ted Murphy pressed Burt to get him to explain HRP policies around when officers can use force and when citizens have to follow lawful orders. That is, apparently, not something that HRP officers can or have to answer at a review board examining whether or not their coworker tasering someone was an appropriate use of force.
Fred himself took the stand as a witness in the afternoon, where he was thoroughly badgered by Green’s lawyer, Brian Bailey. The lawyer pedantically contradicted everything Fred said, in an infuriating exchange that lasted over an hour. Bailey badgered the shit out of Fred, asking over and over things like “let me suggest you were agitated, weren’t you?” and demanding Fred remember the tiniest details of his 45-minute roadside detention by police prior to getting tazed. Never mind that being tasered negatively impacts memory.
Bailey seemed to be trying to establish that Fred was being an angry Black man, which is a common defense for police who are violent to Black men. The board and lawyers periodically stopped proceedings to paternalistically explain to Fred that he didn’t understand the process, and he shouldn’t be getting so agitated by Bailey telling him over and over he was wrong about what he remembered. After more than an hour of this, Fred appeared to give up on the stand and just started passively agreeing with Bailey’s statements framed as questions.
And remember, Fred testified only as a witness, the victim of police actions. The review board is looking into Green, and how she was treated by her police force after Fred filed a complaint about being tasered.
Sergeant Burt, who testified at the review board about taser power, was the officer who initially investigated the incident for the HRP. He found that Green was in the wrong, and punished her with eight hours of docked pay and mandatory de-escalation training. To reiterate: For needlessly tasering a citizen, Green, who made $113,855.62 in 2020, was “punished” with training intended to make her a better cop, losing pay for eight hours of work and having a note on her file for three years. A note for an incident that happened in 2019, which would come off her record later this year.
The provincial review board hearing today was triggered because Green appealed this ruling of wrongdoing from the Halifax police, and its subsequent slap on the wrist. And because Green appealed, Fred—who told The Coast in passing that he has lost a lot more than eight hours pay as a result of being tasered—was subpoenaed, forced to watch video of his being tasered and got his credibility undermined, all in an effort for Green’s appeal to succeed.
The hearing will continue Thursday, May 26, 2022.
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This article appears in May 1-31, 2022.
