Police board still dodging blame for 2021 shelter siege

Five months after a bombshell report laid the blame for Aug 18, 2021’s shambolic shelter siege at the feet of Halifax Regional Police and the HRM, the oversight board that’s supposed to police the former on behalf of the latter seems to want nothing to do with it. On Monday, Feb 3, Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners heard an update on the HRM’s response to the Halifax Independent Civilian Review, a 116-page debriefing of what went wrong on a “day of chaos” where police and HRM staff cleared out four encampment sites for unhoused residents across the city. Things turned “disastrous” on that day, the report concluded, when dozens of police clashed with protesters at the old Memorial Library on Spring Garden Road, pepper-spraying crowds and arresting more than two-dozen people as city crews used a chainsaw to tear down the temporary shelters.

It was a day District 3 councillor Becky Kent, one of the city’s police commissioners, called “violent and disturbing” at the time. At HRM council’s first meeting after the Aug 18 shelter siege, on Aug 31, 2021, she summarized the city’s missteps as the “unintended consequences of what we thought was a good plan,” adding that she “never” wanted to see “something like that happen again.”

Police push back against protesters on the old library lawn Wednesday. Credit: The Coast

But nearly four years on from the violent clashes and mass arrests that prompted thousands to sign a petition calling for an independent civilian review, and a detailed report that offered 37 recommendations for the BOPC, one is left to wonder what the municipality and police have learned from Aug 18. Because it wasn’t clear at all at Monday’s police board meeting.

Board plays accountability hot potato

Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners went back to an old procedural favourite at their Feb 3 meeting: Agreeing that things should be done without specifying what, exactly, those things are or how the board would do them. Kent told the other board members that she was “glad” to see an update on the HRM’s response, and that the BOPC “have a responsibility” to “continue to look very closely at the processes and the recommendations that have come forward.” Not mentioned: A responsibility to act on those same directions.

The 116-page civilian review offered 37 recommendations to Kent and her board co-commissioners, including, among other things, that the board and HRP should “publicly commit to a human rights-based approach” to engaging with unhoused residents; that they should review the HRP’s Use of Force policy, with an emphasis that “every available option other than force should be exhausted” beforehand; that the board should consider mandating a formal HRP debriefing after “critical events” where officers can “openly and safely” ask their superiors about the “successes and flaws” of an operation, including anonymously; and most notably, that HRM and HRP should “publicly acknowledge” that there were “flaws in the decision-making process that led to the evictions,” and that those institutions “should issue a public apology for those errors.”

The petition lists several concerns, including reports of “some police officers removing name tags” during the shelter siege at the old Halifax Memorial Library on August 18. Credit: The Coast

That last bit seemed to give Halifax’s police oversight board the most trouble on Monday.

Former HRP deputy chief Bill Moore, who’s now the executive director of the HRM’s Community Safety Office, went through an Olympics-level verbal gymnastics routine when tip-toeing around an apology with the board, summarizing the review’s recommendation as “whether or not there should be an apology”—the report was fairly clear that there should be—issued to “those that may have been traumatized” as a “result of the actions of the 18th.” Moore did not mention what those actions were—perhaps because they were numerous—nor did he mention whose actions he was referring to—perhaps because they were those of his former colleagues at the HRP. (Moore retired as deputy chief in 2017, moving to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police before returning to work for the HRM.)

The police board’s general counsel and solicitor, Martin Ward, dismissed the report as one that “some people” felt “took a very broad brush” to matters of policing and governance, as opposed to its “original mandate.” Ward did not mention which people felt that way, nor what the report’s mandate should have been, if, indeed, it was to offer meaningful insights on the wide-ranging and systemic issues that led to police and staff tearing down encampments amid a housing crisis. Or pepper-spraying crowds of protesters where children were present. Or arresting 25 people, filling the city’s jail and intake room with so many people at once that one protester testified she had to wait hours to call a lawyer. (A majority of the charges against protesters were later dropped.) From the outside, it would seem the precise kind of situation that merits a broader scope of scrutiny.

Ward continued that the board “felt it wasn’t in a position to really comment on the recommendations that pertain to the police or the recommendations that pertain to the administration.” Which seems an odd thing to say about a police oversight board: If its role isn’t to weigh in on police matters—or the administration that it belongs to—then what is it for?

A more astute police board might have devoted some of its time to valid concerns it has received about the civilian report. For one thing, journalist Zane Woodford wrote into the board to refute the authors’ claim that they spoke to “every media member who was identified” on the scene about how police had treated them on Aug 18, a claim the report’s authors used to determine that “there is no basis to conclude that the HRP did not provide reasonable access to media to cover the protest or that any particular officer’s actions towards the media were inappropriate.”

Woodford, who was at the protests that day on assignment for the Halifax Examiner, told the board in an email that he was “unaware of any attempt to reach me,” and that “another reporter who was there that day” had told him the same.

“If you had contacted me,” he wrote, “I would’ve given you a detailed account of the multiple attempts to curtail my movement and that of other reporters, and the threats of arrest for obstruction we received. I even witnessed and photographed an officer physically interfering with a colleague. The errors and outright falsehoods in this section of your report cast doubt on the rest of your findings.”

Monday’s police board meeting could have been an opportunity to reflect on what other areas the report might have missed. Instead, commissioners made no mention of Woodford’s email and seemed more concerned with how the police board came across in the report.

Deputy mayor and board commissioner Tony Mancini started his remarks with promise, before losing the plot. He called Aug 18 “a very sad day for this municipality,” adding that there was plenty of blame to go around for what went wrong on that day—both of which are true. But the lasting impression of his remarks was one of a councillor loath to eat his slice of humble pie.

“The HRM made some mistakes,” Mancini admitted, before turning his focus elsewhere. “The CAO at the time made some mistakes. The Province of Nova Scotia made some mistakes. The HRP made some mistakes. The residents of HRM made some mistakes. The leader of the provincial Opposition at the time made a huge mistake. So you know, if any apology’s going to be given, let’s make sure we round everybody up to line up for that apology.”

The Spring Garden Road courthouse Tuesday morning, as seen from the old Memorial Library, where the police used pepper spray against protesters at the August 18 shelter siege. Credit: The Coast

Mancini re-affirmed his support for the HRP’s request for body-worn cameras, telling his co-commissioners that “you can’t tell me” cameras “wouldn’t have been helpful on August 18.” (Researchers disagree on whether body-worn cameras lead to fewer violent police incidents. They do, however, provide police with plenty of surveillance opportunities.)

Mancini also wondered, sensibly, how many of the report’s recommendations the HRM and HRP were already acting on. He asked Moore whether it was “possible to get a comparison of the work that’s been done since August 18,” which the former deputy police chief took as an opportunity to express that, in his opinion, “a lot of what was recommended was already part of our response mechanism.” If that were true, one is left to wonder why things went as poorly as they did in 2021.

Moore added that the HRM and HRP’s “alignment” with the civilian report’s recommendations “has been tested in the fact that we have actually been involved in three encampment closures in which we have followed a civilian-led approach, using the communication models, as was noted here, working with our partners and service providers.”

Moore did not specify which encampment enclosures he was referring to, but it would be reasonable to assume that among those three was last March’s Grand Parade encampment evictions, carried out after the HRM “de-designated” the site. There, the city managed to close off a space that had housed roughly 20 people without mass arrests, but not without controversy: Eyewitnesses told The Coast that they saw crews bulldoze a tent while its owner was away. One video shared with The Coast shows a confrontation between a group of protestors and Max Chauvin, Halifax’s director of housing and homelessness. (“It’s not abandoned. He lives there,” one protester tells Chauvin. “Well, it’s empty, and it’s being taken out right now,” Chauvin answers.)

City crews erect fencing and remove a tent from the Grand Parade on Monday, Mar. 11, 2024. The HRM says it has “de-designated” the tent encampment site. Credit: Martin Bauman / The Coast

As if anticipating an objection to his “lesson learned” claim, Moore answered his own question: “Has there been issues? There’s been some issues, yes.” But “the general feel,” Moore added, “of what the independent review has suggested is mirrored in where HRM is, and also by what we’ve been doing in the last little while.”

Staff report will go to HRM council

The police review board motioned for the staff report to be presented to HRM council “for Council’s information.” Council meets next on Feb 11, though an agenda is not yet available for that meeting.

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1 Comment

Country Mouse says:

February 6, 2025 at 8:31 am

August 18, 2021 was the best thing that ever happened to the homeless.

On that day the city and province (and many of us) went from

Move the scum along.

to

Would you please, pretty please with sugar on it, move along?