Christie Zebrasky, whose daughter Eishia Hudson was shot dead by police on April 8, 2020, in her bedroom with her daughter's ashes and memorial in Winnipeg, on Dec. 11, 2020.JOHN WOODS/The Canadian Press
Manitoba’s Children’s Advocate has used a report into the police killing of Eishia Hudson to sharply rebuke the Winnipeg Police Service.
The 16-year-old member of Berens River First Nation was shot and killed by a rookie officer in 2020. Eishia and four friends had allegedly stolen alcohol from an east end liquor store. None were armed.
In her report, Sherry Gott notes that the year Eishia was killed was “one of the deadliest years for police shootings in Canada” and that 48 per cent of those killed were Indigenous and 19 per cent were Black.
Far from being a stand-alone event, the report states, “these data illustrate the fact the death of Eishia was an extreme example in the ongoing pattern of anti-Indigenous racism and state-generated violence.”
Eishia was shot after a chase in a stolen Jeep, after an alleged robbery at a liquor store on April 8, 2020. At the time, Winnipeg police said she was driving the Jeep when it ran into a police cruiser and several other cars.
In 2021, the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba announced that no charges would be laid in her death.
The officer who shot the Anishinaabe teen refused to sit for an interview with IIU investigators. His lawyer provided a statement on his client’s behalf stating that the officer shot Eishia because he felt she was attempting to strike officers with the vehicle she was driving “in order to cause grievous bodily harm.”
The IIU, which investigates deaths and injuries when an officer is involved, accepted this reasoning.
In her report, titled Memengwaa Wiidoodaagewin, or Butterfly Project, Ms. Gott looked at the circumstances of Eishia Hudson’s life.
She found that while Eishia was never charged with a crime, she was repeatedly stopped by city police throughout her life. The report called for an end to this type of “unnecessary and punitive contact,” which results in Indigenous people being “the most arrested, incarcerated and victimized populations by police.”
Data published by The Globe and Mail earlier this year showed that officers in Canada are hardly ever charged for killing civilians. At least 1,129 Canadians have died in encounters with police since 2000, according to information from independent investigator’s and coroner’s reports, court records and news reports. In that time, 22 officers were charged with culpable homicide in the deaths of 13 civilians – three with second-degree murder and 19 with manslaughter.
The data also showed that when officers were charged, the victim was white in 72 per cent of those cases.
The events surrounding Eishia’s shooting have been the subject of much controversy.
André Marin, a former director of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, viewed the video of her shooting death on behalf of The Globe. He thinks the IIU got it wrong.
Mr. Marin said he didn’t see any officer “at risk of imminent grievous injury or death” – nor any officer “in any jeopardy at all.”
“It seems that two shots were fired while the car was either immobilized or in reverse,” he added. “And no one was in the back of it.”
That’s what 10 of the 14 civilian witnesses said they saw: The vehicle was reversing or stopped when the shots were fired.
Three officers on scene, however, agreed with their colleague. They told the IIU that they saw the vehicle moving forward, toward an officer. (One of the 14 civilian witnesses corroborated the police version of events.)
Asked about this discrepancy, Zane Tessler, the IIU’s director and a former Crown attorney, said he was “satisfied that, on the whole, all of the evidence does make sense and supports the findings.”
Less than 12 hours after Eishia was killed, Winnipeg police shot and killed her father’s close friend, Jason Collins, a 36-year-old First Nations power line worker. Nine days later, they shot and killed 22-year-old Stewart Andrews, an unarmed Swampy Cree father of one. The IIU recently cleared the officers involved in the deaths of both Indigenous men.
Black and Indigenous peoples are grossly overrepresented in deaths by officers in Canada, data show.
First Nations people make up 11 per cent of the population in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and 3 per cent of Alberta’s population, according to Statistics Canada. But in the last five years in Manitoba, all six people shot to death by police whose identities were released were non-white, according to obituaries and interviews with family members. Five were First Nations, and a sixth victim was Black.
In Saskatchewan, four of five people fatally shot by officers since 2018 were First Nations. A fifth victim was white. In Alberta, 17 of the 20 people fatally shot by officers in that time whose identities were known were non-white: 14 were Indigenous, one was Middle Eastern and one was South Asian.
In Toronto, a Black person is nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by the police, according to a 2020 report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. In all, 62 per cent of deadly police encounters and 70 per cent of fatal shootings in Toronto include Black victims, it found.
Structural racism acts to elevate white victims and white witnesses, says Tammy Landau, who teaches criminology at Ryerson University. Black and Indigenous people are likely to be considered the “least credible” in these contexts, she adds.
Police, on the other hand, are trained as expert witnesses and know how to “massage the truth” and deceive during investigations, says Bill Closs, a former chief of the Kingston police.
“They are human beings,” he added. “They lie. They will do whatever it takes to keep their job.”