WARNING: This story contains a video that shows violence and contains offensive language.
Country musician Jarrid Poitras says he hasn’t picked up a guitar since an RCMP officer dislocated his shoulder during a late-night highway traffic stop near Prince Albert two weeks ago.
“It’s all muscle memory, right? So for me to play guitar, I don’t know if I can,” Poitras said in an interview at his home in Shellbrook, Sask.
“I can still sing, thank God. But as for playing guitar, that’s going to have to be put on hold for a long time.”
Poitras shared a video with CBC News recorded during his Oct. 10 arrest on Highway 55 between Prince Albert and Shellbrook. He says what should have been a routine traffic stop for a suspended driver’s licence turned into a violent arrest during which he suffered several injuries, and left him and his wife traumatized.
“The physical stuff can heal. But it’s my mind that’s taking a little bit longer to heal,” Poitras said.
“The anxiety of seeing police is still in my mind … like what did I do to deserve that? So my spirit is kind of broken right now.”
Country musician Jarrid Poitras stands in his jam space at his Shellbrook, Sask., home and speaks about the injuries he sustained when an RCMP officer arrested him during a highway traffic stop. (Jeremy Warren/CBC)
The 28-second video starts midway through the arrest and shows an unidentified RCMP officer handcuffing Poitras behind his back and pushing him against a vehicle while Poitras screams in pain.
In the video, the officer wrenches Poitras’s left arm behind his back and Poitras yells out profanities as his wrist is pushed up closer to the back of his neck.
Poitras said he is embarrassed by the video and wonders if it will affect his award-winning music career, as he frequently tours across Canada. But after recent high-profile cases in the province of police officers injuring Indigenous people during arrests, Poitras chose to speak out about his treatment.
“It happens to a lot of my people,” said Poitras, a member of Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta. “Why? Why does it need to happen to the point where we’re seeing all these cases of abuse that are happening all across the province?”
RCMP told CBC News it referred the incident to the Saskatchewan Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT), which investigates the conduct of law enforcement in the province when someone dies or is seriously injured while in police custody or as a result of a police officer’s actions, but SIRT declined to investigate because the incident did not fall within its mandate.
WATCH | Poitras’s wife Marcella captured his arrest on video. WARNING: This video contains violence and offensive language :
Amateur video captures musician’s violent roadside arrest
WARNING: This video shows violence and contains offensive language. Country musician and Plains Cree man Jarrid Poitras says an RCMP officer dislocated his shoulder during a highway traffic stop near Prince Albert.The arrest
Poitras said he and his wife Marcella Poitras were on their way home from watching their nephew play hockey in Warman on Oct. 10. They stopped in Prince Albert to pick up pizza, wings and milk and then headed home to Shellbrook on Highway 55.
Around 11:30 p.m., he was driving and noticed a passing black SUV do a U-turn and start following them, Poitras said. The SUV turned on its emergency lights and Poitras pulled over.
Poitras said stopping for the unmarked vehicle along a quiet highway in the middle of the night made him and his wife uncomfortable, so they decided to keep driving until they got cellular service so they could call RCMP to confirm that the SUV’s driver was actually an officer.
The SUV caught up to them and turned on its emergency lights and siren to pull them over. With both vehicles parked, a uniformed RCMP officer approached Poitras in the driver’s seat.
“[The officer] opened my door and told me to shut my engine off and that’s when he started grabbing me,” Poitras said. “He grabbed my arm and he tried to get me to exit the vehicle but I still had my seatbelt on.”
He said the officer grabbed his arm to try to pull him out, bending Poitras’s arm against the vehicle’s door frame.
“I felt my elbow pop,” Poitras said. “At that point I was trying to reach in for my seatbelt and I kept getting pulled. So I undid my seatbelt and exited the vehicle. And that’s when he said ‘stop resisting’ even though I was compliant.”
Jarrid Poitras speaks about the injuries he suffered during a highway traffic stop with RCMP. (Jeremy Warren/CBC)
Marcella Poitras said this is when she started recording the video, and she would have kept filming but her phone ran out of battery power. She said the officer did not identify himself when they asked and did not immediately tell them why they were pulled over.
“He did not provide any lawful direction or explanation, and he also used profanity … and aggressive commands instead of de-escalation,” said Marcella, who is the director of justice for Big River First Nation.
She said the encounter left her feeling helpless.
“It’s a battle between the justice system and a lot of our people can’t come forward,” she said. “There’s no trust between the police because they don’t feel safe. And that’s who they’re supposed to go to when they’re not feeling safe.”
Jarrid said the officer also choked him prior to Marcella filming the arrest and kicked his legs as they dangled out of the police vehicle while he was handcuffed in the rear seat.
RCMP took him to the hospital, where he had his shoulder reset. About a week later, x-rays showed his elbow did not chip or fracture, but it’s still very painful and his shoulder requires physical rehabilitation, he said.
Jarrid said RCMP gave him a ticket for the suspended licence and charged him with obstruction of justice, fleeing from a police officer and resisting arrest.
RCMP confirmed the arrest in a statement to CBC News that also summarized the highway traffic stop, which started with an officer attempting to pull over the couple’s SUV.
“Each time the officer pulled in behind it, the SUV drove away. The SUV eventually came to a complete stop,” the RCMP statement said.
The officer then “instructed the male driver of the SUV that he was under arrest and to exit the vehicle. The male did not comply with the officer’s request. The male was removed from the vehicle and arrested.”
The aftermath
Jarrid said he has filed a complaint with the Public Complaints Commission and wants SIRT to investigate. The civilian-led team declined to investigate, on the basis that it does not fall within their mandate, according to the RCMP statement.
“Generally, a clip recorded can be just one piece of the fulsome investigation,” the RCMP statement said.
“To get a clear picture of the enforcement action taken, the RCMP response is currently undergoing review by Saskatchewan RCMP senior management. These reviews are conducted to assess the totality of the situation, including any RCMP footage of this incident.”
The provincial Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for SIRT, confirmed that RCMP notified SIRT and that SIRT determined the injuries did not meet the bar for “serious injury” as defined by legislation.
Based on the video and Jarrid’s account of the night and his injuries, the incident could meet the threshold for a SIRT investigation, said University of Saskatchewan College of Law assistant professor Colten Fehr, who researches criminal law procedure and constitutional issues.
“When an individual has their hands above their head and an officer is trying to secure an arrest when they seem to be compliant, to put their arm almost parallel with their shoulders seems to be a gratuitous act of violence,” Fehr said in an interview with CBC News.
“When [SIRT] investigations unfold, sometimes the officer is deemed to have used reasonable force. In other instances they are not. And it’s important for public accountability of the RCMP, and police more broadly, that we have those investigations and learn what happened.”
A still taken from the video shot by Marcella Poitras as her husband was arrested by RCMP on Highway 55 on Oct. 10. (Submitted by Jarrid Poitras)
Fehr said both the couple and the officer, who did not have a partner at the scene, likely felt “a bit scared in the scenario,” because the stop happened in the middle of night along an empty stretch of highway. But the arrest could have been handled better, he added.
“Keeping in mind we do not have the police officer’s account at this point,” Fehr said. “There needs to be some reason for the officer to believe that there is a threat to their person before they can do something that would be designed to hurt the individual.”
Jarrid has two court appearances scheduled for December, one for the traffic violation and the other for the more serious offences. He doesn’t have a lawyer yet, but said he plans to plead not guilty to all charges.
Fehr said he suspects those charges will be stayed, given what he knows about the circumstances of the arrest.
“Where police violence is considered so abusive that it’s considered an abuse of process, basically, then the courts will stay the proceedings,” Fehr said. “The accused will be let go and the charges never tried.”
Jarrid said he’s still trying to understand what led the officer to become so aggressive.
“Until it actually happens to you, you don’t know what to think,” he said.
“I questioned those videos [of police arresting Indigenous people] too, like what were they doing? What were the circumstances leading up to that? Even something as routine as a traffic stop can turn into something like this.”