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A 42-year-old man is dead after being shot by a Winnipeg police officer at a home in the city’s Linden Woods area Monday night.
The shooting followed a call to police from a man who said his brother had locked him out of their home on Avon Gate — just off Victor Lewis Drive and west of Waverley Street — and was “behaving erratically and threatening to damage property,” Winnipeg Police Service Deputy Chief George Labossière said at a Tuesday news conference.
The caller reported his brother had mental health issues and was not taking prescribed medication, a news release from the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, the province’s police watchdog, later said.
The caller initially phoned police around 8:42 p.m. He called again at 9:58 p.m., saying he was still locked out and his brother was now screaming at him through a window, Labossière said.
Two uniformed police officers arrived in a marked cruiser car around 10:23 p.m. Around 10:35 p.m., the man came out of the house with an edged weapon, Labossière said, and one of the officers shot him.
Labossière said he couldn’t answer a number of questions about what led up to the shooting, citing the investigation being taken over by the police watchdog agency.
“The only details I have is that when they arrived on scene, they weren’t able to get into the home,” but “after a few moments of [police] being on scene, the individual came out of the home on his own,” he said.
The man was critically injured and got emergency medical care from the officers, who were helped by a neighbour who rushed over to assist while awaiting paramedics.
The 42-year-old was taken to hospital in critical condition and later died.
Labossière said both officers who initially responded to the call have been placed under the police force’s critical incident protocol, which involves removing them from the workplace — something he said is done for the officers’ well-being and to maintain neutrality for the investigation.
Neither of the two officers who were at the scene at the time of the shooting were wearing bodycams, but another officer who responded afterward did. That footage will be provided to investigators from the IIU, he said.
Some front-line Winnipeg police officers started wearing the devices as part of a long-discussed pilot project announced last month.
The incident marks the third fatal Winnipeg police shooting this year, all in the last two months.
A 34-year-old man involved in a hostage situation in a random home was killed on May 29, while a 26-year-old man was killed June 19 after reports of a domestic dispute in the presence of four children.
Alternative response not used
Labossière also said while police always consider using the alternative response to citizens in crisis, or ARCC, program — which pairs plainclothes police officers with mental health workers to respond to non-violent and non-emergent crisis situations — in this case, they were not sent.
“The ARCC unit is made up of an officer and a civilian member,” Labossière said. “We never want to put our civilian members in positions that might present violence of any kind.”
Labossière said he could not comment on whether the man had made any threats to harm himself or others. When asked if there was any indication of violence before police arrived, he said he didn’t “want to go into those specifics.”
“I don’t know, other than the fact that I can comment that the caller had waited a prolonged period of time, was locked outside of the home, and that the call appeared to be escalating in terms of the situation — that the individual in the home was reacting in ways that were erratic,” said Labossière.
“So not necessarily the type of call we’d want to send our ARCC unit to.”
ARCC only provides secondary responses once a situation is deemed safe. Uniformed police officers are typically still the first responders, particularly for calls involving a weapon.
The Independent Investigation Unit is asking witnesses or anyone with information or video that may help its investigators to contact them toll-free at 1-844-667-6060.