Nunavut police assaulted regularly in line of duty, says top cop

RCMP V Division commanding officer Michael Jeffrey says Nunavut officers are regularly assaulted in the line of duty but he said police don’t track how many of those assaults lead to a conviction in court. (FILE PHOTO)

Nunavut RCMP members suffer dozens of assaults each year while responding to more than 20,000 annual emergency calls.

That’s according to Nunavut’s top RCMP member, Commanding Officer Mike Jeffrey.

Jeffrey provided rare statistics to Nunatsiaq News June 30 in an effort to paint a picture for the public of the environment in which Nunavut police officers do their jobs.

Jeffrey’s effort comes in the wake of a second investigation in six months that cleared an Iqaluit RCMP member of using excessive force in the line of duty.

In the same June 30 interview, Jeffrey urged Nunavummiut to have confidence in the process to review such allegations.

“We’ve been policing Nunavut for almost 100 years, and in a very broad way, we still have an excellent reputation and interactions with the communities we serve,” Jeffrey said.

In the past three years, fourteen Nunavummiut lodged complaints against the RCMP alleging excessive force by one of its members, Jeffrey said.

“In all of those cases, none were established that there was an excessive use of force,” Jeffrey said.

“On the same note,” Jeffrey said, the RCMP reported dozens of incidents in each of the past few years involving the assault of a Nunavut officer, including:

• 63 incidents in 2014;

• 56 incidents in 2015; and,

• 29 incidents so far in 2016, to the end of June.

In 2014, 47 of the reported incidents led to criminal charges for the alleged assaulter, said Jeffrey.

But the RCMP do not keep track of how many of those charges lead to convictions.

And Jeffrey did not provide a breakdown for the reported assaults that led to criminal charges for years other than 2014.

Jeffrey did provide daily averages of the most common emergency calls Nunavut police respond to, including:

• six assault complaints per day;

• one sexual assault complaint per day; and,

• one firearms-related call every three days.

Given the high-volume of calls and the scope of duties for the Nunavut RCMP, Jeffrey said Nunavut police show great professionalism and restraint on a regular basis.

“When you put all of this into context of the environment that police are working in in Nunavut, overall, I’m very proud of the work the employees of the RCMP are doing to make sure we have safe and healthy communities.”

Whenever police resort to force — using batons or pepper spray, for example — a report must be submitted to the officer’s supervisor, Jeffrey said.

“That gets reviewed by a supervisor, who looks at the correctness of the use of force.”

But in a 2015 ruling, Justice Earl Johnson of the Nunavut Court of Justice found the Iqaluit RCMP did not fill out that paper work when police used a restraining chair against Iqalungmiut Michael Naglingniq in 2013.

Iqaluit police acted with “unacceptable negligence” and violated Naglingniq’s basic rights, Johnson said, by keeping Naglingniq in the chair for longer than RCMP policy allowed.

The supervisor on duty during the incident, Const. Alexander Benoit, who failed to follow policy or file the proper paper work, was not disciplined.

But Jeffrey said June 30 that the Naglingniq incident provided the RCMP with an opportunity to learn.

“There were policies in regard to that incident that were reinforced to all members, not just locally but throughout Nunavut,” Jeffrey said.