When he saw the red canisters, he was terrified-he had never experienced what police call “OC spray” before, and though he knew it would be painful, he didn’t know what he could do to protect himself.Īlarmed, he saw that the crowd was pressing against the line of police tape that had been arbitrarily strung up in front of him. They’ve shaped public thinking on so many of their actions.… The priority is their image, and it always has been.”Ĭurran still doesn’t know why he was pepper sprayed. “Historically, they get away with all the time. “It fits within a pattern,” says Jane Gerster, journalist and author of For the Good of the Force, an upcoming book on the RCMP. Now, a joint Capital Daily–Ricochet investigation has established that virtually everything the RCMP told media about what happened on that Saturday morning was false.Īn exhaustive review of more than 90 minutes of footage taken from nine different angles, interviews with witnesses, and information from official sources has disproved many elements of the police force’s narrative and cast serious doubt on others. Justice Thompson rebuked the force for “disquieting lapses in reasonable crowd control” and found police had been responsible for a “serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree.” They’re part of a pattern of police behaviour that led a BC Supreme Court judge to describe some of the RCMP’s conduct as “unlawful” in an August ruling. He went down too, roughly, and the next thing he knew he was dragged away from the crowd.Ĭurran isn’t the first peaceful protester to be injured at Fairy Creek, and the events of Aug. Moments earlier Curran had been linking arms with the people next to him, protecting several protesters who were chained to a gate, when the person beside him was pulled down by police. He could feel his backpack being cut off his arms. ![]() ![]() He had been blinded by pepper spray, and had an elbow driven into his face and a knee into his back as his hands were zip-tied behind him. ![]() Īlexander Curran was lying prone, face down in the dirt, with a cracked rib. This investigation is a joint project between Capital Daily and Ricochet.
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