Family seeks answers, accountability after IIO clears RCMP officer who shot Dani Cooper in crisis
IIO not designed to provide accountability, says father Dennis Cooper
Dani Cooper often thought about death, with hope for what could come after theirs.
"I'm leaving and I have so much to pray for, for the deaths to cease, for hope to build, for action to take root," Cooper wrote in a poem last September.
Two months later, police shot and killed Cooper, who was in psychosis and threatening their mother and neighbours with a paring knife at their home in North Vancouver.
Cooper was a poet, writer and activist who had advocated for police to be removed from mental health crisis responses. They were non-binary and used they/them pronouns.
Last month, B.C.'s police watchdog cleared the North Vancouver RCMP officer who shot Cooper of any wrongdoing, finding the officer was reasonable and justified to use lethal force as Cooper advanced towards a group of five officers with a four-inch blade.
Now Cooper's family is picking up Cooper's cause, calling for the removal of police from mental health crisis calls and looking for accountability they say won't come from B.C.'s Independent Investigations Office (IIO).
The office investigates police incidents that result in death or serious injury, and can recommend charges to the B.C. Prosecution Service if it finds police acted unlawfully.
Cooper's family is applying for a judicial review of the IIO's investigation and want a coroner's inquest to examine what they describe as failings of B.C.'s mental health and police accountability systems, which they say set Cooper's death into motion long before they were shot.
"This isn't about bringing Dani back anymore," said father Dennis Cooper.
"This is about their legacy and helping others and it's a terrible position to carry my child's mantle forward and become the champion of social justice that they were … out of necessity."
Preventing crises
With police interactions resulting in more people being killed in B.C. each year, experts and advocates say fundamental changes to policing and community-based mental health supports are needed to prevent more deaths like Cooper's.
People in crisis make up nearly 28 per cent of people killed or injured by police in B.C. since the start of the 2020-21 fiscal year, according to the IIO.
Cooper had sought treatment for schizoaffective disoder, a diagnosis that sometimes made it hard for them to know what was real, and they sometimes self-medicated with heroin and other opioids.
At the time of their death, they had been waiting six months for a space at Red Fish Healing Centre, the only facility in B.C. that treats concurrent mental illness and substance use.
"There was not much more we could do," said Dennis. "We tried to get them into treatment. We tried to get them out of harm's way."
Long waits of up to a year are all too common for many individuals with serious mental illness, said Shirley Chan, president of Pathways Serious Mental Illness Society in North Vancouver.
Many use substances to cope when they don't have adequate support, she said.
"There's not enough money, there's not enough beds, there's not enough treatment facilities, not enough housing to allow people to move seamlessly and smoothly from hospital to community and to treatment facilities," said Chan, whose adult daughter has schizophrenia.
Supporting people who don't want to seek treatment or stop using substance is also essential, said Meenakshi Mannoe, criminalization and policing campaigner with non-profit Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver.
"What we really need to look at is how do we remove police from this equation altogether? As in 24/7 non-police mental health response, as in safe supply, as in gender affirming care, as in culturally competent sources of healing," said Mannoe.
Several alternatives to a solely-police response have emerged on the North Shore in recent years, including Car 22, which pairs a police officer with a mental health worker, and the Peer-Assisted Crisis Team, which pairs trained peer mental health workers with a mental health professional in North Vancouver.
But neither service attends calls where a weapon is involved, meaning they wouldn't have been called the night Cooper died.
Safety during crisis
Cooper's death has also raised questions about how to keep people in crisis safe when police do respond.
Dennis says RCMP knew Dani was in crisis when they arrived on scene and instead of subduing the situation, escalated it to killing his child in a matter of minutes.
He says he believes the four officers who witnessed the shooting aren't telling the truth about what happened that night.
According to the IIO report, RCMP told Dani to drop the knife multiple times, then tried to taser them. An officer then tried to tell Dani they were there to help, to which Dani replied, "You're going to kill me." RCMP then tried to taser Dani a second time, and an officer shot them less than 10 seconds later.
RCMP shot Dani within two minutes of arriving, Dennis says the IIO told him, and IIO chief civilian director Ron MacDonald told CBC News that it was within a maximum of eight minutes.
North Vancouver RCMP declined to respond to a detailed list of questions, citing the fact this case could be the subject of an inquest.
"They didn't use their pepper spray. They didn't use their baton. They had five officers who claimed they were being backed into a tree by 100-pound individual. Even though there were 12-foot-wide clearances left and right, they claim they had nowhere to go," said Dennis.
"If I had a hockey stick I could have swept [Dani's] feet out from under them and crossed-checked them to the ground and not been harmed."
MacDonald said using a baton or tackling Dani would have put an officer within reach of the knife and a potentially fatal or serious injury, regardless of Dani's small stature.
"This individual had already demonstrated a danger to three other individuals ... and then in a very deliberate and steady, progressive way, moved towards police in a way that created clearly, in my view, a life-threatening danger to them which under the law justified the use of the lethal force," said MacDonald, noting officers did try to communicate with Dani before they were shot.
Trying to speak to someone in crisis, recognizing their different reality and reassuring them you are here to help is a life-saving de-escalation practice, according to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's 2019 framework on mental health and criminal justice.
"The problem is the capacity to de-escalate, the capacity to be able to talk the Dani's of this world down into a place where they feel they're being heard, where they feel that they are not threatened, and the [police] uniform is already very scary," said Chan, who once called police when threatened with a knife by her daughter.
MacDonald stressed the importance of de-escalation in saving lives and said the law does not require an officer to de-escalate a crisis situation.
But while she says de-escalation training should be increased and standardized, Mannoe said it doesn't necessarily mean police will use force less.
"There's been so many years at this point of attention on people killed during incidents of mental distress and in some cases they have a weapon and in some cases they don't.
"But of course, when everything looks like a nail, you're going to use the hammer when you look at every mental health call as a potential fatal incident."
Accountability beyond charges
Charging the officer who shot Dani won't bring accountability for their death, says Dennis, but he wants to see the RCMP and IIO reformed to better address the needs of people in crisis and their families.
Police aren't required to try to de-escalate a situation and the Criminal Code states they are justified to use lethal force if the officer feels their life is being threatened, a threshold Dennis says is too low.
The officer whose actions are in question also isn't required to give an interview or participate in the investigation, as a result of their right against self-incrimination.
"If they're carrying guns and our community should be held to a different standard, they should be accountable for everything they do, and they should be able to have a conversation about that," said Dennis. "If they're not, that's a failing in the system."
He also says the IIO should be able to make binding recommendations for systemic changes and examine more than just the legal threshold for a police officer's conduct.
MacDonald says he could see such an expanded role for the IIO in the future, but that preventing deaths requires a "broad societal response" long before police become involved.
"It's really a society in general needs to bear the responsibility in these cases for helping to ensure they're kept to the lowest number possible and I think we should all be on board with that," said MacDonald.
Dennis says he will keep pushing for accountability for his child and others like them, keeping Dani's own words in mind.
"Let it comfort you instead," they wrote in an August 2022 poem, "that there is a place for suffering to dwell, and still room for peace."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
