Ward 11 councillor Brian Pincott recently turned to Twitter to express his concerns with what he perceives to be an alarming increase in the number of police shootings in Calgary and not all of his fellow councillors share his sentiments.
On Tuesday, Pincott tweeted a link to a Metro News article on Calgary’s tenth police shooting of 2016, including the message ‘Okay, can we please admit we have a problem’.
The tweet drew dozens of comments running the gamut from CPS support to questions of the CPS's use of ‘police-involved shooting’ to requests for Pincott’s solution to the problem.
“I was expecting exactly the tweet-storm that erupted,” said Pincott on Wednesday. “We have talked about this. With each shooting, we have this sort of nice, quiet conversation. Here we are, once again, talking about another shooting and another person that has been killed by police.”
Pincott maintains that his tweet was not an attack on police. "This is about recognizing that we have a problem where we have the most police shootings and the most police killings in Canada,” said Pincott. “The first step is to actually admit that we have a problem and we do. As a city, not as a police force but as a city, have a problem.”
According to Pincott, Calgary has twice as many police shootings as Toronto on a per capita basis.
Ward 4 councillor Sean Chu, a former member of the Calgary Police Service, was disappointed to hear of Pincott’s comments.
"I was kind of sad that a councillor, a leader of this city is actually saying something bad about the police,” said Chu. “Being a police officer for 21 years, I’ve been there and (done) the stuff most people wouldn’t want to do or wouldn’t want to see.”
Chu says the onus is on the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT), a police watchdog agency, not the public, to determine if an officer acted in an inappropriate manner.
“The situations are very fluid and dangerous,” explained Chu. “If the policeman’s done wrong, charge the policeman which I’m 100 per cent for.”
Ward Sutherland, who serves as Ward 1 councillor and as a member of the Calgary Police Commission, tweeted in response to Pincott’s message stating ’Pincott’s generic comment is not helpful and he should find out the facts first’.
Pincott says he does not regret sending the tweet and he'll continue to oppose what he believes to be a deferential attitude restricting some people from questioning authority.
“If it took some councillor to sit there and just say ‘let’s admit we have a problem’ to get us moving towards asking the questions and moving us towards getting a solution, then it may have been the best tweet I ever did.”
Early Tuesday morning, a knife-wielding suspect was shot during a confrontation with police in the southwest neighbourhood of Sunalta. The woman, who died as a result of the incident, was the tenth person to be shot by a member of the Calgary Police Service this year and the fifth to be fatally shot by police.
ASIRT is currently investigating the actions of the CPS member to determine if their actions were justified.
With files from CTV's Rahim Ladhani
