SIU Clears Peel Police Officers After Mississauga Woman Arrested
Published February 8, 2018 at 7:48 pm
Two Peel Regional Police officers have been cleared by the province’s Special Investigations Unit after a 72-year-old Mississauga woman accused them of breaking her shoulder.
“There is no dispute that the complainant suffered a bone chip and a small fracture to her left shoulder,” wrote SIU director Tony Loparco in his decision released on Feb. 8.
“There is, however, an absolute absence of any evidence capable of shedding light on how the complainant’s shoulder came to be broken, when it was broken, by what means it was broken and by whom, if anyone, her injury was inflicted.”
Police responded to a Mississauga condo on Nov. 12, 2016, at 11:56 p.m.
It was for a call involving a disorderly female who lived in the building.
She was very drunk and phoned 911 three times, “starting with a silent call and ending with a call where she threatened to kill police officers,” the SIU report reads.
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Three officers responded to each call made by the complainant.
During the first two calls, the woman was cautioned about her behaviour and advised to go to sleep.
On the last call, however, when she was ranting in the common hallway of her building and fell to the ground, she was arrested for public intoxication and transported to the police station.
Once at the station, the woman was booked and held in a cell overnight.
“Although at one point during the night the complainant began to favour her left arm, at no point did she indicate to any officer that she was injured,” the report reads.
She was released the next morning.
The same woman was arrested on Nov. 16, 2016, on an unrelated matter.
At the time of her arrest, the complainant’s left arm was in a sling.
When asked about it, the woman said her left shoulder had been broken by police during her arrest four days prior.
It was later determined via hospital records that the complainant had suffered a non-displaced fracture of the proximal humerus bone.
In her statement to investigators, the complainant “could not specify if the officers attending her apartment were male or female, or why or where she went with the police officers,” the report reads.
“Once she left with the officers, the complainant had no further recollections until she woke up the next morning in a police cell. She could not recall how her shoulder came to be injured.”
It’s clear on all of the evidence in this matter, Loparco wrote, “that the complainant herself does not know how she came to suffer her injury; she has speculated that it must have happened while she was in police custody, but that is not evidence and does not form the basis for reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has been committed.”
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