Man’s arrest ‘ugly side of policing’: defence

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This article was published 27/01/2022 (1690 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg man on trial for assaulting two police officers says police mistakenly identified him as a suspected criminal before forcefully taking him to the ground and repeatedly shocking him with a Taser.

“This case displays the ugly side of policing in downtown Winnipeg,” Shaun Anobis’s lawyer, Martin Pollock, told a judge in a closing argument earlier this week.

“This case concerns stereotyping, embellishment, deception and the substandard professionalism of these officers,” Pollock said.

Anobis, 38, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

Provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs will deliver his verdict April 5.

Court heard evidence police were responding to a report of a man brandishing a BB gun in the area of a Maryland Steet rooming house on June 8, 2020, at the same time Anobis was walking out of the house.

Anobis, who matched the rough description of the suspect but was not carrying a BB gun, testified he was at the house trying to retrieve his cellphone and initially believed police were there to help him.

Anobis testified he immediately complied with a police demand he take his hands out of his pockets as he walked out of the house but was given no other demand or warning before two officers grabbed him by each arm and took him to the ground.

The officers testified they told Anobis he was being detained, but no mention of it was made in their police notebooks, Pollock said.

The officers testified that after Anobis left the house, they walked him to a fence to search him, at which point Anobis kicked at one officer and punched the other two times in the shoulder. Only then, the officers testified, did they take Anobis to the ground.

But that version of events was contradicted by their own testimony, Pollock argued. Officers testified they took Anobis to the fence only once, but a video provided to court showed Anobis being pressed against the fence in handcuffs, a position from which it would have been impossible to kick or punch the officers, Pollock alleged.

On that same video, one of the officers can be heard calling Anobis “a piece of shit.”

Court heard after Anobis was taken to the ground, one officer sat on his back, while another shocked his thighs and buttocks several times with a Taser, and a third officer punched him in the midsection.

Const. Arjun Sriram, the officer who wielded the Taser, testified he shocked Anobis approximately three times, but an analysis of the device showed it had been activated 13 times within a 10-second period, Pollock said, noting not every Taser shock may have made contact with Anobis’s body.

Photos taken of Anobis a day or so after the incident showed five distinct ‘snake bite’ burn marks on his thighs and buttocks, Pollock said.

Under cross examination at trial, prosecutors suggested some of the scarring may have been the result of cigarette burns or bed bugs.

Prone on the ground, with three officers restraining him, Anobis posed no threat and there was no need to shock him with a Taser, Pollock said.

Sriram “was not using the Taser as a mechanism for gaining compliance, he was using the Taser as a means of punishing Anobis, a show of force,” Pollock argued.

Court records show Anobis has been charged only with offences directly related to the circumstances of his arrest.

Anobis filed a civil lawsuit against Sriram and four other Winnipeg Police Service officers last year.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca