A Prince George RCMP officer was found guilty Thursday of obstructing justice in relation to a seven-year-old arrest turned fatal.
Provincial Court Judge Adrian Brooks issued the verdict against Const. Arthur Dalman after finding he had ordered a bystander to delete video taken at the scene.
Co-accused Sgt. Bayani (Jon) Eusebio Cruz was found not guilty.
The outcome stems from the July 18, 2017 apprehension of Dale Culver after police were called to a report of someone riding a bicycle "casing motor vehicles" on 10th Avenue between Central Street West and Commercial Crescent.
When the responding officer tried to apprehend Culver a struggle ensued and backup was called in. The convergence of police vehicles and their flashing lights also drew the attention of onlookers, some of whom pulled out their smartphones to record videos and take photos.
One of them was Ken Moe. According to a summary of the events Brooks provided in his decision, the Prince George resident had 3-4 drinks earlier that day when he had been visiting a cousin and decided to take the bus home at about 10:30 p.m.
"He described himself as feeling pretty good but would not say he was drunk. He said that his vision was a little bit blurry that night which he attributed to alcohol," Brooks wrote in the decision.
Moe got off the bus about a block away from 10th Avenue and went to a nearby store when he bought some sodas. From there he walked along Central towards 10th when he saw a police vehicle go by with its lights on and as he reached the corner he saw several RCMP vehicles in front of the 10th Avenue Liquor Store.
Moe pulled out his smartphone and started to record "just because it piqued my interest" and got as far as some barriers at the far end of a parking lot where he sat down. He testified that someone in a car stopped to tell him he should stop recording because police were telling bystanders to delete their videos.
"Moe said 'Okay, thanks,' but in his own mind he was thinking 'Whatever. It's legal to videotape. There's no reason why I can't," Brooks wrote.
Moe saw two or three officers in the middle of the road, then noticed one of them, who turned out to be Dalman, walk toward him. Moe responded by stopping his recording and putting his phone in his pocket.
When asked, Moe told Dalman he had recorded some video and agreed to show it to him. Moe went on to claim Dalman tried to snatch it out of his hand a few seconds later before Moe pulled the phone away and put it back in his pocket.
Moe testified that Dalman became "really aggressive" and warned Moe he was going to be arrested.
"I can't recall the exact conversation, but after telling me he was going to arrest me for obstruction, he told me that he was going to take my phone as evidence if I didn't delete the video," Moe testified according to Brooks' decision.
Cruz, a supervising officer, walked over and intervened. Moe described Cruz as much calmer but Moe held his phone tight when he showed the video for a second time. Moe claimed Cruz also told him to delete the video or the phone will be taken as evidence.
In response, Moe said he deleted the video and made sure Cruz saw that he had done so.
In an email to the Citizen, Moe said he was contacted by the province's civilian-based police watchdog because Dalman had taken his name down in his notepad before allowing him to leave. The IIO confiscated the notepad as evidence and contacted him about the incident.
Video from a nearby surveillance camera showed Moe arriving on the scene about 2 1/2 minutes after the arresting officer started to struggle with Culver but Brooks concluded Moe had reached a position to see what was happening only just after Culver had been placed inside a police cruiser.
Brooks generally accepted Moe's testimony.
Conversely, the judge rejected wholesale Dalman's testimony, including the claim that Moe erased the video voluntarily.
Brooks also had some harsh words words for Dalman's claim he had not looked at Cruz's report on the incident before submitting his own. Brooks found that except for the spacing after one of the words, the two were identical, right down to the same spelling mistake.
"This was not simply a reckless disregard for the truth, this was a lie. I reject the entirety of his evidence as to the conversation with Ken Moe on the basis of that deliberate lie. However, to be perfectly clear, I would have rejected all of that same evidence as to the conversation even without that lie. Dalman's evidence was so fraught with illogical missteps, so subject to alteration on the slightest prodding, and so contradictory when compared with reliable evidence, that it is not worthy of any belief," Brooks wrote.
Brooks also had misgivings about Cruz's testimony but when he considered the officer's "evidence in its totality and not just its flaws, I am unable to reject his evidence entirely. In my mind a reasonable doubt remains."
Immediately after the verdicts were issued, Dalman's lawyer, Neil Wiberg, told the court he will be seeking a hearing on whether the time it had taken to get the case to trial had violated his client's Charter rights. The IIO's report on the matter was not forwarded to Crown counsel until March 2020 and it took another three years for charges to be approved.
It took Brooks more than three hours to read out his decision. The more-than 100-seat gallery was close to packed. Colleagues of the accused, a good portion uniformed police officers, dominated one side; friends and family of Culver, an Indigenous man from the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Nations, occupied many of the seats on the other side. Culver’s daughter Lily Speed-Namox was in the front row as was B.C. Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee.
In relation to Culver's death, two other officers had stood accused of manslaughter until it was determined that he was under the influence of methamphetamine that led to heart failure following a struggle with police and did not die from blunt force trauma.
CORRECTION: Ken Moe did not file a complaint with the Independent Investigations Office. This story has been updated from a previous version with the correct information. We apologize for the error.
