An Indigenous mother was left shaken after a confrontation with several officers who she alleges were physically and verbally abusive after they entered her home without cause.
Charity Tom was in her North End home with her three children May 21 when police knocked on her door at around 4 a.m. She said she was told police were responding to a call about a child left outdoors unsupervised, but Tom told them her kids were indoors and shut the door.
Shortly after, multiple police knocked on her door again and “barged in,” swore at her and threatened to arrest her, Tom said.
She said officers pushed her, twisted her arm and ripped her shirt, while calling her a derogatory term for the female anatomy.
“They just barged their way in, grabbed me by the throat and pushed me … it all happened so fast,” she told the Free Press.
In clips of home security footage shared by Tom, police can be seen entering the home and one appears to struggle with Tom, who is not in view of the camera.
An officer can be heard telling Tom to get up, threatening to “get the cuffs” and telling her to “stop acting like a c—t.”
“I’m not doing anything, let go, I’m trying to stand up,” Tom yells, while a young child can be heard in the background.
An officer threatens to “bring (her) to the drunk tank” and asks her if she wants to get arrested.
Tom said she was sober at the time and considered the threat to be racially motivated.
“I thought we’re supposed to call the cops if we’re in trouble, not (what) happened to me,” she said.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Charity Tom alleges she was treated poorly by two Winnipeg police officers when they were investigating a complaint on May 21.
In a video taken by Tom while police were leaving, she accuses the officers of nearly pushing her down a flight of stairs and one replies, “You were trying to prevent us from coming inside.”
Winnipeg Police Service Const. Dani McKinnon said in an email Tuesday that officers were investigating after receiving reports of a child around two-years-old left outside alone at that time of night.
She said officers were met with “an unco-operative adult female” who initially refused to let police in, and officers “eventually located the child in question within the residence, confirmed their well-being and left.”
McKinnon said the youth admitted they had previously been outdoors that night.
The youngest child in her home is eight, Tom said, and everyone had been asleep.
“I don’t know if it was a prank call, I don’t know if there was really kids outside,” she said. “They got the wrong address.”
The WPS did not respond to questions asking if any officers were facing disciplinary action.
“They just barged their way in, grabbed me by the throat and pushed me … it all happened so fast.”–Charity Tom
McKinnon said complaints about police should be directed to Manitoba’s Law Enforcement Review Agency, an independent body that investigates accusations of officer misconduct.
The incident has had a lasting emotional affect on Tom and her family — she said her eight-year-old, who woke up during the scuffle, became sick with fear the next day and remains “shaken.”
“I’ve been affected. It’s hard to deal with,” Tom said. “I’ve been abused all my life, I went through abusive relationships. This is one thing I never thought that would happen, police coming into my home, doing this to me.”
She called 911 in hopes of reporting the officers’ conduct directly after it happened and said an officer called her back, but offered no apologies or next steps. In sharing the video footage on social media, she hopes it helps to hold police accountable.
“Look what the cops are capable of doing … if I didn’t have that camera there, there would be no proof,” she said.
Complaints from civilians about police conduct are handled by LERA or the Human Rights Commission, depending on the nature of the complaint, but Kevin Walby, a University of Winnipeg associate professor in the criminal justice department, calls the bodies essentially toothless.
“There’s no real mechanism for reprimand,” he said. “I think that it is probably experienced most often as just further belittlement … because it’s a bureaucratic process, you have to go through all these hoops, and at the end of the day, there’s no resolution, there’s no reprimand.”
Recorded incidents like Tom’s, particularly when they involve Indigenous Manitobans, speak to “the character of officers and the character of police culture” in the province, Walby said, that cannot be changed without a wider examining of policing as a whole.
SUPPLIED
Home security footage supplied by Charity Tom shows Winnipeg police entering Tom’s home and restraining her on the morning of May 21.
“We’re going to continue to live in the city where this us-versus-them view of the world that police have is inflicted on people on a daily basis, and its results are this kind of racism,” he said.
“It’s an institution that is really regressive in that regard,” he said. “The racism is entrenched in the culture of WPS, and the pithy mechanisms that we do have like Human Rights Commission (and) LERA, sadly, are not going to change that culture.”
According to LERA’s 2022 annual report, the most recent available online, there were 80 formal complaints reported to the agency that year and 81 files closed. All were either abandoned or withdrawn by the complainant, or dismissed by the commissioner for being outside of the scope of LERA, “frivolous or vexatious,” or not “supported by sufficient evidence to justify a hearing.”
malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca
Malak Abas
Reporter
Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.
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