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Saskatoon police have been cleared of wrongdoing after an accusation that officers drove a man out of city limits and left him to walk home.
Ken Thomas filed a complaint with the Provincial Complaints Commission (PCC), an independent body that oversees complaints against police.
He alleged police officers approached him on April 21 while he was having a cigarette outside Stan’s Place, a bar near the intersection of Ruth Street and Lorne Avenue. He claimed they told him he matched a suspect’s description, then bundled him into a black SUV.
Thomas said he was taken to an area off Highway 11 just south of Saskatoon and forced out of the vehicle. In an effort to keep warm, he said he ran back to the city.
On Tuesday, Saskatoon Police Chief Troy Cooper issued a statement on the results of the PCC investigation.
“Yesterday afternoon we received the results of the investigation by the Provincial Complaints Commission into a complaint made by Mr. Ken Thomas in April 2018. The PCC has determined the complaint is unfounded.”
Thomas’ accusation contained echoes of an ugly chapter in the history of the Saskatoon Police Service around what came to be known as “starlight tours.” Two officers went to jail for 8 months after being found to have driven an Indigenous man outside the city limits in 2000, leaving him to walk home.
Following those convictions, a 2003 inquiry was held for the case of Neil Stonechild, a 17-year-old teen who died on the outskirts of Saskatoon in 1990. The inquiry found there wasn’t adequate evidence to conclude what the exact circumstances were around Stonechild’s death, however, the two officers who arrested Stonechild before he died were fired.
In his statement concerning Thomas’ 2018 allegation, Cooper said the Saskatoon Police Service has now faced seven similar complaints since 2012, all of them determined to be unfounded after investigation by the PCC.
He noted Saskatoon police have now had GPS units tracking the movements of all its vehicles for a number of years, along with in-car video and audio recording.
“Our Service cooperated fully with the investigation from its inception, and assisted by providing logs of GPS for our fleet as well as video and audio recordings which are automatically activated in all our cars. This information was undoubtedly very useful in proving that there was no contact between the SPS and Mr Thomas on April 21st.”