RCMP officers face firing for ‘atrocious’ racist behaviour, harassment, documents say

VANCOUVER — Three RCMP members from a Metro Vancouver detachment could be fired over alleged “atrocious,” “racist” and “horrible” behaviour detailed by a fellow officer, including text chats that bragged about “Tasering unarmed black people,” court documents say.

A schedule from the RCMP shows Constables Philip Dick, Ian Solven and Mersad Mesbah are slated to appear next February for code of conduct hearings over allegations including discrimination, harassment and discrediting the police force.

None of the allegations have been proven.

In court filings to obtain a search warrant, an officer in the RCMP’s Professional Standards Unit in Coquitlam, B.C., says another member in the detachment trained by Dick complained about being harassed by the accused officers.

Among the key complaints, according to the filings, is that officers allegedly engaged in comments on a mobile chat group that were abusive, racist, homophobic and misogynistic that matched a “climate of harassment” created by the three officers.

“Members of the (chat) group never talk about their own lives,” the filings said “They use the group to say ‘negative stuff about work or horrible things about people they work with.’

“He (the complainant) described the behaviour in the chat group as ‘atrocious.’ He believed it was racist and horrible, so he used to just ‘skim’ it rather than reading all of it,” the documents say.

The filings also said the complainant tried to leave the chat group but was told it was “used for operational purposes and that he needed to be a part of it,” and was accused of “not being a team member” if he did not rejoin.

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The documents say that among the list of alleged comments made on the chat are instances where an officer “goes off about … brown people” making the Lower Mainland “unsafe,” using the N-word and the racial stereotype of eating chicken when describing blacks, dismissing a woman reporting a sex assault based on her ethnicity and calling her “dumb,” and making fun of a female RCMP employee’s weight by “insinuating that the shape of her vagina was visible through her clothing.”

The complaint also outlined a number of actions by the three officers outside of the group chat, including belittling Indigenous community members as having fetal alcohol syndrome and saying they are “not going to the reserve … because we’re not going to help those people,” the court document says.

In another instance described by the complainant, one of the members, who was “typically dismissive” of shoplifting files, was going “out of his way to attend” a case and try “to provoke the suspect into a fight” when he found out the suspect was black.

The court document says the complainant said the officer “later lamented that he hadn’t been able to ‘rile up’ the suspect sufficiently to justify Tasering him.”

The document also describes other alleged instances where members justified domestic violence by saying “women deserve it,” swearing in front of a four-year-old child while attending a tenancy dispute, and bragging about concluding police files by making up “whatever” when asked to followup on a case without any filings.

The Coquitlam RCMP standards officer also said in the document that a review of other chat logs from the accused officers from January 2019 to May 2021 “identified a variety of comments that were ‘chauvinist in nature, with a strong air of superiority and include flippant or insulting remarks about clients, supervisors, colleagues, policy and the RCMP as a whole.”

“In the messages, Constables Dick, Solven and Mesbah are frequently offensive,” the court filing said. “Constable Dick and Mesbah use racial and homophobic slurs, and all three frequently deride their co-workers.”

The BC RCMP referred The Canadian Press’s request for comment to National RCMP communications, who have not responded to the allegations or the conduct review.

A legal document released on Sept. 12 says the RCMP intend “to seek termination of the members’ employment at the hearing, and the three members have been suspended since June 2021 when the allegations emerged.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 20, 2024.

Chuck Chiang, The Canadian Press