Regina police chief open to all inquest recommendations, including body cameras

REGINA -

Regina Police Chief Evan Bray said he’s willing to explore all of the recommendations made by the jury of an inquest into the police-involved shooting death of Geoff Morris.

“I’m open to all of these recommendations, because the recommendations are made in an earnest effort to improve situations like this in the future and potentially have a positive impact on the outcome,” Bray said at an availability Thursday.

Morris, 41, was shot and killed by Cpl. Devon Sterling during a hostage situation on May 4, 2019.

The inquest concluded Wednesday with the jury ruling Morris’ death a suicide after four hours of deliberations.

“I think our jury gave us some recommendations that might help build a bit of a framework or a template that gives us some strategies we can try and employ if the situation arises again,” Bray said.

The jury also provided a series of recommendations to the Regina Police Service, its Crisis Negotiation Team (CNT) and the non-commissioned officers, including:

• Having a psychologist always arrive at the scene with the CNT
• Creating a list of on-call psychologists
• Giving the CNT members body cameras and audio recording devices
• Giving body cameras to all non-commissioned officers when called to a scene as a supervisor
• Creating an emergency list of elders willing to attend either in person or via digital communication
• Changing and reviewing policies for de-escalation strategies, crisis intervention and addiction/psychosis strategy to allow for annual training specific to mental health crisis intervention

Candy Morris, Geoff's sister, said whether or not the recommendations are implemented, it does not change the result for her family.

"Whether they implement those or not, it won’t bring back my brother. I hope they do, so it can save the next family, so somebody else doesn’t have to go through what we’re going through right now," Candy told CTV News.

BODY CAMERAS COME WITH 'VERY BIG PRICE TAG'

Bray said the body camera discussion is one the Board of Police Commissioners has had several times to date, including within the last few months. He noted the recommendations will add to that topic, but implementing a body camera program comes at a cost.

“The board was wanting to do a little bit more exploration, I assume that will be a conversation we’ll have going forward,” Bray said. “Body-worn cameras come with a very big price tag, not for the actual cameras themselves but it’s the storage and manipulation of data that comes with that and the access to it, disclosure and everything else.”

“Police services that have trialed body-worn cameras across Canada have seen significant budget increases.”

Several of the recommendations are already used to different extents within RPS, particularly those surrounding training, according to Bray.

“We do that sort of training annually now and accreditation is given through our human resource program, so we could maybe formalize it a bit more but that does happen now,” Bray said. “The recommendation with regard to access to an elder, we have an Elder Advisory Council at our police service and we meet with them regularly, I’m really looking forward to having this dialogue with our council and get their advice as to what that looks like.”

The first elder advisory council meeting since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is scheduled to happen soon, Bray said.

Bray told reporters he sat beside Morris’ family during much of the inquest, and offered his condolences during Thursday's media availability.

“This was a tough situation,” Bray said. “No family wants to go through that and no police service wants to cause a family to go through that.”

In response, Candy Morris told CTV News later Thursday Bray did not speak to her or Geoff's family during the inquest.

"He never once talked to my family, he never once looked at my family, he never once apologized to my family," Candy said. "Who wouldn't have wanted an apology? You took a life, you took my brother."

“I know on this day, our officers were involved in taking a life, but in doing so, they saved a life,” Bray said. “This was a hostage situation, they all believed that hostage’s life was in jeopardy and they all believed that despite all their efforts to try and resolve that situation peacefully, the way that situation ended was the only option they had that day to save a life.”

Prior to Morris’ death, the last fatal police shooting in Regina was in 1998.