The silent witnesses

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2017 (2513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT didn’t occur to me until a week or so after off-duty city police officer Justin Holz was charged with impaired driving causing death and failure to remain at the Main Street scene where 23-year Cody Severight was struck.

Maybe my mind just didn’t want to go there again.

Or maybe I didn’t connect the Main Street and Sutherland Avenue location with the “silent witnesses” because of the controversy that followed and the Independent Investigations Unit taking over the case.

Police Chief Danny Smyth reporting that the breathalyzer had been taken three to four hours after the 34-year-old constable turned himself in and “arresting officers formed the opinion” that Holz was impaired. That, and Smyth subsequently announcing that two officers who were assigned to assist with the case had been placed on administrative leave.

“Their actions caused me enough concern that I contacted the director of the IIU,” Smyth said.  “They have agreed to investigate.”

It sounded like an unsettling eerie echo of the botched Crystal Taman case that finally led to the creation of the Independent Investigation Unit.

Would the IIU be able to collect and put all the evidence together on a case that, for the obvious historic reasons, puts added pressure on their dual investigations of the incident and the other two officers now involved. 

Of course they have forensics, perhaps other evidence from the bar where Holz and other cops were drinking after work that Oct. 10.

And at least one eye-witness who claimed the car had been speeding.

All of which finally prompted my memory of those “silent witnesses.”

A few years ago, while touring the Vineyard Church on the same Main and Sutherland corner, someone had pointed to a pair of closed circuit cameras on a lamp post, directly across the street.

They were “cop cams” I was told.

They were two of 10 that were part of a 2009 police CCTV camera pilot project that targeted high-crime locations in the city’s core area.

The pair at Main and Sutherland, my tour guide said, were strategically positioned there to monitor a street gang that frequented the area.

So last week I emailed police asking if those cameras were operational at the time of the alleged hit-and-run involving one of its off-duty officers.

The police service answered by referring me to the IIU.

And the IIU responded predictably.

“The IIU can not provide details of its investigation as this is an active and ongoing matter.”

So this week I visited the scene to see if the cop cams were even still there.

They were.

And, judging by where the collision occurred — on the east side of Main, a popular crossing between the New West Hotel and the Sutherland Hotel — if the cameras were working that evening they would have had what amounted to a front-row, high-resolution view of what happened. And they might have been assisted, by two other cop cams, mounted just across Higgins, by the cross-walk beside the Salvation Army, that would have captured Holz’s approach from the south side of Main Street.

Again, that’s if any of the cameras from the pilot project were still operational — which I still didn’t know, because after the cop-cam pilot project ended not that long after it began there hadn’t been much news about it. A retired city police officer told me last week the program hadn’t been expanded because of budgetary concerns at city hall and for investigative purposes the service was leaning on the network of business surveillance cameras.

Because anything they captured on video was free for the asking.

Anyway, I still didn’t know if the cop cams at Main and Sutherland were operational on Oct. 10 or at all, so I asked another more general question of the police service.

What happened to the police CCTV pilot project and are any of the cameras still operational?

This time the police response got me closer to an answer about the Main and Sutherland cop cams.

“The Winnipeg Police Service CCTV program remains in operation. There are a total of nine cameras located in designated areas within District 1 and District 3. All cameras are set up to record 24/7 (barring technical difficulties, weather etc).”

That left me still wondering as I wandered that block of Main Street counting a half dozen private surveillance cameras of various quality that might have captured part of what happened. Among them was one small camera camouflaged on the black and white mural that is now the artistic face of the New West Hotel.

Izzy Sethi, the hotel’s owner, said it wasn’t mounted in a direction that would have helped the IIU investigators who came by to see what it witnessed. But when I asked him about the police CCTV cameras across the street to him, Sethi had a surprise for me.

One of his customers had seen someone working on the cop cams.

There was another surprise waiting up the street at the Northern Hotel.

Owner Keith Horn said the camera mounted outside his hotel didn’t capture the collision but it did record the hit-and-run car going by, which he showed the IIU investigators.

“You could tell he was speeding,” Horn said.

We spoke for a few more minutes before Horn dropped this on me.

“And it’s too bad, too, because Justin’s a good kid.”

He knew Justin Holz, the officer who had been charged?

Horn said he did know him because Holz used to visit the Northern as part of his patrolling the area.

“He was in a car when I first met him. And then he got promoted to back-office detective. And then he got transferred downtown. He’s a good kid,” Horn repeated. “Always nice. Just a bad decision.”

Horn had another surprise for me, though, when I got around to asking about the cop cams on the corner and whether he knew if they work.

“They do,” he said.

How did he know?

Horn suggested the police have told him they’re operational.

But, were they operational that night?

Then curiously, as I was writing this Thursday afternoon, the IIU sent out an email to the media referencing Cody Severight and the area of Main and Sutherland where he was hit.

“The IIU is attempting to identify an individual who was crossing Main Street, at the intersection, from east to west, and was with Mr. Severight before and at the time of the collision.”

I think we can assume the answer is “yes”.

Those silent witness cop cams were on the job the night that has turned out so tragically for all involved on that dark October evening.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca