From outside her family’s Victoria home, Marney Mutch heard a terrifying gunshot blast and was hustled by police into the back of a squad car to wait. As she sat alone in the vehicle, her worst fears were confirmed over the police radio: Her 20-year-old son had been shot, likely fatally. “Subject down. Bullet to the neck. Mother safely in the car,” the emotional mother recalls hearing. The last time she saw her son Rhett, she said, he had been sitting quietly on the couch of her Victoria home with tears in his eyes. Earlier that day, last Nov. 1, he had broken a window, after losing his key and thinking that his mother was not home. Police released few details after the shooting, but said the mother called 911 after her son allegedly threatened to hurt himself. There were issues Rhett was upset about that day, she said, adding she later learned he had been fired from his job the night before. The fatal shooting of her only child is being examined by the province’s Independent Investigations Office, so Mutch declined to discuss the specifics of what happened until the report is complete. But she is certain that Rhett was not a threat to her or to himself, and was mortified when heavily armed officers responded to her 911 call with sirens blaring. “I was on my way to sit down with him when the SWAT team arrived and I tried to assure them before they entered that the assault rifle was not needed ... I will forever be haunted by thoughts of how terrified he must have been,” Mutch said in a recent interview. “If they think someone is distraught enough to consider harming themself, how does confronting them with terrifying weapons improve their outlook? This wasn’t a hostage-taking. The whole thing was surreal.” Neither Victoria police nor the IIO will discuss specifics of what happened that day until the probe is finished. Rhett was one of six people shot and killed by police in B.C. in 2014. All of the deceased either had diagnosed mental illnesses or were going through a mental health crisis triggered by drug use or difficult life events. Last year was unusually active for fatal police shootings in this province. And it comes at a time when nearly every officer in B.C. has completed new training on how to de-escalate situations with mentally distraught people, before resorting to lethal force. The Vancouver Sun was unable to find a complete list of fatal shootings by police in B.C., so compiled one using coroner’s reports, newspaper archives and IIO press releases. The newspaper tallied 41 people killed in police shootings in this province since 2004, an average of just under four a year. Of those, we conservatively estimate 60 per cent of the deceased were going through a mental health crisis. (The list does not include people who died after being Tasered by police, or those who died in police custody of other means.) Some years, such as 2004, 2009 and 2014, had more fatal shootings than average, while other years, such as 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2013, had fewer. In 2012, the province introduced mandatory “crisis intervention and de-escalation” training to help officers in B.C. better relate to people in the throes of a mental health crisis. The training was created in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski, the unarmed Polish man who became agitated at the Vancouver airport and was Tasered several times by RCMP in 2007.

All new and existing officers were to complete the four-hour online training and the one-day classroom session by January 2015, but the Justice Ministry could not confirm this target has been reached. Instead, it said as of December, more than 7,500 officers — between 75 and 85 per cent of those in B.C. — had taken the training. Once trained, B.C. officers must complete an online refresher course every three years. The B.C.-developed training is unique in Canada and has received some positive reviews, including from the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Several U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions want to adopt similar measures for their police officers. But is there any evidence the training is working, if the number of fatal shootings dropped from four in 2012 to one in 2013, and then climbed to six in 2014? Yes, insisted Justice Minister Suzanne Anton. “I do believe police in B.C. are much better equipped to interact with people with mental health or substance abuse issues now, and in fact our expectation is that the (de-escalation) skills police learn are practised during other types of training such as use of force training as well,” Anton said in an emailed statement to The Sun. Sgt. Mike Massine is a use-of-force instructor at the Justice Institute, which teaches the de-escalation training to all new recruits. Without getting into the specifics of the cases, he argues the cluster of incidents in 2014 could be caused by many different variables — and isn’t proof that police too often reach for their guns, instead of their negotiating skills, when confronted by an erratic, often-armed mentally disturbed person. “The numbers themselves are not indicative that (the training) program isn’t working. The situations that officers face from year to year, call to call, are very different,” Massine said in an interview. “Just because you have one year with higher incidents of use of force … doesn’t necessarily mean a program is failing.” There are simply times, Massine added, when the life of an officer or a bystander is in danger. “We want to de-escalate. We want to avoid the use of force at all costs, but we also realize that we don’t live in a perfect world, a utopian world, where we will eliminate the need for officers to use force,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate reality.” Doug King, a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, an advocacy organization for disenfranchised people, is concerned about the tally of fatal shootings in 2014. “(It) was a difficult year, for sure, for police shootings and I think maybe that’s one of the reasons it is in the public’s mind a lot right now — the sheer number. And it suggests that we are not going in the right direction. We are having difficulties,” he said. Pivot is representing the family of Tony Du, a schizophrenic man shot in November by police in an East Vancouver intersection. Du, 51, was waving a wooden two-by-four, but was otherwise unarmed.

That case, King argues, is one in which the de-escalation training should have been tried before the trigger was pulled. “It seems like a classic example where there was a total failure to de-escalate,” King said. “It is tough to reconcile with what the purpose of the training is.” In too many of these fatal cases, the shots are fired within minutes — sometimes seconds — of police arriving at the scene. That is often a factor of an officer not being able to slow the situation down because there isn’t proper backup, or access to less-lethal weapons such as Tasers, or enough time to prepare. In addition to relatives of Du and Mutch, other families have raised concerns: • Peter de Groot, an academic before suffering a brain injury caused by an aneurysm, was shot in October at a remote cabin near Slocan, where he had hunting rifles but posed no public safety threat, his sister said. His family accused the RCMP of “executing” the 45-year-old man when he opened the door of the cabin holding a rifle, alleging officers wouldn’t accept relatives’ offers to help calm de Groot. • In December, Naverone Woods, 23, was acting irrationally inside a Surrey grocery store and was shot by Transit police when he advanced toward them armed with a knife. His relatives said he had no diagnosed mental illness, and question why a gun was used instead of less-lethal options such as a Taser. • Gregory Matters, a Canadian peacekeeper with PTSD, was holding a hatchet when he was shot in September 2012 after he walked toward an officer at his mother’s rural Prince George property. His relatives maintain police handled the situation poorly, arguing the autopsy proves Matters, 40, was shot twice in the back. • Justin Zinser, who was bipolar, was shot in September 2011 at a remote Chilcotin cabin after police asked him to drop his rifle and he instead turned his back to them and appeared to be loading it. The family of the 23-year-old have advocated criminal charges in the case, arguing he was fatally shot in the back and received no first aid at the scene. • Michael Vann Hubbard, a schizophrenic living in a Downtown Eastside homeless shelter, was holding an Exacto knife he used for artwork when shot in March 2009 after interacting with police for just two minutes. His family believes he would still be alive today if police had used a Taser. In some of the cases, the people shot were unarmed, such as Matthew Wilcox, 39, who in January 2010 pulled a cellphone out of his pocket to text his wife. A North Vancouver RCMP officer thought the mentally ill man’s phone was a gun. And Jeffrey Hughes, 48, was shot by Nanaimo RCMP in October 2009 after police mistook the marine flare gun held by the mentally ill man for a real firearm.