The RCMP’s Civilian Review and Complaints Commission says police officers acted unreasonably when they arrested a man who was hiking in British Columbia’s Fairy Creek area in 2021, around the same time as protests against old-growth logging.
In a summary of its review of a public complaint, the commission says Mounties demanded to search the hiker at a checkpoint on a public road in September 2021, and arrested him after he refused to leave the area or to be searched.
The commission says the arrest was “groundless,” and the demand to search his backpack was “unfounded.”
The summary says the man had been lawfully using the forest service road where he encountered police who were trying to keep people out of “exclusion zones” set up by the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group.
It says he was also not obligated to identify himself or submit to a police search after coming upon Mounties who refused to identify themselves by name, only reading out their badge numbers “quickly” and refused to repeat them.
The commission says the police acted unreasonably enforcing the exclusion zones in Fairy Creek, removing their name tags, while one office wore a “thin blue line” patch against RCMP uniform policy.
Police actions in Fairy Creek have been sharply criticized by a B.C. Supreme Court judge for overstepping the terms of a court injunction, granted to logging company Teal Jones in 2021, after logging activity in the ecologically sensitive area set off protests, leading to hundreds of arrests.
The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP says it continues to review the actions of the Mounties’ community industry response group in a “systemic investigation,” after the B.C. judge threw out numerous cases against logging protesters for police failures in properly enforcing the court injunction.