injusticebusters 1999 > > Saskatoon City Police: Injusticebusters Oct. 1999 page with police brutality pictures

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2005: Year of the David Milgaard Inquiry: 35 years in the making!

A walk down memory lane to our early days online

Welcome to Saskatoon: Home of David Milgaard, Martensville, the Foster Parent case and a police force that beats up girls and kills drunks!

Who's in charge of Saskatoon Police?

Since we created this page the cover-ups have intensified. Hatchen and Munson have bee convicted of kidnapping Darrell night but they are out on bail, the cops have been cleared in the death of Rodney Naistus and a hearing is going on right now to do the same for Lawrence Wegner. Scott is gone but a new, mopusey chief has been hired after much hoopla about a desire on the part of the new police commissioners to fix things. We hope Amnesty International is not sucked in by the PR the cops put out. Certainly the local media are still gobbling up their press releases and publishing them as facts instead of the fictions they are. In a superficial gloss of the problems of aboriginals, even the Globe and Mail tagged Saskatoon's west side as "Harlem of the Prairies." But the intelligentsia continue to claim there is not so much racism any more, that attitudes are improving -- we weren't at the top of a recent poll on how racist people think their communities are.

The problems in the Saskatoon Police Department include racism but do not end there! See also Chief Scott approves Zoorkan's actions, more or less telling Judge Laing to go suck a rope

Jim Maddin elected Mayor of Saskatoon October 26, 2000

March 2, 2000

The problems in the Saskatoon Police Department include racism but do not end there!

For years, police unions across Canada, including Toronto have sought advice from the LA Police Union about how to become more powerful. Now the LAPD is being publicly scrutinized for corruption going back many years and possibly involving Federal police, injusticebusters are reassured that diligence in uncovering corruption eventually is rewarded. Saskatoon may eventually get the truth about police corruption here. The lost evidence from Larry Fisher may not ever be recovered. We might not ever find out just how many Native bodies are at the bottom of the Blue Lagoon by the QEII Power Station. But some things we DO know. Closely in line for chief is a corrupt, unrepetent bad cop.

How can Chief Dave Scott (right) justify Supt. Dueck's most recent promotion Scott KNOWS that Supt.Dueck botched the investigations which we cite on this website. He was taken out of Youth Division shortly after the trials of Ross Ross and White and the Klassens/Kvellos.He is well aware that Dueck failed to stop severe abuse which he knew was going on. Scott is also well aware that Supt.Dueck had Klassen and Steele of injusticebusters busted for criminal defamation and failed to make his case, There are only two possible explanations for Chief Scott's actions and neither of them are good enough for the person entrusted with running our police service.

The first is that Chief Scott does not consider it important that Supt. Dueck allowed his eight year old witnesses to be raped. After all, they were only "white trash" and Supt. Dueck did what any ambitious officer would do when faced with an opportunity to expand one or two possible convictions into a headline-making case involving dozens of people. It all happened almost a decade ago and time helps bury all crimes in the public memory.
The second possible reason is that Scott is just as corrupt as Supt.Dueck and that Supt.Dueck has something on him. More on Supt. Dueck

That Scott has protected Supt. Dueck casts a dark and sinister shadow over the good cops who do their jobs every day. Let's remember that Supt.Dueck was a Corporal in 1989 when he became involved with the "Scandal of the Century". After the conclusion of this case, he was promoted to Sgt. and proceeded to use his office to have his critics arrested and criminally charged. He failed in this enterprise. He or his supporters have been instrumental in bullying Internet Service Provider Sympatico to pull at least three websites which have been critical of him. In 1999, this dangerous authoritarian cop has reached the rank of Superintendent!

Any Police Service which includes Supt. Brian Dueck in its ranks cannot ever be trusted!

injusticebusters' investigative update on Saskatoon Police Service Cover-up (Feb. 2000)

* The RCMP have set up an HQ under Sgt. Ken Poulson with the 1-800 number 868- 7030. This line is usually busy. But if you have a complaint you should give them a call.
* They have agreed to keep FSIN chiefs informed weekly.
* Chris Axworthy mischieveously threw out the notion of setting up a parallel Native Justice System, and has sent this on to the Feds. (injusticebusters have to ask what does this mean -- that now Native drunks will be driven to the edge of town by Native cops?) According to the media, the Native leadership has accepted this and has postponed its call for a full public inquiry.
* injusticebusters drove out to the Queen Elizabeth Power Station to look for evidence that some footwork was being done to look for more bodies. We found nothing. There were no tire tracks or footprints or bent-over brush to indicate a search of any kind had been made. We have to ask: How seriously can we take an investigation of two dead bodies and a live person dropped off in the same location without a full search of the area? We would point out that the river is on the other side of the road. How many of the bodies that wash up on the banks north of the weir during spring thaw every year originated here?
* Meanwhile, Saskatoon Provincial Court is releasing Natives charged with dangerous and violent offences back into the community. The media is tippy-toeing around the issue, reporting it as simply a problem of race relations. Race relations are certainly bad in this province! But police relations with the whole community are bad. Mar. 4, 00

At the second public assembly held in front of the Saskatoon Police Station following a march along 20th St., Feb. 26, Lawrence Joseph, a vice-chief of FSIN stated: "This is not an aboriginal issue. It's a human issue. People are dying and it's time to ask the question why"

Welcome to Saskatoon: Home of David Milgaard, Martensville, the Foster Parent case and a police force that beats up girls and kills drunks!

Saskatoon Police Chief Dave Scott said there would be no cover-up. That was last week! This week Supt. Brian Dueck appears as an official spokesman to offer solutions to a beaten-up community! The only thing we can now believe from Chief Scott is that he fights cover-up accusations with more cover-ups!

The Saskatoon Police Department is scrambling to regain public trust now that two cops have admitted they drove Darryl Night to the edge of town in sub-zero weather and the deaths of three other men are being looked at. A third body found January 19 was added to the list to be investigated. Lloyd Joseph Dustyhorn's death Saturday morning after being sent home from the police station in a taxi has caused PR Sgt. Glenn Thompson, a credible spokesman, to issue a statement that the city needs . a "detox centre" for impaired citizens.

Saskatoon Police Service has lost all credibility!

The claim that the force has been calling all along for better facilities for drunks and persons impaired on drugs is lame.It appears nowhere on their wishlist. They have been calling only for more resources to fight "crime." They treat drunks like criminals. They shut down the Riversdale community police station, their one attempt in the last few years to go into a community and tackle the roots of crime. The money they have received has been used to beef up the drug squads, using state of the art surveillance technology to set up socially destructive stings.Bully Sgt. Brian Dueck, through bare-faced lying, including perjuring himself in Court, has managed to convince some in the Department that he was victimized by the defamers at injusticebusters when the truth is he had us criminally prosecuted for defaming him and lost in court! Those who know the truth about Supt. Dueck keep their mouths shut because they don't wish to risk their positions.

In an astonishing act of brazen cover-up, the spokesman promoting the new detox facility is none other than the malfeasant Supt.Dueck himself! This is a cop who does what he pleases and does not keep notes.(Read what press outside Saskatoon has had to report about Supt.Dueck.) A detox facility could happen overnight and it should be funded by the breweries, the liquor stores, the bars and lounges, the pharmaceutical companies and the money retrieved from hard drug busts. If there was any will to help addicts, the obvious and practical solutions would have happened long ago.

Anyone who has ever complained about unfair treatment by Saskatoon City Police will have run into the amazing complaints department run out of Regina by an E.R. Gritzfield, Q.C. and his muscle-man Gary Treble. When Gritzfield is unable to get rid of the complaint by claiming it is unfounded or stale-dated, Treble comes to visit. The man is large and intimidating. After having two complaints regarding Supt. Dueck dismissed by Gritzfield because the incidents were too old, I put in a third complaint about Supt. Dueck in 1994 and inadvertantly typed in the wrong date, so the investigator believed the incident had happened within the previous six months. I received a telephone call from Gary Treble who arranged to meet with me. On the day of the meeting, he came to my house and I was alone. He set his papers and a small tape recorder on the table. A few minutes later, Rick Klassen and Rob Klassen showed up with a video camera. Treble refused to hold the meeting unless we turned the camera off. A minor complaint I had put in concerned Supt. Dueck referring to us as "that inbred group," an ugly slur in a community with many Mennonites. Treble showed us a report showing that Supt.Dueck had been spoken to by his superiors about this and had apologized. To whom? Certainly not to us! Treble left without addressing any of our other concerns and I expect he wrote up a report that another complaint had been satisfactorally dealt with. This department is a disgrace and should be shut down and replaced with a civilian board at arms-length from the Justice department.

In fact Supt. Dueck (he is an extremely large and tall man) and his side-kick Staff-Sgt. McDonald (equally large and tall) had been actively harrassing us, had taken Rick Klassen in for questioning regarding allegations made by a dead man, and had threatened to wrap our videocamera around our neck. The following summer when we served him with a lawsuit (which we had to abandon) he again showed signs of a violent temper.

Dueck sets a bullying tone for the whole Police Service

Before he got bumped up to Super, Dueck's Platoon C contained some other bullies, notably Joseph Dean Hoover and David Chartier (who use physical force) and Keith Ecklund who uses verbal threats. These stalwart Dueck supporters will no doubt expect rewards for their loyalty. Watch out for them! Hoover and Chartier could well be the prototypes for "Hawk and Gumby." See the Famous Blue Lagoon Column

The truth is that "everybody knows" that Saskatoon cops beat up drunks. injusticebusters has not ever gone out of its way to document this, but in the last year, two cases have fallen into our laps. The first, last April, concerned a man who was picked up and beaten so badly his sight in one eye may be forever impaired (right). The evidence of brutal hancuffing remained four days later(left). He met a friend of injusticebusters while in the city cells for three nights and came to get pictures taken of his injuries.

The second is of a fifteen year old girl named Nicole (right, below) who was picked up along with Michelle Ross (left, below) last summer for being drunk and disorderly. The pair was held in Kilborn Hall for five days and came to visit me after they were released because they knew I had a car and they needed a ride to Kilborn to pick up their stuff. Michelle was also bruised by a cop. To me, more horrifying than the fact the police had done this was the fact that the girls took the bad treatment for granted! "Everybody knows" that the cops do this.

Young people are increasingly cyncical about the police and wear the police-inflicted scars as badges of initiation rites into life on the Saskatoon streets.

We have told elsewhere on these pages the story of Jonathan Poundmaker (left) who was mistakenly IDed by Constable Gardipie --one of the few Native constables -- from a fuzzy security video -and picked off the street on Thursday night before Easter in 1997. He was held for five days without any explanation. He was acquitted at trial. It turned out the "offence" was the theft of a $20 video taken by an unrelated Poundmaker and returned to the store the morning after it was taken.

This problem in the Saskatoon Police Department goes much further than the brutality of the two cops who have been suspended (and we still have to ask why they were not fired and charged with attemnpted murder the moment they admitted they had driven Darrell Night to the edge of town.) It goes deeper than racism, too, although racism runs thickly through this town. There are too many cops who have no respect for the badges they wear and they have been harboured by many more who look the other way as these sadists go about their business. -- Sheila Steele

On October 4, 1998, Mel Ohochinsky was working on his roof when he fell off the ladder. His neighbour called 911 and the police were the first to arrive. They took him down to the city cells and locked him up, assuming he was drunk. He regained consciousness and asked for medical attention. None was called for. The next morning, Mel Ohochinsky was dead in his cell. The routine investigation which follows the death of a person in custody exonerated the Saskatoon police of any wrongdoing. This is another murder that did not get counted among the statistics.

Cover-up and smokescreen artist Superintendent Dueck is now presenting himself as someone who cares about addicts! After gaining his stripes in youth division for allowing and enabling the rape, sodomy and torture of 8 year old twin girls, Dueck became a poster-boy for the Ritalin problem. Since he took over as head of narcotics, the drug problems in Saskatoon have become worse, not better. This man cares nothing about serving or protecting the public.

There can be no fair resolution to this matter without a full and impartial publicly conducted inquiry run by honest civilians. As long as Dueck is associated with the Saskatoon Police Service, any claim to be on the side of fair play is a cruel joke.

injusticebusters will publish any pictures and stories of illegal police actions as long as they are documented and signed. It's time the out-of-control cops were identified and drummed out so the good ones can get on with their jobs!

Although David Milgaard has been totally exonerated in the rest of the world, members of the Saskatoon Police Department continue to promote the story that he was guilty, that they did nothing wrong in their investigation, that the files that went missing were just normal casualties of moves and reorganization and the Saskatoon Police and Prosecutor Serge Kujawa did nothing wrong. As the Crown gathers its evidence for Greg Fisher's trial in Yorkton in the fall, injusticebusters wonders how they will handle the fact that Fisher's former girlfriend brought the police a paring knife with blood evidence and that this knife disappeared? Of course the Saskatoon Police maintain that the murder of nursing assiatant Gail Miller was done by two people, Milgaard the killer and Fisher the rapist. Never mind that Milgaard and Fisher didn't even know each other. May 15, 1999

index to Saskatoon Police stories (set aside an evening if you want to read them all)

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

If you hold the mouth of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb

Publisher : Sheila Steele

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injusticebusters court advice :
How to walk yourself through the justice system

Why you should dump your preliminary hearing (written July 1998 and still valid)

Sermonette: Sucked in, Diegested and spit out by Saskatoon police (You will find links to many more sermonettes in the sidebar on this page

Another target of Dueck's malice:

Wilf Hathway

Our activism contributed greatly to the good vibes which happened around the civil trial.

Please participate by posting your own photos and links of activism in your community. Index to the stories on this website

This is not regularly updated so if you are looking for a particular story and you have a name or keyword, please use the site search engine(at the bottom of the page) which IS regularly updated

Index to Saskatoon Police stories

This is a pretty good scrapbook for the 1998-2002 period.