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Shot seven times and crawling, disarmed and bleeding, along Granville Street, Paul Boyd had a final 23 seconds of life before he was shot fatally in the face by a Vancouver Police Department officer. The bullet entered his face, and went into his heart, killing the well-respected animator instantly, and ending a confrontation that was witnessed by more than 50 civilians, one of whom described the August 13, 2007 shooting as an “execution.”
Boyd’s death has proven meaningless, with no official response to retrain police generally, or at least the shooting officer, no improvement in mental health services, and yet another failure of police self-investigation, with the true details of the shooting only becoming public at the coroner’s inquest two weeks ago, years after the shooting.
Paul Boyd was mentally ill, and had stopped taking his medication. When a neighbour called 911 mistaking his heated and delusional interaction with a man for a fight between three men, two plain clothes VPD officers attended and took Boyd to the street. Boyd then suddenly stood up, hit one of the officers with a bike chain that he had coiled up in his hand, and ran into the middle of Granville Street near 16th.
Backup uniformed officers confronted Boyd in the street. One of the responding officers didn’t pull his gun, not seeing any threat in front of him that couldn’t be contained with a night stick and other non-lethal weapons. Another officer pulled his gun and started shooting when Boyd didn’t respond to his commands.
Civilian witnesses who testified at the coroner’s inquest were uniform in agreeing that Boyd was on the ground when he was shot the final time. The witness who described the shooting as an “execution”, Jonathan Menzies, wasn’t called to testify. One police witness agreed with the civilians, saying Boyd was on all fours and disarmed for the final shot. The pathologist supported this version of events, saying the bullet track could only be explained by Boyd being shot from overhead while looking into the sky, crawling on hands and knees, or in a posture where his torso was parallel to the ground, looking up.
Amazingly, none of the seven shots that hit Boyd before the final shot were immediately fatal, and in fact, the pathologist was of the opinion that Boyd had a reasonable chance of surviving all of the first seven shots. But the last shot, that came after twenty-three seconds of reflection and assessment of the threat by the shooting officer, while Boyd crawled along the ground, was the fatal one.
Police officers are trained to use lethal force in careful, considered and measured ways. This shooting officer has been on the job, uninterrupted save for voluntary leave, for years since the shooting, with no additional training or sanction. Even if you don’t think criminal charges and a trial are justified, perhaps you’ll agree that our system has completely failed, again, to respond to a crisis through learning, adaptation and improvement to save a life next time and improve policing for all of us.
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