SIOUX LOOKOUT — Ontario's Special Investigations Unit has found no reasonable grounds to believe an OPP officer committed a criminal offence in connection with a self-inflicted injury suffered by a person in custody.
The SIU's report into an incident last fall at the OPP detachment in Sioux Lookout was released Wednesday.
On November 24, 2024, police were contacted by a staff member at the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority who indicated an 18-year-old woman had left the facility threatening to harm herself.
She was located in a parking lot, arrested for breach of the peace, and apprehended under the authority of the Mental Health Act.
The woman was known to have carried razor blades in her mouth or under her clothing in the past, so she was briefly patted down and had her pockets checked before being taken to the detachment to be searched more thoroughly by a female officer.
When she was placed in a room to change into a gown she retrieved a small blade from her mouth – which was described in the SIU report both as a razor blade and as a pencil sharpener blade – and started to cut herself.
An officer observing through a partially-open door immediately entered the room to take control of her arms but she had already swallowed the blade.
At the local hospital, she underwent surgery to remove it.
"The question is whether there was any want of care on the part of the subject officer sufficiently serious to attract criminal sanction, that endangered the complainant's life or contributed to her injury. In my view there was not," stated Joseph Martino, director of the SIU.
He reported he was unable to reasonably conclude the woman accessed the blade because of any transgression of the standard of care prescribed for police under criminal law.
"The complainant had been briefly searched at the scene of her arrest, and was in the midst of a strip search when she retrieved the blade...Short of a body cavity search, it is not clear how the subject officer or any of the officers could have confiscated the blade, and, yet, it is arguable whether there were grounds to justify such an invasive search," Martino wrote.
The SIU director added that even if there were such grounds, it would be speculation to suggest the woman could have been prevented from self-harming, given the speed with which events unfolded.
