The Indigenous mother was left conflicted and upset after she alleged she was physically and verbally abused by several Winnipeg police officers who broke into her home without cause.
Charity Tom was at her North End home with her three children on May 21 when police knocked on the door at about 4 a.m. They were told they had responded to a report of children left outside, but Tom told police her children were inside and closed the door.
Tom said that shortly afterwards, officers knocked on her door again, “barged in,” yelled abuse at her and threatened to arrest her.
She said the officers shoved her, twisted her arms, ripped her shirt and called her derogatory names aimed at a woman’s body.
“They just barged in, grabbed me by the throat and pushed me off… it all happened so quickly,” she said. Free Press.
Home security camera footage shared by Tom shows officers entering the house and struggling with him, who is not seen on camera.
An officer can be heard ordering Tom to stand, threatening to “handcuff him” and ordering him to “stop acting like a cop.”
“I’m not doing anything, let go, I’m trying to stand up,” Tom yells, and a young child’s voice can be heard in the background.
The officer threatened to “take (her) to the drunk monitoring room” and asked if she wanted to be arrested.
Tom said she was not intoxicated at the time and that he believed the threats were racially motivated.
“I thought that if you were in trouble you called the police, but that wasn’t what happened to me,” she said.
John Woods / Free Press
Charity Tom claims she was mistreated by two Winnipeg police officers on May 21 while they were investigating her complaint.
In a video recorded by Tom as the police left, she accuses the officers of trying to push her down the stairs, to which one of them responds, “They were trying to stop us from getting in.”
Constable Dani MacKinnon with the Winnipeg Police Service said in an email Tuesday that officers are investigating after receiving a call about a child, approximately 2 years old, left outside alone in the middle of the night.
She said officers encountered an “uncooperative adult female” who initially refused police entry, but “officers eventually located the child in question inside the residence, found him safe and left.”
Mr McKinnon said the teens admitted to being outside that night.
Tom said her youngest child, who is 8 years old, was all asleep.
“I don’t know if it was a prank call or if there really were kids outside,” she said. “They got the wrong address.”
The WPS did not respond to questions about whether any officers had faced disciplinary action.
“They just barged in, grabbed me by the throat and pushed me off… it all happened so quickly.”–Charity Tom
MacKinnon said complaints against police should be submitted to the Manitoba Law Enforcement Review Authority, an independent body that investigates accusations of officer misconduct.
The incident has had a lasting psychological impact on Tom and his family – his eight-year-old son woke up during the brawl, felt terrified and sick the next day and is still “shaken”, Tom said.
“It has affected me. It’s been hard to deal with,” Tom said. “I’ve been abused my whole life and I’ve been in abusive relationships. For the police to come to my house and do this to me, I never thought something like this would happen.”
She said she called 911 immediately after the incident to report the officer’s actions, but that while the officer called her back, she never received an apology or any offer of action. She hopes that sharing the video on social media will help hold police accountable.
“Think about what an officer could do … if the camera wasn’t there, there would be no evidence,” she said.
Civilian complaints about police conduct are handled by LERA or the Human Rights Commission, depending on the nature of the complaint, but Kevin Walby, an associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s criminal justice department, said these agencies are essentially powerless.
“There’s really no mechanism for disciplinary action,” he said. “I think that disciplinary action is probably most often perceived as an added insult, because it’s a bureaucratic process, you have to jump through all the hoops, but at the end of the day there’s no solution, there’s no disciplinary action.”
Documented cases like Tom’s, particularly those involving Indigenous people in Manitoba, speak to “the character of our officers and the character of our policing culture” in the province and can only be changed through a broader investigation into policing overall, Walby said.
Offering
Home security camera footage provided by Charity Tom shows Winnipeg police entering her home and detaining her on the morning of May 21.
“We’re going to continue to live in a city where the police’s ‘us versus them’ worldview is imposed on people on a daily basis and the result is this kind of racism,” he said.
“In that respect, it’s a really regressive institution,” he said. “Racism is ingrained in the culture of WPS and unfortunately, a simple mechanism like the Human Rights Commission or LERA is not going to change that culture.”
According to LERA’s 2022 annual report, the most recent available online, there were 80 formal complaints reported to the agency during the year, and 81 files were closed – all of which were abandoned or withdrawn by the complainants or dismissed by the commissioner for being outside LERA’s jurisdiction, “frivolous or nuisance,” or “not supported by sufficient evidence to warrant a hearing.”
malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abbas
Reporter
Malak Abbas is Free PressBorn and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she headed the campus newspaper at the University of Manitoba before going on to Free Press 2020. Read more about Malak.
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