The acquittal of Umar Zameer should not have surprised anyone. There was a precedent that applied. And my career has been just weird enough to have made me aware of it.
First, the context: Zameer was facing charges of first-degree murder for the death of Detective-Constable Jeffrey Northrup in 2021. The facts of this case, as accepted by the jury, are that Toronto police officers in plain clothes tried to arrest Zameer, in a case of mistaken identity. Zameer, believing he was being attacked by criminals, panicked and sped away in his car, striking and killing Northrup.
There are a lot of other things we need to talk about surrounding this case, and we’ll cover some of them today, but that’s the necessary context. And it was, for me, familiar. I expected Zameer to be exonerated, because the other guy whose case I’d covered was, too.
This was a long time ago now, very early in my career. Stephen Harper was prime minister, and his government had been overhauling Canada’s self-defence laws. There had been a series of cases in which people had used force, sometimes causing death, in circumstances where the average citizen would likely be supportive of their actions because they were responding reasonably to real threats. The absolutely bonkers case of Ontarian Ian Thomson is the one I remember most: the man was in his home while attackers were outside it literally trying to set it on fire, and he fired a warning shot at them — a warning shot! Didn’t even shoot at the people trying to set him on fire! — and he was arrested and charged. Thomson was ultimately acquitted, but, like, come on.
There were other cases like that, though none was quite as wild, and the Harper Tories wanted to tweak the Criminal Code to put the law more solidly on the side of honest citizens acting in legitimate self-defence. I was fascinated by that issue (still am, really) and began following a lot of the applicable cases that were unfolding at the time.
One of the weirder ones came from Quebec. On March 2, 2007, a Laval police tactical team raided a home in Brossard, part of the Greater Montreal area. The police were looking for drugs. The officers were in plain clothes, and the raid was a so-called dynamic raid. Instead of knocking, the police knocked down the door in the dead of night. Basil Parasiris, the home owner and target of the raid, opened fire with a revolver as men burst into his room.
The entire scene was chaotic and, frankly, a dark comedy of errors. Police returned fire and injured his wife; they fired into the room his teenaged son was sleeping in after wrongly concluding that’s where the shots were coming from. A judge later ruled that the entire raid was illegal. In the moment, though, Parasiris surrendered once he realized the men storming his home were police.
But by that point, he’d already shot two officers. One of them died.
A jury acquitted Parasiris of the killing. They accepted his defence: he’d believed his home was being invaded, and the police had not done enough to identify themselves as law-enforcement officers. (Sound familiar?) Parasiris did eventually go to jail for weapons-related offences. The revolver he’d used to shoot the officers was legally owned but registered under an incorrect address; worse, during the investigation, police found a series of unregistered weapons that were stored improperly. Parasiris went down for those offences and, in the mind of this lawful firearms owner, correctly so. Still. On the main charge? Murder of the dead officer and attempted murder of the wounded one? Parasiris was cleared.
There are a lot of things about the two cases that are very different. But, at their core, the Zameer and Parasiris cases came down to a similar set of facts. Canadians have the right to kill in self-defence. And in cases when a Canadian does not know that the person confronting them is a police officer, that right to self-defence applies.
Canadian law is much stricter about self-defence than American law. But there seems to be a mistaken view among much of the population that it is illegal for Canadians to protect themselves with force, even lethal force, or with weapons, whether cars or firearms. This isn’t true. You must have reasonable grounds to fear for your life, and you must use reasonable force in defending it. That’s the snapshot view of self-defence in Canada, and as long as you can credibly claim that both of those things are true, the law is on your side.
Northrup’s death is a tragedy, and I feel genuinely awful for his family and colleagues. Truly. I am not tacking this on to make some token show of balance. This is a gutting, depressing case. I feel horrible for everyone involved.
But there are lessons that need to be learned here and facts we should all keep in mind. The trial of Zameer suggests some very worrying issues with the honesty of testimony given by police — I am pro-police by nature, but the facts of the case and the testimony given by officers simply do not align, and that should not be allowed to go unanswered. There are also lessons politicians ought to learn: many of them were outraged when Zameer was released on bail, but based on what we now know, the outrage and injustice stem from the fact that he was kept behind bars as long as he was.
These are issues worth talking about, at length, and it’s important that guys like me don’t let them get swept under the rug, which is what I suspect the police and the politicians will want to see happen. But there are other lessons, and they matter, too. The trials of Zameer and Parasiris both revealed serious problems with how the police attempted their arrests. Any situations in which civilians believe that they are being attacked, use lawful lethal force to protect themselves, and only later find out that they’ve killed a cop are a failure of policing.
For their own safety, police officers can’t leave members of the public labouring under any doubt as to whether they’re being assaulted by a criminal or arrested by a cop — because where any such doubt exists, the public has the right to defend themselves. I hope it doesn’t take more dead cops for this message to sink in. I don’t want any more deaths like Northrup’s. Or ordeals like Zameer’s.
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