RCMP officer faces firing for 'abhorrent' racist behaviour and harassment, documents say – DiscoverMooseJaw.com

Three RCMP officers from a Metro Vancouver detachment could be fired for allegedly engaging in “abhorrent,” “racist” and “appalling” behavior described by a colleague, including text chats in which they bragged about “attacking unarmed black people with a taser,” court documents say.

An RCMP schedule shows that police officers Philip Dick, Ian Solven and Mersad Mesbah are scheduled to appear for code of conduct hearings next February. They are accused of discrimination, harassment and discrediting the police, among other things.

None of the allegations have been proven.

In court documents obtained for a search warrant, an officer with the RCMP's Professional Standards Unit in Coquitlam, BC, states that another member of the unit trained by Dick had complained of harassment by the accused officers.

According to the files, the main allegations include that the officers allegedly made offensive, racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments in a mobile chat group that were consistent with the “climate of harassment” created by the three officers.

“The members of the (chat) group never talk about their own lives,” the documents say. “They use the group to 'say negative things about work or horrible things about the people they work with.'”

“He (the complainant) described the behavior in the chat group as 'abhorrent.' He thought it was racist and horrific, so he skimmed it rather than reading it in full,” the documents say.

The documents also state that the plaintiff tried to leave the chat group, but was told it was “used for business purposes and he had to be part of it” and was accused of being “not a team member” if he did not rejoin the group.

(Note the graphic content)

The documents say that among the alleged comments made in the chat were instances in which an officer “told people of color” who made the Lower Mainland “unsafe.” He used the N-word and the racist stereotype of eating chicken when describing black people. He dismissed a woman who reported a sexual assault based on her ethnicity, calling her “stupid.” And he mocked an RCMP officer's weight by “assuming the shape of her vagina was visible through her clothing.”

The complaint also detailed a number of actions by the three officers outside of the group chat, including denigrating members of the indigenous community who were accused of suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome and saying they “would not go to the reservation … because we are not going to help those people,” the court document said.

In another case described by the complainant, one of the members who was “normally dismissive” of shoplifting reports “made a special effort to attend a case” and attempt to “provoke the suspect into a fight” when he discovered that the suspect was black.

The court document states that the plaintiff said the officer “later regretted that he had not succeeded in sufficiently 'agitating' the suspect to warrant using a Taser against him.”

The document also describes other alleged cases in which members justified domestic violence by saying “women deserve it,” cursed in front of a four-year-old child during a rental dispute, and boasted about closing police files with “something” when asked to investigate a case that had no files.

The Coquitlam RCMP Standards Officer also said in the document that a review of other chat logs from the accused officers from January 2019 to May 2021 “identified a number of comments that were chauvinistic in nature, exuded a strong air of superiority, and contained flippant or offensive remarks about clients, superiors, colleagues, politics, and the RCMP as a whole.”

“In the news, Officers Dick, Solven and Mesbah are frequently abusive,” the court filing states. “Officers Dick and Mesbah use racist and homophobic slurs, and all three frequently mock their colleagues.”

The British Columbia RCMP referred The Canadian Press' request for comment to the RCMP's national communications department, which did not respond to the allegations or the conduct review.

A legal document released on September 12 said the RCMP intends to “seek termination of the members' employment at the hearing” and the three members have been suspended since June 2021, when the allegations surfaced.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published September 20, 2024.