Durham Regional Police And Their Imaginarium

Posted by Innocent Man as Our Story

After arriving at our front stoop and waiting for the responding officers I decided to sit down and light another cigarette…as it turned out it would be the last cigarette I would have for a while. I have some experience with police despite having no criminal record and pretty much keeping my nose clean throughout my life. What experience I had came from being a huge fan of CSI type shows (I also enjoyed Cops for a time) as well as having a few friends that had become career police officers. Both of which does absolutely no good when dealing with an officer responding to a 911 call. From their point of view I was just an unshaven, messy haired guy who had alcohol on his breath sitting outside in the relative dark.

When they pulled up across the street, I put out my cigarette and waved them over to the front door. They asked if they could enter and I said no and that we would have to go in the other way, and I led them around back. Saying no was one of the first mistakes of many I made, but what I hadn’t told them was that no one uses the front door because it requires two sets of keys to unlock, the main lobby door and then the other for the apartment. Our place is basically a duplex with a shared front entrance and everyone who lives in our building uses the back entrance to save themselves the headache of the two doors. Another reason is that I never carry the keys to the apartment with me, either my wife or I are always home when the other goes out, so we just leave the back entrance open.

Because the balconey isn’t much more than a fire escape type staircase that allows only one person to go up at a time and because the sensor lights only activate when someone starts the accent, I warned the officers to be careful going up. There is a loose stair near the bottom that our landlord had delayed fixing and could easily cause someone to trip or sprain an ankle, in fact my mother in law on one occassion had almost done so. They immediately took the warning as a sign of danger, and they demanded to know whether or not my wife was okay. I told them that she was of course fine, but that she had been drinking and I never got the chance to mention the loose stair as they seemingly rushed up to check whether or not my wife was in fact okay.

When we all arrived upstairs we found my wife in the kitchen washing the days bottles so she could start making new ones for our son to have the next day. She seemed to have calmed down from her earlier episode and after seeing the police officers, looked a little embarrassed over the incident. One officer took my wife into the other room so they could discuss things and the remaining officer made some idle small talk with me and never really asked me anything of note.

What happened next left us both in shock. The officer that had spoken to my wife came back into the kitchen from the living room and I heard him say that he didn’t believe her and he then gestured to the other officer with a nod who placed me against the kitchen counter, handcuffed me and informed me that I was being arrested for assault. This caused an almost immediate panic attack in my wife who lunged forward towards the officer and just kept saying no, no, no. At this point I wasn’t sure how this could be happening when I hadn’t even touched my wife, but I asked her to relax and calm down because it would do absolutely no good if she interferred and was charged with obstruction or assault herself. She understood and asked again to speak to the original officer and tried to clear things up while I was taken downstairs. While outside the other officer followed a routine, told me what the charge was, asked whether or not I understood the charge and asked if I would like to be assigned Duty Council. I was still pretty hopeful that this would be cleared up on the spot. It was not.

The other officer emerged from our apartment and decended the stairs with my wife following right behind and screaming that he was not listening to her. When what was going to eventually happen became clear the last thing my wife said to me was, I told him the truth and he is not listening…I love you. I responded that everything would be fine and to take care of our son. She began to cry even more. At this point I had no idea how a police officer could just come into a home and arrest someone for a crime that never occurred but I was still hopeful that after a brief investigation, they would discover the mistake. Perhaps if they had asked me any questions at all, based on what they had assumed incorrectly, the outcome would have been very different. At this point however I didn’t know anything other than I was being put into the back of a police car and was going to jail.