Why did this unarmed man die after an encounter with police?

Those were the last words of Jon Wells, a 42-year-old man from the Kainai Blood Tribe in Alberta, captured on body camera, as Calgary police forcibly removed him from the Carriage House Hotel.

As he left, three police officers would use multiple types of force, including physical force, Tasers, pepper spray and a spit mask to restrain Wells, about six-foot-two and 190 pounds, face down on the ground, vomiting and bleeding.

Seven minutes later, EMS arrived and gave him a sedative, and three minutes later he was unresponsive. He was declared dead at the scene.

At 9:34 a.m. on Sept. 17, Jon’s mother, Edith Wells, received a call from Alberta Serious Incident Response Team’s tactical unit, saying her son would not be coming home.

“I’m broken,” Wells said in an interview this month.

“Sometimes I don’t get up, but I have to get up, to face it.”

ASIRT informed the Wells family it was investigating Jon’s death in the encounter with Calgary police.

“He said that the only tactic that they didn’t use was their guns,” Wells said.

The crisis led the Assembly of First Nations to call for a national inquiry into Canadian police’s use of force and treatment of Indigenous people.

Police forces are trained in de-escalation techniques with civilians to prevent harm to the subjects or themselves. But many advocates say the training of these techniques is insufficient and do not properly address racism embedded in Canada’s justice system, where Indigenous people are disproportionately represented.

“He was just another Native,” Well said of how police and emergency services treated her son.

“They didn’t care.”

Wells described her son as kind and loving. He would call his mother and they would sit and talk for hours. He was an accomplished steer wrestler, travelling to rodeos across Canada and the U.S. Wells said he won a tour championship in 2012, a big goal of his.

A father to three daughters, Jon was working toward a degree in criminal justice. 

He created a horse therapy program for those struggling with addictions called Isoowooiiks Open Circle, which translates to “going into battle” in Blackfoot.

“That was who he was,” Wells said. “He always thought of others, to try and help them to better themselves.”

Jon was in town for the Calgary Stampeders’ Indigenous celebration night the weekend of Sept. 14. On the night he was killed, Wells said Jon had a disagreement with his common-law wife and tried to check into the Carriage House Hotel.

Wells said the hotel was often a site for gatherings among various First Nations in the area, and Jon knew of the hotel.

After refusing to give him a room, the hotel called police just before 1 a.m. asking for “assistance in removing an unwanted person from the lobby.”

According to Calgary police’s 2023 De-Escalation and Use of Force Report, incidents requiring use of force typically involve people “experiencing an elevated level of distress,” who are “agitated, assaultive, display unpredictable mood swings,” and are actively attempting harm to themselves or others. 

The Calgary police’s initial press release said Wells was “uncooperative” and “combative’ with police, but in ASIRT’s press release, according to a review of bodycam footage, while Wells seemed intoxicated, he had no weapons and at no point did he attempt violence. 

Wells said Jon had been inducted last summer into the Horns Society, a Blackfoot cultural and spiritual society. Members cannot participate in physical violence.

“He knew that, and that there was nothing he could do,” Wells said.

Wells’s sister, Georgia Rose Yellow Old Woman, said she believes Jon was targeted by police because he was Indigenous, and wants the police to be trained in Indigenous cultural ways. “We’re not bad people.”

Both women blame racism for his death and want accountability.

“To never be able to sit there and talk with him,” Wells said, “never share my life with him anymore, his goals, his dreams — this is devastating for me.”

In a statement to the Star by Calgary Police Service spokesperson Emma Poole, officers are trained in de-escalation and use-of-force techniques as recruits and must requalify through in-service training annually.

Poole said all recruits receive “mandatory diversity training that is community-led,” that includes topics such as “Indigenous e-learning, Anti-Racism, and Cultural Humility for all sworn and civilian members.” 

ASIRT has not yet released findings from its investigation. Because the probe is ongoing Calgary police wouldn’t comment further, but “we can confirm that the involved officers are current serving members of the Calgary Police Service.”

Alexander McClelland, an associate professor of criminology at Carleton University and lead of the project Tracking (In)Justice, said anti-Indigenous racism is built into the structure of policing, beginning with the RCMP.

The project tracks the deaths of civilians from use of force by police — such as conducted energy weapons (such as Tasers), physical force and restraint, pepper spray and firearms.

The RCMP was born of 1873 legislation creating the North-West Mounted Police for the expanding country through the prairies, then part of the Northwest Territories.

Established to reinforce federal legislation in the territory, the RCMP was also used to reinforce several colonial and assimilative policies on Indigenous people, including the Indian Act and reserve system, residential schools and the Sixties Scoop.

Today the RCMP is still the primary police force for 22 per cent of the country, including numerous First Nations communities. 

But McClelland said systemic racism is an ongoing pattern in Canada’s police forces, including the modern RCMP. 

“The police’s origins are about controlling and regulating Indigenous people,” McClelland said. “Colonization hasn’t gone anywhere.”

In July 2020, former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki wrote a letter to the federal government — later obtained by the Star — about systemic racism within the force.

She wrote the force’s historical treatment of Indigenous people has “influenced and informed the RCMP’s policies, systems, and processes resulting in differential treatment on racialized groups.”

According to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police’s National Use of Force Framework, use-of-force models began to appear in the U.S. in the 1970s and Canada in the 1980s.

McClelland said while the U.S. has produced a lot of research on use of force in policing, there is very little in Canada.

“We know from U.S. research that the more restrictive use-of-force policies you have, the less use of force is applied,” he said.

“Here we just have this weird, amorphous wheel that’s like, if you feel like this, you go to this … that requires hardly any parameters.”

The CACP’s model, created in 2000, is designed to allow officers to respond to the dynamic situations using their own perceptions of risk involving civilians and provides a framework to help them decide intervention options, from verbal de-escalation to the use of Tasers or firearms.

According to the Use of Force Advisory Committee co-chairs, Chief Instructor Gary Conn and Supt. Thomas Walker, the committee is contemplating “a new national hybrid, public-facing intervention model,” expected to be released in the next two years.

The new model will focus on “improving public awareness and understanding,” as well as establishing “industry standards” on de-escalation training programs and “evidence-based best practices surrounding crisis intervention,” which can be distributed to all police services in Canada.

RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival said in a statement that “99.9 per cent of RCMP occurrences are resolved naturally” through de-escalation, determined through the ”Incident Management Intervention Model,” similar to CACP’s, taught to recruits at the police academy. 

Percival said that in April 2021, the force updated its annual recertification training and the use-of-force graphic “to place more emphasis on communication, crisis intervention and de-escalation.”

Currently, RCMP officers must complete annual recertification training using the IMIM and scenario-based training recertification every three years.

Rae Banwarie, a retired RCMP officer who served for over 20 years until 2017, said in an interview that the de-escalation wheel itself is not the problem, but rather the real-life, scenario-based training they receive is not enough.

“Officer experience and knowledge, these are all pieces that have an impact in how you respond out in the field,” he said.

“Unless you’re in that role where you’ve got to make decisions — split-second decisions — one way or the other, you know, you don’t really understand that.”

Earlier this month at the Assembly of First Nations’ Special Chiefs Assembly in Ottawa, gathered chiefs voted in favour of a national inquiry into police involved deaths.

On the last day of the AFN’s Special Chiefs Assembly in Ottawa, Martha Martin and Claudette Beals-Clayton — who both lost their children during police encounters in 2020 — spoke directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was there to address the assembly.

“We invite you to come and sit with us,” Martin told him. “Hear our stories.”

Sitting in the crowd, Wells abruptly made her way to the microphone.

“I had to speak to Trudeau,” she said. “He needed to know what the police are doing throughout Canada.”

All week, Wells had worn a large beaded medallion around her neck, made by her niece Tia in Jon’s memory, featuring Jon doing what he loved: steer wrestling.

Wells clutched the medallion at the mic, telling Trudeau her story. Later, she told the Star she barely heard what he replied, having been overcome with emotion.

“My spirit is shattered, but I’m being strong because I need to, I had to do this,” Wells said.

“Because he doesn’t have a voice now.”