Toronto police TAVIS stop of four teens ends in arrests, captured on video
Published on Tuesday August 07, 2012
Jim Rankin
Staff Reporter
Four teenaged men — three with braces in place to straighten smiles — drape their sprouting frames over chairs in a stuffy second-floor room overlooking a common area in the Neptune Dr. public housing complex, where a police encounter they had went dangerously wrong.
No, they agree, they will never again try to exercise their rights when confronted by police.
On Nov. 21, 2011, the teens — twin brothers, then 15, and two friends, aged 15 and 16 — were walking in the common area, on their way to an after dinner Pathways to Education mentoring session. The much-lauded program helps keep kids in at-risk neighborhoods in school.
The Neptune Dr. housing complex sits within the Lawrence Heights area, one of the city’s 13 designated priority neighborhoods.
In an event that would quickly escalate to punches, a drawn gun, five backup cruisers and first-time arrests, an unmarked police van rolled into the parking area and two uniformed Toronto police officers with the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) unit emerged.
The four teens, all of whom live in the complex, had been stopped and questioned many times before by police. They had also all attended a moot court program, where they learned about their rights.
This encounter came off the rails when one of the teens attempted to exercise those rights and walk away.
