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His lawyer and an expert on policing both said the case highlights problems with the kind of no-knock raids where officers bash down someone’s door and confront them at gunpoint — including the basic question of whether there’s any data to show the tactic is effective.
“It’s just a mess of a case,” said Chris Woof, a property manager and part-time hip-hop musician from east-end Ottawa. “They tore my house apart, literally, and left it in a giant mess … What’s to stop them from doing it again?”
Two years ago, the Ottawa police drug squad developed a new source, a person “familiar with” cocaine, crack and other drugs, according to allegations police filed in court. The confidential informant stood to get paid for correct tips they provided, even hearsay.
Their very first tip was about Woof, alleging simply that he sold “large amounts of” cocaine and crack.
‘Weak’ evidence: lawyer
Based on that tip and subsequent surveillance on Woof, in which police never saw any drugs but did find it suspicious that two different men left his home with a hand clenched, police obtained a search warrant.
A dozen officers in commando gear bashed in Woof’s door in the early morning of July 14, 2020. In a security video viewed by CBC News, they are seen deploying a flashbang grenade before streaming in, rifles drawn. Investigators seized 70 oxycodone pills, which Woof had old prescriptions for, a small amount of “unknown white powder” that tests later showed was not a controlled substance, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash.
Woof told CBC News last year the money was from his contracting business, where he often deals in cash.
WATCH | Christopher Woof discusses impact police raid had on him:
Christopher Woof’s home security cameras capture police as they raid his home, and he describes the impact on his life.
Police found no cocaine or crack.
“The evidence upon which the warrant was based, I think, was weak,” said Woof’s lawyer, Paolo Giancaterino, who’s worked on more than 75 cases in the Ottawa area involving search warrants for drugs.
“It seems that it’s quite easy to get a search warrant these days and to enter someone’s home violently.”
Based on the oxycodone and the cash, police charged Woof with possession of a controlled substance with intent to traffic, which in the case of opioids carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, and possession of the proceeds of crime.
The case dragged on in court for nearly two years. Then, as the prosecution and defence were arguing to a judge whether the charges should be tossed because of the delays, the Crown decided to withdraw the criminal charges.
Federal prosecutor Céline Harrington told CBC News in an email the Crown’s own drug expert advised he “could not support an opinion that the amount of the drugs seized were for the purpose of trafficking.”
Trauma and, sometimes, death
Woof’s case is one of several documented by CBC News from across the country in recent years where police violently raided someone’s home based on a tip that they would find illegal drugs or weapons, only to turn up nothing. Homeowners are left to foot the bill for damages that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars, with their only recourse being to sue police — an ordeal that can take years of costly litigation with no guarantee of success.
Even worse than the property damage, the door-bashing raids, which happen almost daily in Canada, can leave a trail of personal trauma and sometimes death.
“I haven’t slept properly since the day this happened,” Woof said of his experience. “Noises for sure wake me up. Every little thing wakes me up. I mean, it leaves you on edge.”
At least six people, including one police officer, have died in no-knock raids in Canada in the last 15 years. At least three of those were Black men, who experts say are — along with Indigenous residents — disproportionately affected by violent police tactics.
The risks are so grave that some police forces have almost entirely done away with the kind of no-knock raids where officers break down a door and rush in, guns drawn. The Vancouver Police Department told CBC News that it didn’t do any in 2019 or 2020, and the head of the RCMP’s tactical unit for B.C.’s Lower Mainland region said last year that he could recall just one full-on “dynamic entry,” as they’re called, that his team did in the prior 12 months — and it wasn’t a search for drugs.
“It’s not uncommon for the police to get the wrong house. It’s certainly not uncommon for the police not to find what it is that they were looking for,” said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies policing, race and the war on drugs.
“And at times, if the raids are not conducted properly or if the warrant wasn’t applied for properly or properly obtained, even when there is evidence of criminality, that may get tossed out in court.”
‘Would you not want to know if such a practice was effective?’
A major problem is that police agencies don’t track how often their no-knock raids go off the rails for one or more of those reasons, both Owusu-Bempah and Giancaterino, the Ottawa defence lawyer, said.
Ottawa’s interim police chief, Steve Bell, told CBC News, “we just don’t have the system to do it right now,” but he said the force is deeply committed to improving its data collection and analysis.
Last year, following a CBC Fifth Estate investigation, Ottawa’s then-chief temporarily banned most no-knock raids, with allowances in extenuating circumstances, while the force conducted a review. That moratorium is still in place, but a police spokesperson said they couldn’t immediately say how significantly it’s reduced the number of no-knock raids officers are doing.
Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General, which oversees policing in the province, said in an email that police forces do not report on the number of no-knock raids they conduct, or how often those raids result in nothing found, in charges laid or withdrawn, or in a ruling that police breached someone’s charter rights.
“Would you not want to know if such a practice was effective?” Owusu-Bempah said. “We need to be collecting information about these instances so that we can not only have a measure of transparency in policing, but also accountability.
“These are highly tactical teams with lots of equipment. The officers involved receive lots and lots of training, so they’re extremely expensive,” he said. “If the police are going to work to justify maintaining such tactics, they should at least demonstrate that there is not only a benefit to them, but they are cost effective.”
Woof, who said he had to spend thousands of dollars on a new front door and other repairs, vowed to sue over the failed raid on his home.
“I don’t even care about the money,” he said. “I want accountability first and foremost … I want the police to know that, when they wrong me like this, then it’s going to be public and there’s going to be a claim filed against them.”
“There’s nothing else I can do.”
Send tips on this or any other story to zach.dubinsky@cbc.ca or call 416-205-7553
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