Family seeks answers, accountability after IIO clears RCMP officer who shot Dani Cooper in crisis

Dani Cooper often thought about death, with hope for what could come after theirs.

"I'm leaving and I have so much to pray for, for the deaths to cease, for hope to build, for action to take root," Cooper wrote in a poem last September.

Two months later, police shot and killed Cooper, who was in psychosis and threatening their mother and neighbours with a paring knife at their home in North Vancouver.

Cooper was a poet, writer and activist who had advocated for police to be removed from mental health crisis responses. They were non-binary and used they/them pronouns. 

Last month, B.C.'s police watchdog cleared the North Vancouver RCMP officer who shot Cooper of any wrongdoing, finding the officer was reasonable and justified to use lethal force as Cooper advanced towards a group of five officers with a four-inch blade.

Now Cooper's family is picking up Cooper's cause, calling for the removal of police from mental health crisis calls and looking for accountability they say won't come from B.C.'s Independent Investigations Office (IIO).

The office investigates police incidents that result in death or serious injury, and can recommend charges to the B.C. Prosecution Service if it finds police acted unlawfully.

Cooper's family is applying for a judicial review of the IIO's investigation and want a coroner's inquest to examine what they describe as failings of B.C.'s mental health and police accountability systems, which they say set Cooper's death into motion long before they were shot. 

"This isn't about bringing Dani back anymore," said father Dennis Cooper.

"This is about their legacy and helping others and it's a terrible position to carry my child's mantle forward and become the champion of social justice that they were … out of necessity."

With police interactions resulting in more people being killed in B.C. each year, experts and advocates say fundamental changes to policing and community-based mental health supports are needed to prevent more deaths like Cooper's.

People in crisis make up nearly 28 per cent of people killed or injured by police in B.C. since the start of the 2020-21 fiscal year, according to the IIO.

Cooper had sought treatment for schizoaffective disoder, a diagnosis that sometimes made it hard for them to know what was real, and they sometimes self-medicated with heroin and other opioids. 

At the time of their death, they had been waiting six months for a space at Red Fish Healing Centre, the only facility in B.C. that treats concurrent mental illness and substance use.