Hamilton police violated woman's Charter rights with no-knock raid, judge rules

A judge has ruled Hamilton Police Service (HPS) violated a woman's Charter rights with "cavalier disregard" after smashing their way into her downtown apartment home to look for drugs.

The case against the Hamilton woman and the evidence officers seized — which included $500,000 of cannabis products, $50,000 in cash and some magic mushrooms — were thrown out of court, according to a Jan. 25 ruling by Ontario Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman.

Goodman found Hamilton police couldn't explain why they chose to execute a dynamic entry, also called a no-knock raid, that day in June, 2021. He found the officers, despite being experienced, did not report the evidence they seized and did not properly inform the woman of her right to a lawyer.

No-knock raids are supposed to be rare because, by law, officers usually must knock on a home's door, identify themselves as police, and wait for someone to answer before executing a search warrant. Police services say no-knock raids make situations safer and are generally only used if there's a higher risk of danger or the potential destruction of evidence. 

But prior CBC investigations have shown these raids have become more common, despite coming under scrutiny after some raids turned deadly, such as in the case of Anthony Aust in Ottawa and Breonna Taylor in the U.S. 

In Hamilton, Goodman said the raids are "verging on becoming a systemic problem" after HPS officers told him when they execute search warrants, no-knock raids are used over 90 per cent of the time.

This case is the second time a judge has found HPS violated someone's Charter rights using a no-knock raid in recent years, according to publicly accessible court rulings. A judge gave a similar ruling on a police raid in 2019.

While HPS made some changes to its no-knock policy in late 2023, including training officers on Charter rights, Kim Schofield, the lawyer representing the woman, says there should be even more oversight.

"This is a perfect example of the police steadfastly refusing, systemically, to accept … the fact that dynamic entries are dangerous and should be the exception, not the rule," Schofield told CBC Hamilton.

Court documents and a video clip obtained by CBC Hamilton show how things unfolded.

In late 2020, Hamilton police started investigating an illegal cannabis dispensary that was operating as an online delivery service. HPS eventually pinpointed two units inside a downtown apartment building as the source of the deliveries and got a search warrant to enter the units.

On an afternoon in June 2021, the HPS drug and gangs team executed the search warrant by doing a no-knock raid.

Surveillance camera footage from inside the apartment, provided to CBC by Schofield, shows the door starting to give way to a battering ram. A woman briefly approaches the door and scurries away as police continue to force their way in.

After about 20 seconds, police break through and seven officers wearing bullet-proof vests over street clothes flood into the unit. The footage stops shortly after all the police officers enter.