Manitoba Mountie gets conditional discharge after pleading guilty to assaulting Indigenous man
CBC
An RCMP constable who pleaded guilty to an assault a Manitoba judge called "violent and excessive" will avoid a criminal record after being sentenced to a conditional discharge.
Const. Gregory Oke was convicted in a September 2018 incident where he punched an Indigenous man three times while responding to a call outside a homeless shelter in Thompson, Man.
According to provincial court Judge Murray Thompson's sentencing decision, delivered earlier this month, the situation escalated when the man spat in Oke's direction and the officer believed some of the spit landed on him.
That's when Oke punched the man and arrested him for assaulting an officer — an incident the decision says was caught by surveillance video outside the shelter in the northern city.
A DVD of that video was submitted to the court as evidence.
The man was never formally charged and was released from custody the next morning. He had a small cut on the back of his head and no memory of what happened, the decision says.
Oke, 44, was later charged with assault following an investigation by the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, which looks into serious incidents involving police.