Halton Police respond to coroner's inquest recommendations from 2018 shooting

The Halton Police Board has approved the service's response to recommendations made by a jury in a coroner’s inquest looking into the death of Ahmadu Ahmed.

The 22-year-old was shot six times after exchanging gunfire with Halton Police officers following a standoff at a gas station in Burlington in September 2018. Two Halton officers were also shot during the incident, suffering serious, but non-life threatening injuries.

Ahmed had fled the scene of a two-vehicle collision on the QEW and locked himself inside the bathroom at an Esso gas station. An SIU investigation found that Ahmed opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun. The investigation cleared the officers in June 2019, saying they were “justified in taking steps to protect themselves and had no reasonable alternative than to shoot.”

However, the coroner’s inquest jury made recommendations about how police could improve the handling of situations in the future.

One of the recommendations was that Halton Police “conduct a review to determine the viability and cost effectiveness of ensuring the availability of members of the Emergency Services Unit, Crisis Negotiation Team and Tactical Response Unit being on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

The report to the board noted that Halton Police’s tactical team has grown since the incident in 2018. It now includes three deployed sections that can cover times when the tactical unit is most often called upon. The remaining times are covered by on-call tactical team members.

It also noted that Halton Police now has 24 Canadian Police College-qualified crisis negotiators that provide on-call services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The report also calls for the board to annually assess Halton Police's "resource requirements to ensure adequate and effective policing.”

The other jury recommendation called for Halton Regional Police to develop a policy about when to outsource investigations to another police service that was not involved in the incident. It also recommended the police board receive information on which the investigation’s findings are based and that the person conducting the investigation be available to the board to ask questions about the findings.

In response, the Halton Police Board established a new policy setting out mandatory conditions for ensuring an investigation’s independence, including when to outsource an investigation, identify the information from the investigation that will be provided to the board, and require the person conducting the investigation to attend the board meeting where the chief’s report is being presented.

The board passed the policy at its most recent meeting.