Winnipeg police chief defends response to truck protest in city

Winnipeg’s police chief is defending the response to last month’s anti-mandate convoy protest that occupied a portion of the city’s downtown for nearly three weeks.

“At times there were up to a thousand people there,” Danny Smyth said in an interview Wednesday with CTV News Winnipeg. “That’s not something you just wade into and start giving offence notices or tickets.”

The group, which opposes COVID-19 public health measures and mandates, occupied the area in front of the Manitoba Legislative building from Feb. 4 to Feb. 23 using semi trucks and tractors. They only left last Wednesday after the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) warned them to clear the road or face arrest and possible charges. But critics still want to know why police didn’t act sooner.

“Winnipeggers still have questions that are going unanswered here,” said Coun. Sherri Rollins (Fort Rouge—East Fort Garry).

Rollins thinks there should’ve been more communication from police when the protest was taking place.

She said residents in her ward still want to know why loud horns and traffic disruptions were allowed to continue for nearly three weeks before the police finally asked protesters to move on.

“These are the questions that they really wanted answers to,” said Rollins. “Why there was no ticketing.”

In an online post titled ‘Setting the Record Straight on Crowd Management,’ the WPS’s superintendent of uniform operations Dave Dalal wrote that it made little sense for police to abandon the tactics of de-escalation and negotiation based on daily gains police made on reducing noise and disruptions by talking with protesters.

The explanation was published Tuesday on the digital platform Substack after the Winnipeg Police Service created a page called ‘Tried and True’ where Smyth questions whether traditional and legacy media can be relied upon to tell a balanced story.

“I have observed an ideological shift by some media outlets that seems intent on “othering” the police,” Smyth explains in the about section of the page.

Despite that, Smyth made himself available to media outlets for one-on-one interviews on why police handled the situation the way they did.

Smyth told CTV Winnipeg other than a driver being charged in a hit-and-run, in which a group of demonstrators was struck by a vehicle, there was only one arrest stemming from concerns relayed to police about a protester acting in a disruptive manner.

He said police were able to make more progress through negotiation than they would have if they had gone in heavy-handed with enforcement, adding the protest ultimately ended with no violence, use of force, or mass arrests.

“The community, the people that live and work down there. They took the brunt of this. No question about it,” Smyth said. “I would’ve liked to have resolved this sooner.”

“We had a pretty committed group of people that just initially weren’t willing to leave.”

Coun. Markus Chambers (St. Norbert—Seine River) who serves as chair of the Winnipeg Police Board, the civilian oversight body of the WPS, still has outstanding concerns about the way in which police communicated with residents during the protest.

“The residents that were impacted, the businesses that were impacted—their voice has not been heard in any of this communication that I’m very much concerned with, with what I saw last night,” Chambers said, in response to the online post by police.

Police officers were involved in a minimum of four media conferences connected to the downtown protest. One was after the hit-and-run.

The public information office (PIO) also sent out at least six news releases related to the protest.

It’s expected the issue will be discussed again Friday during a meeting of the Winnipeg Police Board.