How the UCP covered up police violence against the U of C Palestine encampment
The Orchard has obtained hundreds of pages of correspondence from the university's executive leadership team, campus security, Calgary police and the provincial government. Part II of II.
Tl;dr
According to handwritten notes obtained by The Orchard, during and after Calgary police violently dispersed a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Calgary on May 9, Chief Mark Neufeld spoke on the phone with three Cabinet ministers and the premier’s then-chief of staff.
On May 13, half an hour after Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis informed Neufeld that the province was ordering an investigation from the provincial police watchdog, the chief spoke with Marshall Smith, the premier’s chief of staff, who apparently assured him that the watchdog “won’t investigate” but will focus on whether there was “serious injury” resulting from police actions.
At a June 27 Calgary Police Commission meeting, Neufeld suggested he would consider a concussion from blunt force trauma to be a serious injury, as defined under the Police Act. But two encampment protestors, who were concussed after being assaulted by police officers submitted medical records detailing their traumatic head injuries to investigators, and were told they weren’t serious injuries.
A May 14 email from UCalgary’s communications staff to its crisis management team reveals that the university’s leadership was aware of at least one of these injuries.
On May 10, 2024, the day after Calgary cops attacked students who had already taken down their pro-Palestine encampment, Calgary Police Service (CPS) chief Mark Neufeld received a text message from the premier’s chief of staff, Marshall Smith.
“More great work by the Calgary Police last night. Big kudos Mark, all the members,” wrote Smith.
“Thanks Marshall,” Neufeld replied. “Good positioning by U of C. After that is’s [sic] easy (well…reasonably easy).”
The above exchange is revealed through documents activist and writer Euan Thomson, who was repeatedly punched in the face by a Calgary cop at the encampment, received through a freedom of information request, which he provided to The Orchard.
These documents supplement hundreds of pages of internal correspondence from the university’s executive leadership team from before, during and after the encampment that this outlet obtained independently through FOIP, thanks to the generosity of readers.
The “positioning by U of C” referenced by Neufeld, as detailed last week in Part I of this story, consisted of issuing a directive to preemptively prohibit encampments, internalizing the pro-Israel perspective that protest in support of Palestinian human rights is inherently antisemitic and disparaging the university’s law professors who criticized adminsitration’s decision making on May 9.
Part II, which you’re reading now, outlines how the provincial government, alongside the Calgary police and UCalgary, ensured that nobody would be held accountable for police violence that left at least two people, including Thomson, with concussions.
In addition to a text exchange with the premier’s chief of staff, the documents obtained by Thomson include Neufeld’s notes summarizing conversations he had with key Cabinet ministers during the encampment raid and in the following days.
On the morning of May 10, Premier Danielle Smith praised the CPS’s handling of the encampment, encouraging UAlberta to follow suit with its own encampment that was established the day before, which it did less than 24 hours later.
At 2:30 p.m., Neufeld wrote in his notes that he received additional texts from Marshall Smith, which appear to be redacted due to Smith being “non-responsive” to the original request, and phone calls from Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney to “express support.”
Neufeld spokesperson Michael Nunn clarified that this was a typo and that the chief received just one call from Sawhney.
At 2:50 p.m. on May 13, Neufeld notes that he received a call from Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis, a former Calgary cop, informing him that the province was going to order an investigation from its police watchdog, the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT), which Neufeld helped establish in 2007.
According to the chief’s notes, Neufeld told the minister that “it would be helpful if it were done quickly.”
An ASIRT investigation is triggered when a cop is accused of misconduct that would bring the justice system into disrepute, including but not limited to death or serious injury.
The Orchard provided Edmonton-based criminal defence lawyer and police accountability advocate Tom Engel with a copy of the chief’s notes.
He said it’s inappropriate “for the chief of police whose police service is being investigated to have anything to say to the minister of public safety about how quickly this should be done.”
At 3:20 p.m., Neufeld logged a phone call with Marshall Smith. According to Neufeld’s notes, Smith assured him that “ASIRT won’t investigate,” but would instead do a preliminary probe to determine if there was “serious injury.”
Engel noted that it’s the public safety minister, not the premier’s chief of staff, who is responsible for ordering an ASIRT investigation, questioning why the “voice of the premier” would have any insight into the scope of an ASIRT probe.
That evening, Premier Smith announced an ASIRT investigation into alleged police violence at the UCalgary and UAlberta encampments.
The probe was indeed quick, as Neufeld requested, and narrow in its focus, as Marshall Smith promised.
Just five months later, in late October, Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness spokesperson Arthur Green announced the result of ASIRT’s "limited scope investigation," which found there were no “serious injuries” at either encampment.
With that finding, it’s now up to the CPS and Edmonton Police Service to investigate themselves, via their professional standards units.
Neither the Premier’s Office nor the Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness acknowledged requests for comment for this story.
Chief Neufeld said, via Nunn, that when he told Marshall Smith that the ASIRT investigation should be conducted “quickly,” he was speaking generally.
“Any time there is a high-profile matter involving the police it is in everyone’s interest for it to be looked into in a timely manner, while ensuring the appropriate thoroughness. This is for the sake of those directly impacted, the broader community, and the officers involved,” Neufeld said.
The same day Smith announced the ASIRT review, The Orchard filed FOIP requests with Calgary and Edmonton police for their correspondence regarding their decisions to use force at UCalgary and UAlberta.
Citing the ASIRT review, a representative of the Edmonton police said they can’t release any information. Calgary police never responded, even after a follow-up email. Both kept this writer’s money.
At the Calgary Police Commission, chair Shawn Cornett repeatedly invoked the ASIRT investigation as a catch-all reason not to answer questions from members of the public who were reporting major injuries.
At the outset of the May 30 commission meeting, the first held since the encampment removal, Cornett said that the commission had received more than 1,300 letters from members of the public objecting to police conduct on May 9.
In his presentation to the commission, Neufeld said there were four arrests in relation to the encampment, none of whom were “current students,” and that the police deployed 15 pepper balls and four pepper grenades at the encampment to force protestors to disperse. He added that he’s “not aware” of any officers using their batons against protestors.
Commissioner Robert Tanguay, who was appointed to the commission by the province, dismissed any reports of injuries as “misinformation that’s on social media.”
During the public presentation portion of the meeting, Katy Anderson, a UCalgary PhD student who helped organize the encampment, told the commission of the concussion she sustained when she was “struck by a police officer during the Calgary Police Service’s efforts to keep our campus safe.”
At the June 27 commission meeting, Euan Thomson asked the chief whether he considers “broken bones and concussions from blunt force trauma” to be serious injuries.
“Yes, I accept the definition of serious injury as you’ve laid it out there,” Neufeld replied.
Engel, the lawyer, noted that Neufeld, who worked for ASIRT from 2007 to 2010, and again from 2012 to 2014, “would be very familiar with how you classify an injury as being serious.”
Annette Lengyel, a UCalgary alumna who was hit in the face with a baton at the encampment, asked the chief whether he had read her complaint describing her injury to the CPS Professional Standards Unit when he said he hadn’t heard any reports of protestors getting hit with batons.
Cornett interjected to say the chief cannot comment, citing the ASIRT review. “The commission is not an investigative body,” she said.
At the September 27 commission meeting’s public presentations portion, Lengyel revealed that ASIRT rejected her submission, arguing that her injury “didn’t pass the threshold of serious injury,” sending her complaint back to Professional Standards.
Lengyel clarified to The Orchard that she wasn’t concussed, but “dealt with swelling, bruising, pain and a black eye for a few weeks,” alongside the “moral injury” of being assaulted by police on the campus of the university she graduated from.
She wasn’t the only person to report their injuries to ASIRT.
On June 11, Euan Thomson filed a series of Professional Standards complaints to the CPS and police commission, which were forwarded to ASIRT.
On July 23, he sent documentation of the “mild concussion” diagnosis he received on the evening of May 10 at the Sheldon M Chumir Health Centre to an ASIRT investigator, including photos of his bruised face, which he provided to this newsletter.
That same day, Katy Anderson also submitted documentation of her injuries to ASIRT, which she similarly provided to The Orchard.
Anderson explained that she went to the hospital because she had been confused, dizzy, exhausted and nauseous for a few days after her injury. Fearing that Anderson might have cracked her skull, the doctor ordered a CT scan, which revealed she was concussed.
“I’m a researcher. How am I supposed to do research with a head injury?” she said in an interview.
Her ASIRT submission included three doctor’s notes—two from the Sheldon M Chumir Health Centre in downtown Calgary dated May 14 and June 3, which confirm that a doctor saw her, and one from the concussion clinic at UCalgary Sports Medicine dated July 14, which explicitly stated she “suffered a concussion injury and [is] having difficulty with concentration and memory.”
“She requires academic accommodations with an extension in the time of completing her dissertation,” the July 14 doctor’s note added.
Anderson also included photos she took immediately after she returned home from the encampment in the early hours of May 10 of markings on her body from the assault.
In August, Anderson and Thomson were each informed that their concussions didn’t meet ASIRT’s threshold of serious injury.
Wesam Cooley, a UCalgary alumni who served as a police liaison for the encampment, expressed his frustration with the whole ordeal.
“We're now sitting here, months after the encampment, there's been no answers and no investigation, even though we sent evidence of serious injuries to ASIRT,” he said in an interview.
At the October 2024 police commission meeting, Cooley asked how the commission intends to address “one of the most severe acts of police brutality against non-violent student protestors the city has ever seen” now that there won’t be an ASIRT investigation.
In response, commission chair Cornett said that ASIRT’s “mandate is to look at serious injuries.”
But examining serious injury is only one part of ASIRT’s mandate.
According to Engel, an actual ASIRT investigation would have looked not just at whether there were serious injuries, but, as per the Police Act, “any matter of a serious or sensitive nature related to the actions of a police officer.”
Factors to consider when determining whether a matter is serious or sensitive include the impact on public confidence in law enforcement and the potential for significant media interest, both of which Engel says were clearly at play regarding the use of force against the encampments.
“They circumscribed the scope of the investigation by ASIRT to a point where they influenced the result—being that ASIRT wouldn't be investigating this whole affair,” said Engel.
As soon as Professional Standards complaints were made, Engel added, Neufeld should have used section 46(1) of the Police Act to have another police service take over the investigation.
Asked why he didn’t invoke section 46(1) of the act, Neufeld didn’t answer the question, but reiterated that after ASIRT determined there were no serious injuries, the matter was sent back to Professional Standards.
It wasn’t just the Calgary police and its oversight bodies that ignored reports of significant injuries.
As noted in Part I, UCalgary’s communications team was diligently monitoring social media before, during and after the encampment, with a focus on whether posts were positive or negative.
“A bit of an uptick on social media posts this morning,” senior communications specialist Heath McCoy, a former Calgary Herald entertainment reporter, wrote around 8 a.m. on May 14.
“Worth noting though that the vast majority of them are in response to this Tweet from last night, by a PhD student (Katy Anderson) who reports of being assaulted. (Many of the responses are very negative towards her as well).”
This email, which was part of the cache of documents The Orchard obtained from UCalgary through FOIP, was sent to the UCalgary crisis management team, consisting of its senior executive team, campus security and communications staff.
Since UCalgary leadership became aware of Anderson’s injuries through a tweet, an unattributed June 11 university statement was able to confidently state that it “has not had any injuries reported directly to us [emphasis added].” The statement encouraged those with injuries to report them to the CPS or ASIRT, which Anderson, Lengyel and Thomson did to no avail.
The June 11 denial was the only use of the word injuries in a report the university commissioned from accounting firm MNP, which, according to UCalgary law professors Jonnette Watson Hamilton and Jennifer Koshan, is “superficial, vague, and reproduces UCalgary’s lack of transparency around the events of May 9.”
“When I hear them say that there's no injuries, it's infuriating, because it’s a lie,” said Anderson.
While UCalgary commissioned an accounting firm to write an 18-page review of its handling of the encampment, UAlberta hired a retired judge, Adele Kent, to write theirs, which was 137 pages. Kent’s report, while similarly defensive of the university’s decision to call the police on protestors, does provide valuable information.
On May 3, the Kent review notes, Advanced Education Minister Sawhney and Public Safety Minister Ellis “met with the heads of Alberta’s universities.”
“The message from the government was that, should encampments materialize, the government was there if the universities needed assistance,” Kent wrote.
The only email from an Alberta government email account that appears in the UCalgary tranche came after the encampment.
On May 13, Mackenzie Blyth, press secretary for Minister Sawhney, emailed UCalgary director of government relations Candice Laws and her UAlberta counterpart, Brent Francis.
Blyth, whose boss spoke to Neufeld the day after the encampment to applaud how it was handled, asked Laws and Francis to each submit “a document showing the timeline of events.”
“There are a few items of high interest,” Blyth explained, specifying that he was seeking information on when trespass orders were issued and whether protestors were made aware that police were being called.
The impact of the university’s decision to call the police on its students didn’t make the cut of priorities.
The Ministry of Advanced Education didn’t acknowledge a request for comment.
In almost every one of CPS Chief Neufeld’s written summaries of his phone conversations, he doesn’t indicate who called whom. But in the case of a call the evening of May 9 with Minister of Justice Mickey Amery while the encampment raid was underway, Neufeld emphasized that the phone call came from the minister.
According to Neufeld’s notes, the minister was “inquiring what was happening” after “receiving calls”—presumably from his Calgary-Cross constituents.
“I was very careful on the call,” wrote Neufeld. “He didn’t ask for anything and nor did I offer.”
Amery, who is both the first Lebanese-Canadian Cabinet minister and first Muslim justice minister, has previously expressed sympathy for the cause the encampment supported.
In May 2021, before he became a Cabinet minister, Amery denounced “violence against innocent and unarmed Palestinian worshippers and civilians” at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, although he didn’t specifically mention who was perpetrating the violence.
“The Government of Alberta does not have a foreign affairs policy, but as a humanitarian, a father, a husband and on behalf of those I represent as MLA for Calgary-Cross, I fully condemn this violence,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
But whatever his motivation for calling the police chief three years later, Engel said it was inappropriate, something the chief appeared to be cognizant of when he noted that he “was very careful on the call.”
“What business is it of the Government of Alberta to be involved in the issue of the clearing of a protest encampment at a university?” said Engel.
For Thomson, it’s clear that “there are higher machinations going on here.”
“If we're seeing free speech being so violently attacked by institutional players like UCalgary and the Calgary police, that should give everyone serious pause that something is not right here,” he said.
The Orchard reached out to the Ministry of Justice for comment. Press secretary Heather Jenkins responded by asking for this reporter’s phone number, which I then provided. Jenkins never called.
This piece has been updated to include comment from Calgary police chief Mark Neufeld, who clarified that his phone calls with the public safety minister and premier’s chief of staff occurred on May 13, not May 10.
Edited by Roberta Lexier
The fact that all of this trouble was the result of a crackdown on free speech is a serious comment on the state of our 'democracy'. Almost the entire 'free world' has looked the other way while genocide was committed against Palestinians.
It seems that when it comes to enforcing the laws of human rights there is no cop on the beat. But it's not hard to recruit a whole squad of cops when it comes to breaking the heads of students that exercise their right to free speech. Students have had a hard lesson in the hypocrasy of our government and our law 'enforcement'.