Middle-class citizen Tania Belleau said she was walking home from her sister’s home on Abbott Street at around 9 p.m. Wednesday when she was stopped by two police officers.
“They said ‘Where you going?’ I said ‘Home.’ then these two guys said ‘Put your hands behind your back, you’re arrested,” the 26-year-old convenience store clerk said.
Tania Belleau, 26, says Vancouver police officers arrested her on the street as she was walking home, breaking her wrist in the process. Belleau, who had not been drinking, claimed she was then thrown into a police wagon and taken to jail.
“I know the officer put on the handcuffs too tight,” she said. “It was so tight that…I couldn’t even feel anything.”
Belleau said she repeatedly asked officers to go to the hospital to treat her wrist, but it wasn’t until she was released from jail nine hours later – at 6 a.m. – when an officer called an ambulance.
She said doctors at St. Paul’s Hospital took an X-ray and confirmed her wrist had been broken.
“The pain was unbelievable. It was unbearable pain,” she said. “I’m a caring, loving person, but I had to go through what I did. It’s not fair.”
Belleau’s employer said she has worked for her for nine years and that she’s been a model employee.
“She’s very calm and easy, she doesn’t swear, she doesn’t get aggressive or anything like that,” Cindy Grewal said. “She’s a very, very good person.”
Grewal said the nine hours Belleau spent in jail will haunt her for the rest of her life.
“Police should have taken her seriously, they should have taken her to the hospital when she’s complaining she’s in pain,” her employer said.
Belleau, has no criminal record, in other words, just like you, me and our children who walk down the street expecting to be safe from criminal violence. No gangsters or rapists were arrested that night. There's no reason to believe that that's because they're usually bigger and tougher.
And keep in mind that the Vancouver police department answer to
Vancouver City Council, which Andrea Reimer, a director of the Western
Wilderness Committee, is a councillor of. Why does the Western
Wilderness Committee encourage police brutality by not stopping it
through their director and city councillor, Andrea Reimer?
