Oct 10
10
Businessman documents cop incompetence in citizen’s arrest defence
National Post – Oct. 8, 2010
‘Don’t come here again’
By Peter Kuitenbrouwer
Wang “David” Chen, the Toronto grocer charged for detaining a thief, for the first time told a packed and rapt courtroom yesterday his own version of what happened in May of 2009 at his store, the Lucky Moose Food Mart.
The testimony painted a picture of a harried shopkeeper who works 19-hour days, preyed on by petty thieves and frustrated by the glacial response of Toronto police. He has, it appears, grown accustomed to using his own methods to deter shoplifters.
In fact, Mr. Chen revealed that on May 22, 2009, the day before the theft that landed Mr. Chen in court, he stopped a woman who had stolen some apricots.
“I asked her to come in the store and pay for the apricots,” Mr. Chen, 37, who wore a black sweatshirt and olive green hoodie, told a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice.
When the woman refused, the Lucky Moose owner had her sit down on the floor in the store between two cashiers. She waited there for five hours before police arrived at 10 p.m. The police officers dissuaded Mr. Chen from pressing charges against the woman, he said.
On an earlier occasion, a man who had taken some apples and refused to pay for them waited at the store 3½ hours for police to show up, the shop owner said.
“The police said, ‘Don’t come here again.’ They let him go.”
Mr. Chen is charged along with two other store employees with assault and forcible confinement for tying up a thief, Anthony Bennett, and throwing him into the store’s delivery van, on May 23, 2009.
The case has become national news, with two MPs in Ottawa submitting private member’s bills to Parliament to change the law on citizens’ arrests.
Read the complete article here.