Tasering caught on video: Criminal charge dropped against woman arrested by RCMP officer at Chilliwack park
Obstruction or excessive force? Opinions divided on stun gun incident after woman confronted Mountie arresting a First Nations man
July 25, 2026
A woman tackled to the ground then Tasered by a Chilliwack RCMP officer at Salish Park last summer while objecting to the arrest of First Nations man has had the charges against her dropped.
Tikaani Rhys’s complaint against the RCMP, however, is still in play although she still doesn’t have an investigator on the case, something not terribly surprising in a process that is notoriously slow.
An RCMP officer using a stun gun on a person in a seemingly vulnerable position caught on video is worth considering 20 years after the famous Robert Dziekanski incident at YVR.
For those who don’t recall, Dziekanski was the Polish immigrant detained at customs for several hours on Oct. 14, 2007. A man at the airport named Paul Pritchard filmed the incident – which occurred early on in the smartphone era and at the cusp of social media use – that showed the clearly agitated man surrounded by several RCMP officers. Dziekanski had been stuck in an immigration limbo at the airport for seven hours before becoming visibly agitated, the language barrier making matters worse. He had propped a door open with a chair, threw a computer and a small table before police arrived. When surrounded, he was directed to stand near a counter, which he did but then he picked up a stapler. Less than 30 seconds later, Const. Kwesi Millington used his Taser on Dziekanski after which four officers pinned him, handcuffed him, and he was stunned at least five times. He died of a heart attack.
Police seized the memory card with the video but Pritchard was able to get it back a month later and he sold it to the media. The case was a major fiasco with RCMP issuing several falsehoods to the media, presumably assuming the video would never be released. The officers conspired with one another on their story and were all charged with perjury. Const. Millington was convicted eight years later and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The incident at the dawn of social media and smartphone camera ubiquity was a touchstone for the issue of police use of force and video evidence.
Obstruction of justice or excessive force?
Twenty years later, police still follow use-of-force protocols and, being human, sometimes still make mistakes. Meanwhile, cameras are exponentially more common with most people walking around with smartphones that take videos at resolutions journalists couldn’t even dream about 20 years ago.
The incident at Salish Park was caught on at least two smartphone videos, one from right next to it all, one from across the pond. The main video is about two-and-a-half minutes long. The other is 10 minutes long and is much farther away, and gives a very different perspective.
The video
Leading up to the shorter video above, a handful of men were drinking beer in the park. In the longer video you see two men on a bench with an RCMP officer standing in front of them, Const. Troy Jones. One of the men is seen dumping his beer out in front of the officer. He then gets up and leaves the frame. A second man, Alex Pete, appears to crack another beer and take a sip in front of the officer. It appears to be an act of defiance that irritates the officer.
As Pete goes to take a sip, Const. Jones is seen to knock the beer out of his hand. He apparently repeatedly told him to get up. There is a moment when the camera leaves the scene so the exact nature of the altercation was not recorded start to finish. Const. Jones eventually gets Pete up and then gets him to the ground.
This is the start of the two-and-a-half-minute video shared here. The officer was trying to arrest Pete who was certainly resisting.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Const. Jones can be heard saying loudly. “Stop resisting.”
Pete, a large man, is on the ground resisting letting the officer put his arms behind his back. The officer then knees Pete in the back while he’s laying on his side.
“He’s not doing nothing,” someone is heard yelling.
Finally he rolls on his front and Const. Jones gets his arms back.
“Good boy, here we go,” he says.
That’s when Rhys is seen to walk closer. As Pete is being handcuffed, she is heard giving a commentary about how the officer told Pete to stand up, then got him to the ground. She states repeatedly that the whole incident is being recorded.
“We recorded this my friend,” she said. “This is not happening. This is not going to happen. Actually, I’d like this officer’s name and badge number.”
Rhys then enters the frame and walks closer to the scene of the arrest with Pete handcuffed and on the ground. She says something to him that is hard to hear other than the word “officer.”
“Go away,” Const. Jones replies. He then looks up. Rhys is about a metre away. He lets go of Pete, steps over him and grabs her while yelling “Back off!”
At this point, the officer grabs her by the left arm and pushes her away.
“Are you fucking serious?” she yells.
He then walks back to his previous position behind Pete who is still lying on his side on the ground in handcuffs. He steps back over him. Rhys follows him back to where she had been, approximately a metre away.
Const. Jones then steps back over Pete and says she is under arrest.
“For what?! For standing?!”
As he goes to grab her arms, she pushes them away. He then goes in and grabs the back of her head, pushes it down with one arm and talks into his radio with the other. With her arms extending, Rhys tried stop the officer as he is trying control her and, presumably, get her arms behind her back. This tussle lasts fully 35 seconds until Const. Jones slowly gets her to the ground on her back and it appears he is kneeling on her torso. For the last part of the interaction, Rhys is not heard saying anything but is still resisting what she later said she felt was an attack, and what the officer clearly saw as resisting arrest.
After a few seconds on the ground, Rhys is still not handcuffed. She isn’t moving substantially but it’s impossible to see if her arms are still pushing back against the officer. Const. Jones then pulls his Taser out with his left hand and the electrical current can be heard as he deploys it while, again, speaking into his radio with his right hand.
“You’re going to jail buddy,” Pete can be heard saying as Rhys stops moving and police sirens can be heard pulling up nearby.
Maybe the officer had his own trauma
Speaking with Rhys after the incident she was still horrified, firstly that a First Nations man was roughly arrested for drinking beer in the park and being defiant, then shocked that Const. Jones came after her. The use of the Taser seemed wholly excessive to her since she was already on the ground with the officers knee on her torso.
When it began, Rhys, who is white, said she felt that Alexander Pete was targeted because he is First Nations.
“The officer told the white men standing with the two native men to walk away, then proceeded to target one of the men.”
After the whole incident, Pete was charged with assaulting a peace officer and wilfully resisting or obstructing a peace officer. Rhys was charged with wilfully resisting or obstructing a peace officer.
Eight months later, on March 19, 2026, the two charges against Pete were stayed by Crown counsel. The charge against Rhys remained until three days after a scheduled pre-trial conference, on June 15, 2026, when the charge against her was stayed as well.
In a follow-up interview after speaking about the traumatizing incident, Rhys wanted to talk again, but this time about the possibility that Const. Jones himself was having a post-traumatic stress episode.
“I wanted to talk about the fact that the RCMP supervisors who are not pulling officers off duty when they’re mental health has become fragile is more the root of the problem rather than the individual officer's actions.”
There is no evidence this officer has or had any mental health issues. Her claim is speculative.
A lawyer’s take
Vancouver lawyer Kyla Lee of Acumen Law watched the video and was included in the podcast episode on this topic
Obstruction of justice or police violence? Lee was torn.
“There's definitely an arguable case there for her being lawfully arrested,” Lee said. “I could see a judge finding her guilty of obstruction based on that video.”
Then again, maybe not.
“I could also see a judge acquitting,” she said. “It's not a slam dunk obstruction by any means.”
The obvious problem visible to the lay-viewer and something Lee agreed with, is that there was a physical imbalance in that the arrest was by a male officer trained in use of force against a small woman.
“He could have used his nightstick or baton instead of going to the Taser,” Lee said. “The Taser seemed to me to be like just the jumping up a few steps on the use-of-force ladder that wasn't necessary. He was also amped up in that video. He was really angry.”
Lee was also asked about video evidence generally and how the increasing quality and number of cameras in our lives and in our communities has affected criminal trials. One surprising response was that the fact that there are more and better cameras everywhere is not necessarily leading to more, better justice.
“A lot of people sort of have this knee-jerk reaction that a video is going to tell the whole story about what happened and it's going to capture everything objectively, but it often doesn’t,” she said.
“When someone pulls out a phone to video an incident that is later shared on social media and maybe in the news, they usually weren’t already filming to see the context of what led up to an interaction, for example, with police.”
A prime example of this was the shooting of Alex Pretti by an ICE agent in Minnesota in January of this year. Pretti was a 37-year-old nurse who was filming ICE officers during protests in Minneapolis. Pretti stood between an agent and a woman on the ground when he was pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground. As is more common in the U.S. than anywhere else, Pretti himself was armed with a handgun in a holster. Videos show the moment when a voice is heard yelling “gun, gun” and then Pretti was shot and killed.
There were multiple videos of the incident, but two in particular shown in the media from different angles gave very different perspectives.
“Whether it was a justified or unjustified killing by the officer, depended on which angle you were pointing to,” Lee said. “Because if you pointed to one angle, you could make the case potentially for justification. If you pointed to the other angle, it looked completely unjustified.”
There is extensive and clear video of the incident in Salish Park in Chilliwack and what led up to it shared with Something Worth Reading. The arrests, charges, and claims made by witnesses point to the issue of police use-of-force, how bystanders should act when witnessing an arrest, and how things are never black and white, even when two different people see the same video.
Asked about the Taser incident at Salish Park, Chilliwack RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Carmen Kiener didn’t want to comment because the matter was still before the courts. She did speak broadly about the use of conducted-energy weapons (CEWs) and use of force.
“The [RCMP’s] incident management/intervention model (IMIM) is a decision-making framework to assist officers with continuous risk assessments throughout an incident. An officer must always be able to justify their actions in line with the IMIM.”
This goes from verbal de-escalation to the use of a CEW, which is considered an “intermediate weapon.” Officers are required to consider several factors when escalating to the use of a CEW, including:
• Are there bystanders nearby? Are they interfering?
• Is there risk of escalation?
• What are the available intervention options? Are these options reasonable and feasible?
• Are there other officers present to assist?
One key element that might have triggered the use of the CEW, which can be a safer alternative to physical altercations that can cause more injuries, is this last question. Const. Jones was alone. He had one person in custody several feet away in handcuffs on the ground, and now he was dealing with a second arrest by himself.
As for what people’s rights and responsibilities are when it comes to witnessing interactions with police officers and members of the public, both Cpl. Kiener and Kyla Lee have some advice. Where they agree is that it’s OK to watch and even film anything you want in public, but it’s not OK to interfere or be belligerent with peace officers.
“We strongly discourage engaging in a police matter when someone is being arrested,” Cpl. Kiener said. “Not only can this lead to a bystander being arrested for the offence of obstructing a police officer, but it can also quickly increase the risk assessment level for the officer and result in more serious intervention options being considered and utilized.”
Lee said that when an officer tells you to “go away” or “get lost,” it depends on context. If you are at a distance not speaking, that would be an unreasonable order. If you are within a couple of arms length yelling at an officer who is conducting an arrest, that's not good.
“If it's interfering with their execution of their duties, you don't have the right to do that,” she said. “And if an officer tells you to leave when you're interfering, and you continue to do the thing that you've been told not to do, yes, that would be obstruction because it's the interference.”
Her advice to anyone in situations such as this is, sure, film all you want. Keep your distance. Use the zoom function on your phone. And keep your mouth shut.
“Don’t be a dick,” she said, jokingly. “The majority of legal advice boils down to that.”
As for the status of Rhys's police complaint to the independent Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC), she said she gets an email once a month that say an investigator has not yet been assigned.
“From what I understand, the process can be so long that it’s gruelling.”
To watch the full episode of the podcast Something Worth Hearing Episode #10 – Taser use in a world full of cameras, click this link for YouTube. SWH is also available with video on Spotify or you can listen to audio versions wherever you get your podcasts.
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Paul J. Henderson
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