Cops Lie: Police Deception and the Killing of Nona McEwan and Randy Crosson

Jeff Shantz



Cops lie. That basic truth is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than in the public statements made by police immediately after they kill someone. Too often in such cases police engage in victim blaming or the purposeful framing of information to imply that victims had threatened police or engaged in some sort of exchange.


We have seen examples of the latter most recently in Surrey, British Columbia, when RCMP shot and killed Nona McEwan and Randy Crosson in a situation described by police as a hostage taking on March 29, 2019. For more than a month RCMP put out a message publicly implying that Randy Crosson had killed Nona McEwan.


When asked directly if he could say conclusively that a police bullet did not hit Nona McEwan, the Surrey Now-Leader reports that Integrated Homicide Investigation Team spokesperson Corporal Frank Jang replied:


“No, I mean that’s all part of the investigation that’s happening now. There will be updates coming forth from the IIO but all those details, the exact mechanism, entries, where the shots came from, that’s all going to be part of the investigation. I can’t comment further because it’s still ongoing.”



Not long afterward the lie was put to this statement when the IIO reported that RCMP had shot and killed both McEwan and Crosson. Certainly, officers at the scene, and IHIT member Jang must have known police had done the shooting. And we might well figure that they knew this over a month of statements that posed Crosson as potentially the killer.


This would seem to be an effort at deceiving the public. The hope for police would be that by the time counter-information came out the public would have moved on or forgotten the issue.


This is not the first time that police have acted in this way, even in Surrey. On July 18, 2015, 20-year-old Hudson Brooks was shot and killed by RCMP Constable Elizabeth Cucheran. Cucheran had also been shot and in the first public reports by RCMP it was suggested that the officer had somehow been injured by Brooks, the implication being a shootout. It turns out this was a police distortion, again likely designed to cast suspicion on the victim and to legitimize the officers’ actions publicly. It was eventually revealed that the officer had been shot by a weapon fired by police (no weapons other than police weapons were on the scene)—by the officer herself in a panic.


Residents of Metro Vancouver will also remember the RCMP tasing and killing of Robert Dziekański. Immediately following their killing of Dziekański, RCMP made a series of public statements proven later to be false. They told a tale apparently designed to denigrate Dziekański in the public eye, initially claiming he threw things and screamed and yelled after police arrived. Police also suggested that Dziekański was intoxicated. All of this was contradicted when a bystander video taken by traveler Paul Pritchard came forward. The video showed that, contrary to police, the taser was not used as a last resort but was deployed almost immediately. Police took Pritchard’s video and refused to return it until he brought forward a lawsuit for its return.



Cops lie to control information to the public. The silence regarding the RCMP killing of Randy Crosson and Nona McEwan must be broken. The public needs to know immediately when cops kill. And we need to know the names of killer cops. We have every right to know the killer cops active in our communities and to know, and oppose, repeat offenders being unleashed in our communities. To get rid of them (and to move toward community not cops).