VPD officers could have de-escalated encounter ending in Myles Gray’s death: expert

VANCOUVER — A police use-of-force expert has told a public hearing that Vancouver police officers missed opportunities to de-escalate their encounter with Myles Gray that ended with his death in 2015, and that they showed a complete lack of awareness about the fatal impact of their actions.

Michael Massine, a former police officer turned trainer, said that had the officers used de-escalation techniques such as trying to initiate a conversation with Gray, it “might have led the incident down a different path.”

Gray died after a violent arrest that left him with injuries including a fractured eye socket, a crushed voice box and ruptured testicles.

Massine testified on Thursday that the officers had missed chances to “break the ice” with Gray, who was described by police at a previous coroner’s inquest as “animalistic” and displaying “superhuman” strength.

He said the officers who turned up at the scene after Const. Hardeep Sahota had already taken shelter from Gray in a police vehicle should have taken time to assess the situation.

Instead, Sahota’s description of the situation helped set “wheels in motion” for the arriving officers’ to immediately use a forceful response, even though Gray was up a set of stairs and out of her sight at the time.

The inquiry by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner is looking into the actions of seven Vancouver police officers involved in the violent encounter, who were all cleared of misconduct in 2024 by a police discipline authority.

Massine blamed the officers’ use of force for Gray’s death. A forensic pathologist testified on Monday that while an autopsy did not reveal a single and definitive cause of Gray’s death, the “one thing” he could say for sure is that Gray would not have died had it not been for his encounter with the police.

Massine said Thursday that two people need to be in control in any use-of-force situation — the suspect and the officer.

He testified about a report he had written about the encounter in which he said Sahota appeared to have “ignored the risks to Mr. Gray’s well-being by not following the principles of her training in crisis intervention de-escalation.”

“She appears only to be concerned with the well-being of herself and possible members of the public who may encounter Mr. Gray,” Massine had written in a portion of the report read out by hearing counsel Brock Martland.

But Massine testified that Sahota’s expressed concern for the public was contrary to her actions in retreating to the police van.

“She expressed that she had these fears for these people, yet her choice, her response, was to withdraw and completely lose sight of Mr. Gray, of what was transpiring,” he said.

Massine said this made it impossible for her to provide arriving officers with a “real-time update” on Gray’s behaviour, and instead her update was based “simply on the fact that she believes he’s going to fight and he looks muscular.”

He said Sahota’s assessment that “he’s going to fight with us … kind of sets the wheels in motion for that type of response if nobody takes a careful step back and just says ‘OK he’s gonna fight with us, let’s talk about this for a second or let’s slow down.'”

“That didn’t happen,” Massine said.

In his report, read out by Martland, Massine wrote that the officers’ use of force “was not proportionate with the subject behaviour displayed by Mr. Gray,” and that the man’s death demonstrated the officers’ lack of awareness about the impact of their “multiple concurrent force options.”

He said the seven officers “didn’t even seem to be aware of the person who’s immediately to their left or to their right, of what they were doing and what effect it was having, whether it was successful.”

“In my opinion, Mr. Gray was experiencing a medical emergency and required immediate and advanced medical care, not multiple applications of force from seven officers who failed to assess the impacts that their uses of force were having on Mr. Gray’s deteriorating condition,” Massine testified.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2026.

The Canadian Press