A Vancouver cop recently sentenced for breach of trust and sexual exploitation decided not to tell Burnaby RCMP that one of his victims had confessed to stabbing a man in Burnaby in 2015.
James Fisher accepts a 2014 Community Safety Photograph By PROVINCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
On June 8, 2015, a man was stabbed in a Safeway parking lot at 9855 Austin Dr. at about 10:30 p.m.
Witnesses reported seeing a man and woman involved in a physical altercation with the stabbing victim, according to court documents.
The pair then fled the scene in what turned out to be a stolen vehicle.
A woman later told former longtime Vancouver police officer James Albert Stanley Fisher, who was working with the VPD’s counter exploitation unit at the time, that she had been the woman at the scene and done the stabbing, but Fisher kept that information from his RCMP colleagues.
On Aug. 21, Fisher was handed a 20-month jail sentence and two years’ probation for breach of trust and sexual exploitation in relation to kissing a 17-year-old girl and a 21-year-old woman whohad been witnesses in prostitution-ring cases Fisher worked on.
In his sentencing ruling, Judge Robert Hamilton touched on the Burnaby stabbing.
It turned out the 21-year-old victim – referred to only as B. because of a publication ban – and her ex-boyfriend had been the man and woman at the scene, according to court documents.
At first, believing the woman to have been only a witness, Fisher gave her name, date of birth and phone number to the Burnaby RCMP.
“Mr. Fisher told her that the police would definitely be contacting her and that it would be better for B. if she contacted the police first,” states Hamilton’s ruling.
But, when the woman changed her cellphone number because she didn’t want to talk to police, Fisher didn’t provide her new number to the RCMP – even though he knew it and had used it to contact her numerous times.
“If I find a way to reach her I will pass on your information and ask her (again) to call you,” Fisher told Burnaby investigators trying to reach her, according to the ruling.
The woman later admitted during an intercepted phone call to Fisher on Nov. 7, 2016 that she had been the one who had stabbed the victim in Burnaby.
“I didn’t know that before,” Fisher had said to her, according to the ruling. “There’s no way I would have even said it if I did, but I didn’t know anything. I knew … that you were there, and you said that you would tell them that you were there and that was it.”
By that time, the woman was acting as a police agent for the VPD investigation into the kissing incident involving her.
About a week later, Fisher told a Burnaby investigator he couldn’t recall exactly was the woman had told him about her involvement in the stabbing but that he thought she had just been a witness.
“Mr. Fisher did not tell the investigator that B. had very recently told him that she was the person who stabbed the victim,” stated the court ruling.
Hamilton was careful to point out that Fisher was not being sentenced for any crime relating to obstructing justice.
“Having said that, Mr. Fisher is an officer of the law who took an oath to uphold the laws of the land and keep the peace,” Hamilton said. “He had a confession from B. that she stabbed the Burnaby victim, and he did nothing with that evidence. Even if B. was a person of suspect credibility … a police officer executing his duty as he was sworn to do, clearly had an obligation to do more with B.’s admission than bury it.”
The man stabbed in 2015 sustained non-life-threatening injuries, according to Burnaby RCMP, and no arrests were ever made in the case or charges laid.
