Officer shot in Calgary standoff in good spirits, police union says

A Calgary police officer shot in a standoff on Tuesday is improving and in good spirits, his union president says.

Const. Jordan Forget, a five-year member of the Calgary Police Service, was taken to hospital after being shot Tuesday during a northeast standoff in which the suspect died. Forget was listed as being in stable condition.

He has two gunshot wounds but medical staff weren't sure if those were caused by one gun round or two, union president Les Kaminski told the Calgary Eyeopener Thursday morning.

Forget was wounded in his arm and a bullet penetrated his upper chest, collapsing a lung, he said. The round travelled through his body, stopping when it hit his armour on the other side.

"When I first talked to him on Tuesday, he said to me, 'I can't breathe very well,'" said Kaminski, who as head of the Calgary Police Association represents more than 2,000 members. "But he's doing much better as of yesterday."

The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team is investigating the death of the man, not yet named, at the centre of Tuesday's standoff in Abbeydale, a community in northeast Calgary.

The Calgary Police Service initially responded to an armed robbery, an attempted carjacking and an attempted break and enter at a home in the neighbourhood. When seeking a suspect, they saw smoke coming from a detached garage, police have said, and then shots were fired out of the garage.

One of those hit Forget.

Officers returned fire.

A man was found dead in the garage after the flames were put out. An autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday but results have not been released.

"I'm not sure if he was actually hit with gunfire or not," Kaminski said. "We know that officers did return fire. We try to use every means possible before resorting to violence. However, police work can get ugly."

The union president also said he believes officers did a textbook-perfect job responding to the original call and subsequent standoff and shooting.

He and the police chief both say officers are encountering guns on the job more often than in the past, and now treat formally routine calls as high risk.

"The criminals that we're dealing with are armed more and more often," Kaminski said. "We have a gun culture here in Canada, don't kid yourself. It's not like it is south of the border yet, but bad people are carrying firearms now."

Kaminski said he knows officers who've been shot at but this is the first time one has been hit in more than two decades in Calgary.

In Edmonton, Const. Daniel Woodall in Edmonton was fatally shot in 2015 while trying to serve an arrest warrant to a man under investigation for anti-Semitic bullying. 

Twenty-two Canadian police officers have been killed by gunfire since 2002, according to the Canadian Police Association.

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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener.