Starlight tours

A starlight tour is the non-sanctioned police practice of picking up individuals in their cruisers, mostly homeless, drug addicts, or other such marginalized people, and taking them outside of town where they would be beaten and/or abandoned on the side of the road.

A suspected case in Canada resulted in an inquiry in 2003 into the hypothermia death of Neil Stonechild in 1990, as part of a series of such cases, known as the Saskatoon freezing deaths. The inquiry found that he might have been subjected to a starlight tour by the police. However, the inquiry found that at the time of the death the police investigation was not adequate to conclude what the circumstances were surrounding Stonechild's death. The 2 officers who allegedly picked up Stonechild that evening were eventually fired; they have steadfastly maintained their innocence and recently it has been discovered that the RCMP officers who investigated the alleged involvement of the Saskatoon Police hid evidence that would have exonerated these two officers.^{[citation needed]}

In December 2010, a young aboriginal man named Evan Maud in Winnipeg accused the police of taking him to the edge of the city at 4:00 a.m., threatening him with a Taser, and taking his jacket. The police stated that the accusation was false and laid charges against Maud of criminal mischief, after evidence surfaced such as video of Maud boarding a bus 15 minutes after being stopped by police, corroboration by police GPS, and testimony by witnesses that Maud was not wearing a jacket that night.

In pop culture

• A starlight tour is notably depicted in the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood.
• In the film A Clockwork Orange, the protagonist, Alex, is taken out into the country side and assaulted by police officers who were previous gang members of his.
• The Nick Nolte film Mulholland Falls, a story of a Los Angeles police detective and his partners, is named for the protagonists' particular style of starlight tours. To wit, the detectives will approach a member of organized crime who has recently arrived in town and make what appears at first to be merely a harassment arrest. However, instead of taking the man to a police station, they take him into the countryside to a large cliff, which they euphemistically call "Mulholland Falls", where he is thrown to his death.

Resources

• Renaud, Rob; Reber, Susanne (2005). Starlight tour: the last, lonely night of Neil Stonechild. Toronto: Random House Canada. 427 pages. ISBN 0-679-31307-9. 

External links

• Report of the Stonechild Inquiry (requires Adobe Acrobat reader)