Those of us who have the privilege of making documentaries spend months and years involved with the people whose stories we’re telling. As well as an honour, it is something of a joyful burden. We want to get it right – the facts and the emotional reality.

Like any big project, it comes together step by step and, for long periods of time, one thinks about the individual steps, not the entire weight of the story. Throughout the making of Hold Your Fire, sometimes the sad power of a storyline would suddenly stop me in my tracks. I think that was true for everyone who worked on the film. There was a lot of sighing going on in edit rooms and sound studios.

One of the scenes that stays with me – Jackie Christopher holding a box that came back to her by courier after the inquest into her son’s death in a police shooting. It’s his last possessions and she knows it must contain the clothes he died in. Eleven years since he died and she still can’t open it. Or throw it out either.

But throughout production, I didn’t think only of the people shot, and the families, but also about the police officers whose lives were forever changed too. It’s true what they say that no officer goes to work planning to shoot somebody that day. If only they can be prepared in such a way that the shooting of a person in crisis is the rarest of occurrences.

Paul Boyd on his 2nd birthday, September 30, 1969

It’s Paul Boyd’s birthday today. He’d be 48 if he hadn’t been killed in a police shooting in 2007.

Since his college years, Paul had suffered from a mental illness most easily described as bipolar disorder. But he still managed to get himself educated and find meaningful work as one of Vancouver’s top animators. Paul worked on Gary Larson’s TV specials, Tales from the Farside, and he contributed his talents to the stunningly beautiful film At the Quinte Hotel. 

In 2007 Paul’s mother, with whom he was very close, was dying of ALS. Paul was devastated and his illness worsened. He was on Granville Street, shouting at people, when police were called to a possible assault in progress. (There was no assault.) Paul was shot by police 2 ½ minutes after they arrived at the scene.

Paul’s death was a huge news story in Vancouver – not just when it happened but also 4 ½ years later, in 2012, when a video surfaced out of the blue showing that he was on his hands and knees at the time the fatal shot was fired. That visual was at odds with the police version of events.

David Boyd stands at the corner where his son was killed

One part of the story that hasn’t been told – why Paul was even on the street that August night. When his possessions were returned to his father after the legal proceedings wrapped up, David Boyd saw something in his son’s last notebook that police had over-looked or thought unimportant: Paul was apparently looking for medical help that night. David Boyd took us out onto Granville Street for what was a very poignant tour of his son’s final hours. 

Paul and his sister Deb on his 2nd birthday 

Paul Boyd, September 30, 1967-August 13, 2007

When we first started researching Hold Your Fire, we spent a long time looking for answers in statistics – trying to figure out if the increase in police shootings of people in crisis is simply because there are so many interactions. We ended up concluding that the question we really had to look at is – how can any police shooting of a vulnerable person be prevented? – because the number of interactions just keeps going up.

Police have become de facto frontline mental health workers as police services struggle to keep up with a mental health crisis that has effectively been dumped in their laps. Jennifer Chambers of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction & Mental Health says the economy is partly to blame – once people lose housing they’re more likely to end up in personal crisis. In Toronto in 2014, police handled 20,000 interactions with people in crisis. (In Vancouver, one spokesman said the annual number is closer to 30,000.)

While filming in downtown Toronto to illustrate the point about the link between the economy and people in mental crisis, we met a man named Alexander who consented to be filmed going about his day with all his worldly possessions in a shopping cart. When we said good-bye, we gave him a little money to say thank you. Unbeknownst to him, we filmed one last shot of Alexander as he rolled his cart away down the street…and then stopped, to give the money away to another homeless person who was fast asleep on top of a heating vent. You couldn’t help but be moved.

Three families are featured in Hold Your Fire and it is impossible to describe the depth of their sorrow. Losing a loved one suddenly is terrible for anyone. Losing them violently is worse yet. And losing them violently at the hands of someone you trusted is profoundly sad and difficult to comprehend. Michael MacIsaac’s widow, Marianne, describes it as “absolute horror.”

Michael MacIsaac with wife Marianne

Another common thread linking the families is a sense that their loved one was not only killed but also somehow blamed for their own death. In the various attempts to explain their actions, police focused on what they saw as a threat, and that was generally the first story told publicly. David Boyd said his son was portrayed as a brute – until a video surfaced years after the shooting that revealed Paul Boyd was on his hands and knees when the final shot was fired.

Paul Boyd on the right, with his father, nephew and sister

We began actively researching a documentary about policing and people with mental health problems about 2 ½ years ago, shortly after Sammy Yatim was killed by police on a streetcar in downtown Toronto. I say “actively” researching because my Bountiful Films partner, Maureen Palmer, and I (Helen Slinger) have been exploring this topic for many more years.

We were partly inspired by a friend who we feared could become a shooting statistic. He’s a brilliant and gentle man who sometimes lives in another reality where he hears voices and behaves very differently from average folk. He’s had several interactions with police that have all ended happily but the other possibility haunts his family.

I remember sitting one summer afternoon with his sister during a particular bad period when the delusions were many and powerful. She worried about her brother heading downtown that afternoon on his own. What if he caused a scene and came up against a police officer who didn’t understand? So many Canadian families live with this fear. And some, including families you’ll meet in the film, have it realized.

In the documentary Hold Your Fire, we tried to figure out how officers who signed up genuinely wanting “to serve and protect” could ever end up shooting a vulnerable person – and what can be done to change that.

Debuts Thursday, October 22 at 9pm (9:30 NT) on CBC TV’s FIRSTHAND.