Abstract
This article examines how reinforced police gloves can operate as concealed force multipliers, amplifying state violence within ambiguous legal and regulatory frameworks. Drawing on the Canadian case of Abdirahman Abdi, whose death followed a violent encounter with police officer Daniel Montsion in 2016, the study employs Critical Legal Discourse Analysis to examine court transcripts, forensic evidence, investigative reports, and a subsequent coroner's inquest. This in-depth case analysis illustrates how reinforced gloves may materially increase injury severity during police encounters while remaining legally unrecognized as weapons. Despite forensic evidence suggesting that these gloves significantly amplified harm, judicial proceedings avoided explicitly classifying them as weapons due to uncertainties about their direct criminal role in causing legally actionable outcomes (e.g. death). This judicial avoidance points to and may reproduce a regulatory blind spot, reinforcing definitional ambiguity and making certain forms of police violence more challenging to regulate and contest. This article uses the Abdi case to show how ambiguous legal definitions and the continuous wearability of ostensibly protective police equipment can facilitate institutional impunity and structural harm. The case study further suggests that clearer institutional definitions, proactive regulatory standards, and comprehensive accountability measures may be warranted to address forms of state-sanctioned violence enabled by ambiguously classified police technologies.
Keywords
Introduction
The role of police equipment in excessive force cases typically centers on explicitly classified weapons such as guns, batons, and Tasers (Alpert and Dunham, 2004; Ariel et al., 2015; Terrill and Paoline, 2017; White and Fradella, 2016). Less scrutinized, however, is how seemingly defensive gear—particularly reinforced gloves—functions as a significant yet concealed force multiplier, defined here as equipment that materially enhances an officer's ability to inflict harm beyond their physical capabilities alone. Unlike clearly defined weapons, reinforced gloves occupy a legally ambiguous category, which can enable officers to amplify physical harm while maintaining plausible deniability as protective equipment and thus evading explicit regulatory oversight. In this context, plausible deniability refers to the institutional or legal ability to deny responsibility for the violent potential of ambiguously classified protective gear, creating implications for police accountability, as potentially harmful equipment remains unregulated.
This article critically examines how reinforced gloves operate within this regulatory gray area through an in-depth analysis of the 2016 fatal encounter involving Abdirahman Abdi—a Somali Canadian man experiencing mental distress—and Ottawa Police Constable Daniel Montsion, who repeatedly punched Abdi while wearing Oakley SI Assault Gloves. The subsequent criminal trial, R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464), offers a critical lens to explore legal complexities and regulatory gaps surrounding police gear that materially enhances harm yet lacks clear categorization as a weapon.
Methodologically, this article treats the Abdi case as a critical case study in Gerring's (2007) sense: a single, information-rich case that is particularly well suited to probing the mechanisms through which police equipment, legal discourse, and institutional ambiguity interact. The case is not presented as statistically representative of all police killings in Canada. Rather, it is analytically valuable because it combines several elements that foreground questions of accountability—racialization, mental distress, the use of reinforced gloves, and extensive documentary records across criminal and coronial proceedings. These features make the case especially useful for examining how legal and institutional actors construct, sustain, and operationalize ambiguity around force-multiplying protective equipment.
This study addresses three primary questions:
In what ways do reinforced police gloves materially increase the severity of injuries in police encounters? How are reinforced gloves discussed or categorized within legal and forensic narratives during a trial involving police violence? How does the legal ambiguity surrounding reinforced gloves systematically produce and sustain gaps in police accountability and regulatory oversight?
Drawing on court transcripts, forensic reports, findings from Ontario's Special Investigations Unit (SIU), and evidence presented at the 2024 Coroner's Inquest, this article suggests that reinforced gloves exemplify a critical regulatory blind spot within the Canadian legal system. The analysis suggests that, in this case, regulatory scrutiny of police equipment appeared to depend heavily on establishing direct criminal causation linking the equipment to legally actionable consequences, such as death. This emphasis may help explain how gear capable of amplifying violence can remain weakly regulated or fall into a gray zone of oversight.
By analyzing how reinforced gloves were framed in forensic and legal discourses during the Montsion trial, this study addresses two key gaps in existing scholarship. First, whereas previous literature typically emphasizes explicitly militarized police equipment such as firearms, riot shields, and armored vehicles, this article highlights reinforced gloves as a subtler but materially significant form of police violence embedded in routine practices. Second, the article contributes to socio-legal scholarship by illustrating how definitional ambiguities can create institutional loopholes that enable certain forms of police violence to evade oversight and accountability. Ultimately, this analysis points to the importance of considering clearer institutional definitions, proactive regulatory standards, and greater accountability regarding police gear that materially escalates harm yet continues to evade legal scrutiny.
Although reinforced gloves are the empirical focus of this case, the article's broader contribution lies in showing how legal and institutional mechanisms of ambiguity enable police impunity. Reinforced gloves function here as a lens through which to examine how courts, oversight agencies, and police services rhetorically navigate contested equipment that both protects officers and amplifies harm. The analysis, therefore, speaks both to debates about specific policing technologies and to wider socio-legal discussions of how accountability is produced, limited, and deferred in cases of police violence.
Literature review
Structural violence and police militarization
Critical scholarship extensively documents how intensified policing contributes to the expansion of state violence, embedding it within broader carceral logics of punishment and social control (Garland, 2001; Gottschalk, 2006; Wacquant, 2009). At its core, policing embodies Max Weber's (1919) classical definition of the state as holding a legitimate monopoly over the use of physical force, situating police violence firmly within frameworks of state-sanctioned authority and legitimacy. Garland (2001) emphasizes that contemporary punitive practices, including aggressive policing strategies, serve to strengthen state legitimacy and extend mechanisms of social control, frequently justified through narratives of public safety and officer protection. Central to this dynamic is police militarization, defined as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model” (Kraska, 2007: 503). Beyond merely acquiring military hardware, militarization fosters an aggressive “warrior” mentality among officers, characterized by heightened combat readiness and suspicion towards civilians (Kraska, 2007; Lawson, 2019). Policies like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror have accelerated the normalization of military-grade force in civilian policing, blurring the line between police and military functions (Haggerty and Ericson, 1999; Lawson, 2019).
Wacquant (2009) identifies intensified policing and mass incarceration as key manifestations of a broader punitive shift, which disproportionately targets racialized and marginalized communities. Indeed, as social welfare recedes, coercive police power increasingly fills this governance vacuum, enforcing social regulation through violence against economically and socially disadvantaged populations. This intensified policing is fundamentally structural rather than incidental. Structural violence refers to institutionalized arrangements systematically disadvantaging specific populations, perpetuating inequalities (Galtung, 1969). Research consistently demonstrates that racial minorities experience higher rates of police stops, physical coercion, surveillance, and imprisonment than white populations, reflecting systemic biases (Alexander, 2010).
While most of this literature focuses on the United States, an emerging Canadian scholarship documents analogous patterns, including racial disparities in police stops and use of force, limited transparency in use-of-force reporting, and structural weaknesses in oversight regimes (Wortley et al., 2021). Police violence thus constitutes systematic, state-sanctioned harm directed at groups perceived as undesirable or threatening, perpetuating historical and contemporary inequalities (Maynard, 2018; Vitale, 2017). This article contributes to the growing Canadian body of work by examining a Canadian case in depth and by highlighting how equipment-related legal ambiguities intersect with existing patterns of racialization and mental health criminalization.
In sum, policing in North America, and particularly in the United States, has been widely analyzed as a form of structural violence. This article focuses on the Canadian context, where police violence has received comparatively less scholarly attention, and uses a single Canadian case to explore how similar dynamics of structural harm and legal ambiguity can operate outside the US-centered literature.
Legal ambiguity and weak police accountability
Formal accountability mechanisms for police violence frequently fail due to ambiguities and gaps within legal frameworks. Police operations often occur in zones of “low visibility” (Goldstein, 1963), governed by vague standards for permissible force (Butler, 2017; Simon, 2007). In Canada, police discretion to apply “as much force as is necessary” under the Criminal Code (Government of Canada, 2024) creates an exceptionally high threshold for criminal prosecution, making charges and convictions exceedingly rare, even in severe cases (Puddister, 2023; Puddister and McNabb, 2021; Roach, 2022; Wortley et al., 2021).
Further complicating accountability, judicial interpretations of police violence often emphasize explicit intent and clearly defined weapons (Reiter and Chestnut, 2018; Simon, 2007). Therefore, accountability frameworks regularly overlook police equipment whose harmful potential is less explicitly recognized. Protective equipment that materially amplifies injuries without clear forensic evidence is often overlooked in accountability frameworks, leaving their violence-enhancing potential legally invisible (Herring, 2019; Vitale, 2017).
Such definitional ambiguity interacts with police officers’ discretionary powers, further undermining accountability. Lipsky's (1980) concept of street-level bureaucracy illustrates how frontline officers regularly interpret ambiguous regulations, effectively shaping practical law through situational judgments. Policing inherently occurs in unpredictable and dynamic environments, granting officers significant discretion, particularly regarding decisions to use force (Bittner, 1970). Ambiguous standards for “reasonable” force thus provide police substantial latitude, creating situations conducive to excessive force that fall short of clear legal violations (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993; Walker, 2005).
This ambiguity disproportionately affects marginalized populations, whose interactions with law enforcement frequently occur within interpretive grey areas, exacerbating vulnerability to police violence (Brunson and Miller, 2006). Recent socio-legal scholarship highlights these troubling implications through the concept of “liminal legality” (Michaud et al., 2024), referring to how unclear legal standards permit inconsistent policing practices. Ambiguities in policing authority undermine public trust, reinforce institutional biases, and shield officers from accountability even in ethically problematic cases (Desmond et al., 2016).
Forensic uncertainties further compound these issues. Courts routinely accept ambiguous forensic interpretations that align with police narratives, constructing “reasonable doubt” in ways that systematically favor officers over victims (Lvovsky, 2017; National Registry of Exonerations, 2019). Medical and forensic experts wield considerable influence through authoritative interpretations of injury causation and responsibility, significantly affecting judicial outcomes (Lynch et al., 2009; Timmermans, 2007). Ambiguities in forensic evidence, particularly competing medical explanations for injuries or deaths, thus create additional barriers to accountability. Institutionally, Canadian oversight bodies often lack independence or prosecutorial authority, and police transparency about use-of-force data remains minimal (Corley et al., 2025; Wortley et al., 2021).
Thus, accountability for police violence remains consistently undermined by legal ambiguities, forensic uncertainty, judicial interpretations, and institutional frameworks. These systemic weaknesses collectively facilitate and perpetuate conditions in which police violence remains unchecked and institutionally shielded from meaningful scrutiny or sanction. Given these regulatory ambiguities, subtler policing technologies—whose harms often go unnoticed—require specific attention.
Protective policing equipment as force multipliers
Police equipment is not neutral; it actively shapes officer-citizen interactions and can materially amplify violence. Particularly important, yet understudied, are protective or defensive tools such as reinforced gloves, which function as hidden force multipliers: devices that significantly increase an officer's capacity to inflict harm while evading scrutiny typically reserved for explicitly classified weapons. Critical scholarship has examined how policing technologies mediate state power and police-citizen encounters, highlighting unintended consequences that reinforce existing inequalities (Brayne, 2021; Sandhu and Haggerty, 2015; White and Fradella, 2016). However, these studies have primarily focused on explicitly militarized gear—such as riot shields, armored vehicles, or weapons—and surveillance technologies, leaving subtler yet impactful equipment understudied. Protective tools thus remain relatively overlooked, despite clear potential for harm.
The concept of force multiplication explains how equipment designed to protect officers simultaneously enhances their capacity to harm civilians. For instance, riot shields and body armor redistribute physical risk, enabling police to exert greater force without personal injury, thereby disproportionately increasing civilian harm during encounters (Kraska, 2007). Similarly, the so-called “less-lethal” or safety-oriented technologies often amplify violence rather than reduce it; a phenomenon known as net-widening. For example, conducted energy weapons (CEWs) such as Tasers, intended as safer alternatives to firearms, have been found to increase overall police use of force. Ariel et al. (2019) found that Taser-equipped officers used force more frequently than their unarmed counterparts, attributed to the psychological “weapons effect,” where mere possession escalates aggression among both officers and civilians. Importantly, the introduction of Tasers did not decrease actual injuries but instead expanded the contexts in which force became acceptable, further entrenching state violence.
This scholarly neglect of subtler force-multiplying equipment has critical implications. By overlooking ambiguously classified gear such as reinforced gloves, existing research underestimates how police violence operates through materially significant yet less visible means. From a human rights perspective, the ambiguous categorization of such technologies poses significant challenges. International organizations document extensive misuse of standard police weapons like batons and rubber bullets, but subtler gear often escapes systematic monitoring. Although some jurisdictions explicitly restrict reinforced gloves (e.g. the Royal Canadian Mounted Police prohibit sap gloves, and several US states classify reinforced gloves alongside brass knuckles as prohibited weapons), local police agencies may unofficially tolerate or issue them as protective gear. This practice creates regulatory gray zones, perpetuating conditions of unchecked institutional violence while publicly maintaining narratives of restraint.
In sum, ambiguously classified protective police technologies can significantly influence contemporary practices of state violence. By amplifying force capacities while often circumventing rigorous oversight, such tools may contribute to ongoing systemic violence and institutional impunity. In this sense, reinforced gloves exemplify the subtle intersections between legal ambiguity, policing technologies, and structural violence.
Case background
The case of Abdirahman Abdi highlights significant ambiguities in the regulation and oversight of protective police equipment, particularly in relation to police violence. On 24 July 2016, Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali Canadian man in his late thirties with documented mental health conditions, died following a violent encounter with officers from the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) in the Hintonburg neighborhood. The incident began when officers responded to a disturbance involving Abdi at a local coffee shop. Upon police arrival, Abdi fled toward his apartment building, pursued by Constables Dave Weir and Daniel Montsion. Constable Weir was first to engage Abdi physically, during which Abdi sustained initial injuries, including a fall to the pavement.
Constable Montsion arrived shortly after, wearing reinforced tactical gloves (Oakley SI Assault Gloves) equipped with hardened knuckles. Witnesses described Montsion repeatedly and forcefully striking Abdi, primarily in the head and face, even as Abdi was restrained and subsequently handcuffed. Abdi was left unresponsive and face-down on the pavement. Despite paramedic interventions, he never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead the next day.
Following an investigation by Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, the provincial body responsible for examining police actions involving serious injury or death, Constable Montsion was charged in March 2017 with manslaughter, aggravated assault, and assault with a weapon. The SIU emphasized excessive force concerns, particularly related to Montsion's use of reinforced gloves. The focus on criminal liability meant that questions about equipment classification and use-of-force standards were largely filtered through the lens of whether the Crown could prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Montsion's actions were both unlawful and a significant contributing cause of Abdi's death. Montsion's claim that his punches were intended as “distraction blows” was not a separate legal defense but functioned as part of his justification that his actions fell within a reasonable use-of-force continuum.
The ensuing criminal trial, R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464), commenced in February 2019, centering on whether Montsion's actions directly caused Abdi's fatal cardiac arrest and whether the reinforced gloves constituted a weapon under Canadian law. On 20 October 2020, Montsion was acquitted of all charges due to reasonable doubt regarding direct causation. The acquittal sparked renewed criticism and protests, underscoring perceived systemic failures within the Canadian justice system to hold police accountable for violence against marginalized communities.
Abdi's case illustrates how, in this instance, reinforced gloves appear to have materially amplified violence, according to forensic experts, yet escaped explicit legal classification as weapons. This ambiguity suggests potential regulatory gaps and illustrates how institutional and legal frameworks can struggle to effectively oversee and regulate protective police equipment.
In December 2024, a coroner's inquest officially ruled Abdi's death a homicide, issuing over 50 recommendations aimed at addressing systemic issues within OPS and broader Canadian policing practices. Recommendations included creating a mental-health advisory council, enhancing de-escalation and anti-racism training, and establishing clearer guidelines on police equipment usage. During the inquest, Montsion testified publicly for the first time, maintaining his intention was to merely “distract” Abdi and emphasizing the defensive rather than offensive purpose of the reinforced gloves.
The eight-year gap between the 2016 fatal encounter and the 2024 homicide ruling reflects the slow pace and layered structure of Canadian oversight mechanisms: criminal proceedings must be completed before a coroner's inquest is convened. The inquest's homicide classification does not overturn the criminal acquittal and carries no direct legal consequences for Montsion; its significance lies instead in fact-finding and in generating non-binding recommendations for institutional reform. This temporal and institutional separation further illustrates how different legal forums can produce divergent narratives and classifications of the same death.
Data and methodology
Case study approach
This study employs a qualitative case study approach to analyze how reinforced gloves function as force-enhancing tools within legal frameworks governing police use-of-force incidents. The research centers specifically on the legal and institutional handling of Abdirahman Abdi's death and the subsequent proceedings in R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464). This high-profile case is particularly valuable for examining how reinforced police gear (explicitly not classified as a weapon) materially amplifies harm while simultaneously evading clear regulatory categorization. The case study method is well-suited to unpacking the complexities, definitional ambiguities, and contested interpretations that characterize excessive-force incidents involving ambiguously classified police equipment (Yin, 2014).
Additionally, the case was selected for the extensive documentation available, including detailed court records, forensic analyses, Special Investigations Unit findings, and coroner's inquest reports. These resources provide comprehensive insight into how reinforced gloves were discussed, contested, and ultimately left without definitive regulatory classification. By critically examining these sources, the study sheds light on potential weaknesses in the regulation, oversight, and accountability mechanisms governing police violence.
Sources of data
This research draws from four main categories of archival data and official documents covering the period from 2016 to 2025 and encompassing the initial incident, trial proceedings, and subsequent coroner's inquest findings:
Legal Proceedings: Official court documents from R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464), including trial transcripts, judicial rulings, prosecution and defense arguments, and expert witness testimonies. These documents are critical for understanding how reinforced gloves were legally framed, debated, and ultimately left undefined. Forensic and Investigative Reports: Detailed forensic documentation from the Ontario Special Investigations Unit, medical examiner and pathology assessments, and forensic evaluations of the reinforced gloves worn by Montsion. These reports provide empirical evidence regarding how the gloves amplified injuries and informed legal debates around causation and equipment classification. Coroner's Jury Inquest Findings (2024): Official documents from the 2024 coroner's inquest into Abdi's death, which also includes recommendations for institutional reforms. These sources contextualize institutional perspectives on reinforced gloves, revealing insights into their intended purpose, operational policies, and perceived potential for harm. News Media Sources: Coverage and articles from established media outlets, primarily the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national public broadcaster (CBC News), published between 2016 and 2025. Selected media articles—especially those reproducing extended quotations from police officials, supervisors, and community actors—were also imported into NVivo and coded where they contained relevant institutional discourse. More broadly, news media sources were used to situate legal and institutional developments (e.g. public reactions, protest activity, and statements by police officials) and to triangulate timelines and public-facing narratives. They were not analyzed as systematically or extensively as legal and forensic documents, but they informed my interpretation of how institutional accounts were articulated, received, contested, and amplified in the public sphere.
Critical Legal Discourse Analysis (CLDA)
This study employs CLDA (Fairclough, 1992; Foucault, 1977) to examine how legal actors and institutions rhetorically construct and maintain ambiguity regarding reinforced police gloves. CLDA treats language as a form of institutional power and is used here to analyze how discursive practices in court transcripts, forensic testimonies, and institutional statements produce or perpetuate conditions of legal uncertainty and regulatory blind spots.
Specifically, this analysis focuses on four key discursive strategies:
Minimization and Neutralization: How actors rhetorically diminish the offensive capabilities of reinforced gloves by framing them primarily as protective or neutral. Passive Agency and Ambiguity Production: The ways in which judges and institutional actors linguistically position themselves as passive interpreters of evidence, thereby reinforcing ambiguity around direct criminal causation. Strategic Avoidance and Deflection: How judicial statements explicitly avoid classifying reinforced gloves as weapons, shifting analytical emphasis onto forensic and medical uncertainties. Institutional Denial and Plausible Deniability: How police supervisors and officers rhetorically deny or downplay the potential for harm, strategically maintaining plausible deniability at the organizational level.
Courtroom transcripts, forensic reports, institutional testimonies, and jury recommendations from the 2024 Coroner's Inquest were systematically analyzed using NVivo software. An inductive–deductive coding approach guided the analysis, starting with open coding to identify key discursive patterns, followed by focused coding aligned with the four CLDA strategies outlined above. Iterative coding cycles ensured thematic coherence and analytical rigor, refining categories to highlight precisely how discursive strategies sustained regulatory ambiguity surrounding reinforced gloves. This approach allows the analysis not only to reveal how definitional ambiguities manifest within individual cases but also to illustrate broader institutional mechanisms through which police violence can be shielded from accountability.
In practical terms, I imported all available court transcripts, SIU reports, expert testimonies, inquest transcripts, and selected media articles into NVivo. I then conducted an initial round of open coding, generating inductive codes such as “minimizing language,” “equipment as protective,” “equipment as offensive,” “causation uncertainty,” “victim pathology,” and “institutional responsibility.” In a second stage, I organized these into more focused thematic codes aligned with the four CLDA strategies (minimization/neutralization; passive agency; strategic avoidance/deflection; and institutional denial/plausible deniability). Coding was iterative: I returned to earlier documents as new patterns emerged, refining the codebook and merging overlapping codes. While coding was conducted by a single researcher, I engaged in repeated memo-writing and reflexive note-taking to document interpretive decisions and to guard against confirmation bias.
Findings and analysis
Reinforced gloves as force multipliers in legal ambiguity
The analysis of R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464) highlights one way in which a critical yet underexplored dimension of police violence can operate: the role of reinforced tactical gloves as hidden amplifiers of physical harm, operating within legally ambiguous spaces. During the violent encounter resulting in Abdirahman Abdi's death, Ottawa Police Constable Daniel Montsion wore Oakley SI Assault Gloves, which became a central focus of forensic and institutional scrutiny. These gloves were explicitly entered into evidence and described by the court as having knuckles that were: [R]aised and rounded and hard to the touch […]. The knuckle area is covered by a piece of leather-type material. The surface is smooth and free of protrusions or jagged edges. (R. v. Montsion, para. 264)
Crucially, forensic evidence contradicted this minimization by explicitly affirming the gloves’ significant role in intensifying Abdi's injuries. Forensic pathology evidence in the Abdi case indicates that he sustained extensive facial fractures, severe blunt force trauma, and internal injuries consistent with repeated strikes to the head. Expert forensic testimony stated that the rigid, reinforced knuckles of Montsion's gloves amplified the severity of Abdi's injuries beyond what would have occurred from bare-handed strikes alone. Moreover, the forensic pathologist emphasized that the gloves enabled Montsion to deliver repeated, forceful blows without injuring his own hands, thus facilitating the sustained application of severe violence. Rather than merely serving a protective function, the gloves materially amplified the harm inflicted upon Abdi, exposing a substantial gap in the regulation and oversight of ostensibly defensive police equipment.
By discursively positioning the reinforced knuckles as merely “intentional reinforcement for protective purposes,” courtroom narratives maintained plausible deniability regarding their offensive use. In this case, the forensic evidence strongly suggests that the gloves played an active role as concealed force multipliers, situating them within a problematic regulatory space between protective gear and offensive weapons.
Institutional ambiguity and continuous wearability as regulatory blind spots
A critical but often overlooked dimension of reinforced gloves as force-enhancing tools lies in their continuous wearability—defined here as the capacity for equipment to be worn constantly without requiring explicit justification for deployment. Unlike explicitly classified weapons such as batons or Tasers, which require deliberate decision-making, deployment, and justification, reinforced gloves can remain on officers’ hands before and throughout routine policing activities. The court explicitly documented this continuous wearability in the Montsion case, noting that Constable Montsion's gloves remained on throughout the entirety of the incident and encounter with Abdirahman Abdi, thereby blurring distinctions between protective equipment and offensive weapons (R. v. Montsion, paras. 264–266).
By positioning the gloves as routine, ever-present, and passively worn, courtroom discourse constructs their violence-enhancing capabilities as invisible and mundane, evading the regulatory scrutiny typically activated by explicit weapon deployment. Through rhetorical normalization, continuous wearability linguistically obscures the gloves’ aggressive potential, embedding violence structurally into everyday police practice.
In this case, institutional ambiguity surrounding reinforced gloves was further highlighted during the 2024 Coroner's Inquest. Ottawa Police supervisor Sparling testified that reinforced gloves were issued to officers without any accompanying guidelines, formal training, or explicit protocols governing their appropriate and inappropriate use. Sparling's testimony used discursive minimization, framing the gloves exclusively as protective rather than offensive: “It never even occurred to me [that the gloves could be used as weapons],” she said. “I never heard of anybody using those ever as a weapon, not even as a weapon of opportunity.” (CBC News, 2024) None whatsoever … It was just a pair of gloves that were going to protect your knuckles. (CBC News, 2024)
This discursive strategy of institutional minimization extended into Montsion's own statements during the inquest, in which he asserted his intent was merely to distract Abdi to facilitate arrest. CLDA identifies Montsion's choice of words (“to distract”) as rhetorical neutralization, framing his actions as harmless, routine, and instrumental. This language strategically diverts attention from the explicit violence-enhancing role of the reinforced gloves, obscuring accountability by reclassifying aggressive strikes as minor or incidental operational tactics.
Institutional ambiguity was further compounded by contradictory narratives presented during the trial itself. Prosecutors argued that the gloves worn by Constable Montsion were neither officially sanctioned nor standard issue within the Ottawa Police Service. However, evidence presented in court confirmed that the gloves had been directly issued to Montsion by his supervising officer within the Direct Action Response Team (DART), demonstrating institutional authorization (R. v. Montsion, paras. 265–266). CLDA illuminates how these competing institutional narratives operate discursively to create plausible deniability. By maintaining ambiguity regarding authorization and official policy, the Ottawa Police Service strategically deflects responsibility and accountability for harm caused by reinforced gloves.
In the Abdi case, these discursive contradictions appear to undermine accountability frameworks and point to broader vulnerabilities in how such frameworks operate. When institutions produce conflicting narratives about equipment authorization, training, and intended use, CLDA reveals how responsibility is diffused, obscuring precisely who bears regulatory oversight and accountability. Consequently, harmful police gear remains operationally invisible within existing regulatory structures. Thus, institutional discrepancies, through strategic discursive framing, not only expose deeper regulatory gaps but may help perpetuate systemic conditions that enable unchecked and intensified police violence.
Legal ambiguity, weapon classification, and judicial avoidance of accountability
The trial of R. v. Montsion (2020 ONCJ 464) reveals how definitional ambiguities, and forensic uncertainties, shape judicial outcomes in police violence cases. Central to the Crown's argument was the assertion that reinforced gloves worn by Constable Montsion constituted weapons under Canadian law. Specifically, prosecutors argued: Constable Montsion committed an unlawful act: he assaulted Mr Abdi by punching him multiple times in the face and head while wearing hard-knuckled gloves. The force he used was excessive and unjustified and carried a foreseeable risk of bodily harm. The gloves were a weapon. […]. Constable Montsion's unjustified assault was a significant contributing cause of the cardiac arrest that led to Mr Abdi's death.
Critically, the presiding judge echoed and reinforced this discursive reframing, explicitly stating: When I step back and consider the evidence as a whole, I am left with a reasonable doubt about whether Constable Montsion's acts were a significant contributing cause of the cardiac arrest that led to Mr Abdi's death. I accept that they may have been, but I am unable to reach this conclusion on the criminal standard. (R. v. Montsion, para. 628)
Most significantly, the Ontario Court explicitly declined to resolve the critical definitional question regarding the gloves’ legal status as weapons, stating: In these circumstances, I need not decide whether the Crown has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the gloves worn by Constable Montsion meet the definition of “weapon” in s. 2 of the Criminal Code. (para. 481)
Instead, the judicial analysis centered narrowly on three primary issues:
whether Constable Montsion's actions were unlawful or criminally negligent, requiring an assessment of the force used, its justification, and if it demonstrated a reckless disregard for Abdi's life or safety compared to reasonable police standards (para. 6), whether Montsion's actions directly caused Abdi's nasal fractures, considering extensive medical evidence (para. 7), whether Montsion's conduct significantly contributed to Abdi's death by cardiac arrest, based on comprehensive medical and non-medical evidence (para. 8).
Ultimately, the court's decision hinged on establishing reasonable doubt regarding direct criminal responsibility and causation. Given forensic uncertainties around establishing a precise criminally actionable causal relationship between the gloves’ impact and Abdi's fatal cardiac arrest, the court deemed it unnecessary to determine the gloves’ legal status as weapons. However, by narrowly focusing on direct criminal causation and sidestepping the definitional issue, the court inadvertently reinforced precisely the regulatory ambiguity critiqued in this analysis. The use of “need not decide” operates discursively as a strategic avoidance mechanism, allowing the reinforced gloves’ violence-enhancing capacity (affirmed by forensic evidence) to remain legally invisible, occupying a problematic position between protective gear and offensive weapons.
Additionally, the defense’ invocation of “Excited delirium,” a controversial and medically disputed concept, further diluted accountability. Excited Delirium typically describes a sudden onset of extreme agitation, heightened physical strength, and altered mental state, allegedly linked—without strong scientific consensus—to drug intoxication or psychiatric crises (Beliso-De Jesús, 2024). Despite lacking scientific consensus or formal recognition by major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization, the strategic rhetorical deployment of contested medical terminology constructs forensic uncertainty, shifting culpability from police actions onto victims’ purported medical or psychological conditions (Beliso-De Jesús, 2024). Such victim-blaming narratives reflect broader systemic patterns wherein police violence accountability is weakened by redirecting attention away from officers’ use of force.
All in all, critics may argue that the court's definitional avoidance was logically sound, suggesting that classifying the gloves became irrelevant once causation was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, it is precisely this logic that reveals a significant potential limitation within existing legal standards: current accountability frameworks are largely reactive rather than preventive. Such a reactive approach places undue evidentiary burdens on victims and prosecution teams to demonstrate direct criminal causation before potentially harmful police equipment receives necessary scrutiny or regulation. Consequently, ambiguously defined police gear can continue to operate in a definitional gray area, potentially exacerbating systemic violence and contributing to conditions of institutionalized impunity.
This case illustrates a potential systemic limitation within existing legal frameworks: the fixation on proving direct causation and criminal responsibility. Without this direct link, ambiguously classified police equipment—even equipment explicitly recognized by forensic experts as violence-enhancing—remains outside regulatory scrutiny.
Discussion and conclusion
The analysis of the Montsion trial presented above illustrates how definitional ambiguities around reinforced gloves can impede individual accountability and reveal deeper systemic problems within police oversight. By applying CLDA, this study has highlighted how judicial and institutional language actively constructs and sustains these ambiguities.
This article does not claim that reinforced gloves are uniquely or universally responsible for police impunity, nor that the mechanisms identified here operate identically across all cases of police violence. The analysis is based on a single, highly documented case and is therefore analytically, rather than statistically, generalizable. The aim is to trace how equipment, legal discourse, and institutional practices intersect in one context, and to use this tracing to generate questions and hypotheses for further research on other force-multiplying technologies and other jurisdictions.
Within these limits, this study contributes to scholarly understandings of police violence by illuminating how ostensibly neutral protective equipment, specifically reinforced gloves, can materially intensify harm in particular cases while simultaneously evading explicit regulatory scrutiny. The CLDA approach exposed how courtroom and institutional actors in this case strategically employed rhetorical minimization, passive framing, and strategic avoidance to maintain the gloves’ ambiguous legal position. Despite forensic evidence affirming their harmful capacity in this particular context, reinforced gloves were repeatedly constructed as merely protective, thereby sidestepping formal weapon classification and limiting the scope of accountability mechanisms.
The trial and subsequent coroner's inquest underscored how the continuous wearability of reinforced gloves facilitated sustained, intensified violence. Unlike explicitly classified weapons, reinforced gloves remain constantly worn by officers, linguistically normalized within institutional discourse as routine protective equipment. CLDA demonstrated how this normalization can embed implicit preparedness for violence into routine policing practices, making the gloves’ force-multiplying potential less visible and contributing to regulatory invisibility unless explicit criminal causation is conclusively established.
Moreover, institutional contradictions regarding the authorization and oversight of reinforced gloves further compound accountability gaps. Although prosecutors initially argued that Constable Montsion's gloves were unsanctioned, court evidence demonstrated that these gloves were directly issued by his supervising officer within the Ottawa Police's DART. Such conflicting narratives suggest significant oversight challenges, creating ambiguity around regulatory responsibility and facilitating institutional plausible deniability. Consequently, harmful police equipment can remain operationally obscured within existing regulatory frameworks, exacerbating accountability deficiencies.
The judicial avoidance of explicitly classifying reinforced gloves as weapons, despite forensic evidence indicating their harm-enhancing capacity in this case, points to a limitation within existing legal frameworks. Current legal standards remain heavily focused on establishing direct criminal causation linking police equipment explicitly to legally actionable harm (i.e. death), thereby placing substantial evidentiary burdens upon victims and their families. The strategic invocation of the controversial and medically disputed concept of “Excited Delirium” during the Montsion trial further illustrates broader patterns of victim-blaming, which redirect accountability away from police actions toward victims’ purported medical or psychological conditions. Such discursive tactics disproportionally affect racialized individuals and those experiencing mental health crises, reinforcing structural biases and exacerbating vulnerabilities inherent within contemporary policing.
It is also important to note that reinforced gloves were not the only salient feature of this case. Abdi's racialization as a Black Somali man, his documented mental health struggles, the involvement of multiple officers, and broader patterns of racialized policing in Canada likely all shaped how the incident unfolded and how it was interpreted legally. The analysis here does not deny these factors; instead, it isolates reinforced gloves as one understudied element through which institutional and legal mechanisms of impunity can be examined.
The broader social implications of this regulatory ambiguity are particularly troubling for marginalized and racialized communities. Extensive scholarship demonstrates that these populations disproportionately experience unchecked police violence, a situation that can be exacerbated by the presence of violence-amplifying equipment lacking explicit regulatory oversight. The absence of clear regulatory standards risks deepening existing racial disparities and structural inequities in policing, potentially intensifying harm to vulnerable groups.
Given these findings, this case study suggests that proactive and more comprehensive legal reforms may be warranted regarding police equipment capable of materially escalating violence. While detailed policy design lies beyond the scope of this article, the analysis points to at least two areas that merit closer consideration:
Clearer institutional definitions. Police services and oversight bodies could consider formally classifying reinforced gloves and comparable protective gear within use-of-force policies as intermediate or less-lethal weapons, explicitly recognizing their potential to amplify harm. Proactive regulatory standards. Agencies might also explore mandating specialized training on appropriate and inappropriate uses of such gear, establishing explicit accountability procedures for misuse, and systematically reviewing incidents involving force-enhancing equipment—regardless of whether direct criminal causation can be established in court.
These suggestions are tentative and grounded in a single case. They are intended less as definitive policy prescriptions than as starting points for further empirical research and normative debate.
While public outcry following Montsion's acquittal and the subsequent coroner's inquest prompted the Ottawa Police Service to reconsider aspects of police accountability, specific policy changes regarding reinforced gloves have not been detailed publicly (Ottawa Police Service, 2024). Moreover, these responses appear predominantly reactive rather than systemic or preventative. The extent of similar policy changes across Canadian law enforcement agencies remains unclear, underscoring ongoing national regulatory uncertainties.
Although this article examines a specific Canadian case, regulatory ambiguities surrounding police equipment and accountability are not uniquely Canadian phenomena. Similar legal and institutional uncertainties have been documented internationally. For example, controversies around ambiguous police technologies such as “less-lethal” rubber bullets in the United States (Amnesty International, 2023a) and in Chile (Amnesty International, 2023b) illustrate how equipment intended for defensive or non-lethal purposes frequently occupies contested regulatory and definitional spaces. The Canadian context provides a critical illustrative example due to the extensive documentation and public scrutiny surrounding the Abdi case, but the conceptual insights and regulatory critiques offered in this study may hold broader relevance for other jurisdictions facing analogous accountability challenges. Thus, while the specific details are Canadian, the broader implications and analytical framework of this study are internationally relevant, highlighting the need for comparative research and transnational policy discussions addressing ambiguous police equipment.
Future research should further interrogate ambiguously categorized police technologies, critically examining both their physical impacts and the legal discourses shaping their oversight. For social scientists, the Abdi case underscores the value of close, qualitative examination of specific incidents in order to unpack the discursive and institutional mechanisms that are often flattened in large-N studies. Future research could, for example, compare multiple cases involving reinforced gloves or other protective equipment, trace how similar technologies are regulated across different jurisdictions, or combine doctrinal legal analysis with ethnographic or interview-based work among officers, oversight officials, and affected communities. Such work would help assess how widespread the mechanisms identified here are, and under what conditions they are amplified, muted, or resisted.
Clarifying the legal status of reinforced gloves and comparable forms of ostensibly protective equipment may represent an important step toward addressing regulatory structures that enable violence and institutional impunity. Ultimately, this research emphasizes the importance of policymakers and legal institutions proactively recognizing and regulating forms of police equipment capable of intensifying harm—not only explicitly classified weapons—if they wish to respond effectively to concerns about unchecked, state-sanctioned police violence. Such efforts, while necessarily limited, may contribute to strengthening institutional integrity and public safety, and to advancing racial justice and safeguarding the dignity of communities disproportionately harmed by police violence.
Footnotes
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The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.