A couple who were pulled over, searched and "aggressively" questioned earlier this month by the police's gang task force have filed a complaint about one officer's allegedly "inappropriate" behaviour to the young woman.
Sabrina Haloulakos, 25, said Tuesday she was driving her boyfriend's car back to her Burnaby home at about 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 16, after the couple had had dinner with her mom, when they were waved over in the 5500-block Kingsway by two black SUVs carrying officers in uniform.
"The police said they stopped us because I wasn't the registered owner of the car, but my boyfriend produced his registration and he was right beside me," said Haloulakos, who says she has never been in any trouble with the law.
"They [the officers] seemed really uptight, for no reason at all."
The officers, who were from several police forces, asked her boyfriend, Steven Sugrim, 20, what he did for a living and how he had acquired the car, a 2004 black Cadillac.
Sugrim, who worked for a car dealership but is now studying for his realtor's licence, told them he had bought it relatively inexpensively on Craigslist.
"Then they made me get out and they started aggressively questioning Steven and searching the car, while the one officer who stayed with me started asking really personal and inappropriate questions," said Haloulakos.
The officer, a Mountie, was "definitely flirtatious and hitting on me - if it had been a bar, I would have told him to get lost but I was intimidated because he was a cop. It was very, very awkward," she said.
The officer said her boyfriend had "a little bit of history" with police and began "warning" her about Sugrim, she said.
"He started asking, 'How long have you been dating him for?' and 'Have you had sex with him yet?' which I thought was none of his business.
"He was warning me about my boyfriend for no reason and then asking me for my personal phone number and address, which I gave him because I felt so intimidated. I feel really, really unsafe that he knows where to find me."
Haloulakos, who filed a complaint with the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP the following week, said she is "nervous this officer got my personal information for no reason."
Both Haloulakos and Sugrim say they support the work of the gang task force.
"We were trying to be really cooperative, but where they really crossed the line was with the officer taking my girlfriend 20 feet away to warn her about me, asking her inappropriate questions and getting her phone number and address," said Sugrim.
Sugrim acknowledges that he has had some driving violations but points out that charges against him in connection with a July 2009 landlord-tenant dispute were dismissed.
A check of court records indicates Sugrim did face assault and weapons charges in 2009 but all charges were stayed by prosecutors, who obtained significant "new" information about the incident.
Vancouver police Insp. John Grywinski, acting head of the combined forces special enforcement unit of the gang task force, confirmed he spoke to Sugrim the day after the incident and gave him the officers' names.
The task force has been extremely vigilant in the wake of another wave of gang shootings, Grywinski said, and the team that stopped the couple then had to go to a Surrey gang shooting later that night.
"We pulled them over to chat and, yes, we will often talk to associates, wives and girlfriends, to find out whether they're living together and get contact information," he said.
"Now that they have made a formal complaint, it's up to the investigator.
"It raises alarm bells when I hear one of my officers may have gone too far, but of the thousands of checks and traffic stops we've been making, this is the first complaint of this nature."
Grywinski noted that only Haloulakos and RCMP Const. Sean Courtorielle were present when she was being questioned.
"But at the end of the day, if one of my officers is acting in an improper manner, we want it to be fixed," he said.
Grywinski said he will await the outcome of the complaints commission investigation before taking any action.
