Police accused of deleting ‘starlight tours’ section from Wikipedia page

Saskatoon police are responding to questions over why information on starlight tours was deleted from the police service’s Wikipedia page.

A spokesperson for the police said the IP address from which changes were made to the page was tracked back to the Saskatoon Police Service. The police are unable to track who made the changes, however, because their information logs are only kept for 30 days and have since expired.

Starlight tours is a term used for when police officers were accused of taking aboriginal people into custody and dropping them off at the edge of the city, often in cold weather.

Saskatoon’s police service has been publicly accused of conducting starlight tours on a handful of occasions — most famously following the 1990 freezing death of Neil Stonechild.

Stonechild’s body was found frozen in late November of that year in an industrial area on the north end of Saskatoon. An inquiry into the incident, which concluded in 2004, determined two police officers were with Stonechild the night he disappeared.

The officers were fired but no criminal charges have ever been laid in the case. The service has been working to transform its image since the inquiry.

The Saskatoon police Wikipedia page has since been restored with the section on starlight tours.