A law like this is what the BCCLA has been working towards for years.  Now’s the time to contact your member of parliament to support Ian’s law, a private member’s bill put forward by MP Nathan Cullen.

Tags: RCMP, Transparency
Posted in The Police Blog | | 1 Comment »

In 2007, Paul Boyd was shot and killed by a Vancouver Police officer.  Officers responded to a 911 call concerning a man carrying a potentially dangerous weapon.  Upon arrival, one officer shot Mr. Boyd eight times after he allegedly attacked two officers with a chain. The Criminal Justice Branch has just announced that it will not be advancing any criminal charges. In a report attached to the decision, the CJB advises that:

• only one officer fired on Mr. Boyd, no other police officers fired a shot;
• some attending police officers did not unholster their firearms;
• the shooting officer fired at least four shots after a direction had been given to the attending officers to “hold their fire”;
• Mr. Boyd was hit by at least four bullets and possibly five bullets after he was completely disarmed, including the final bullet that hit Mr. Boyd in the head when Mr. Boyd was crawling;
• the shooting officer said he believed Mr. Boyd was wearing body armour, and that Mr. Boyd was standing almost vertical and not crawling when he shot Mr. Boyd in the head;
• the shooting officer said he recalled shooting four bullets, but actually fired nine.

The investigation was not conducted by an independent investigative body but, as is customary in BC, by the VPD itself. It took two years of investigation to come to the decision that there is no need for a trial. This result is not surprising. A criminal charge arising from a police-involved death would have been the first in BC history. However is astonishing that the CJB argued that a criminal conviction was ‘not possible’ on the evidence even though the case of such complexity that it took two years to come to a decision. Instead of referring this serious set of allegations to the truth finding process of trial, the CJB acted as judge and jury by itself.

Unlike in BC, where a police force investigates itself after a death in custody, the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba have independent agencies called Special Investigation Units to investigate potentially criminal police action. The case of Mr. Boyd shows clearly the need for an independent investigative body in BC. It is not surprising that the public has little confidence in the police investigating themselves when police-involved homicides has never gone to trial in BC.

The BCCLA will continue to campaign for reform.  The circumstances of Mr. Boyd’s tragic death should not be kept secret and any decision regarding criminal responsibility should be made in court, and in public, not in private by the CJB.

Tags: BCCLA Police Complaints, Death In Custody, Transparency, VPD
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Hearings will be held to investigate whether three officers from Sûreté du Québec, Quebec’s provincial police force, attempted to incite violence during the Montebello protests.  The three officers, masked and wielding a rock, were outed when their combat boots matched the police officers’ that took them down.  That, and the fact that the officers moved towards police for protection when a union leader confronted the protesters and told them to put down the rock.  No protester would seek police protection from a middle-aged unionist in a suit.

Check out the CBC story.

Check out the original CBC story with links to the video.

Tags: Police complaints, Sûreté du Québec, Transparency
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First it was four shootings in eight days, now it’s five in twelve.  These five shootings, with three fatalities, involve BC police forces.  Four of the five shootings involved RCMP officers.  The RCMP in BC are responsible for more than half of the RCMP’s in-custody deaths, despite accounting for only one third of the RCMP’s forces in Canada.

A man was fatally shot yesterday after a reported 4-day standoff with police in Buick creek, near Fort St. John.

Eugene Knight was fatally shot by Vancouver Police on September 19th.

Bill Gillespie was shot in Chemainus after a traffic stop by North Cowichan/Duncan RCMP.

Surrey RCMP peppered a reportedly stolen car with bullets after the unknown male driver fled a parking lot in Langley, striking a civilian vehicle, a police cruiser and a plainclothes officer.

Rodney Jackson was fatally shot by Hazelton RCMP when officers attended his grandfather’s cabin to arrest him on outstanding warrants.

Beyond the brief information contained in the newspapers, little is known about these incidents.  The BCCLA, the RCMP and BC’s police chiefs are all in agreement that a civilian-led agency needs to investigate police shootings and deaths in custody, although the BCCLA argues that only a civilian-staffed agency can eliminate any perceptions of bias and restore public confidence in the police.

The issue is not whether any of these dead men were good or bad people or whether investigating police officers is somehow an affront to the dignity of their public service.  The issue is about ensuring that when the government uses lethal force against its citizens, a transparent and thorough investigation occurs to ensure that the use of lethal force was justified.

The BCCLA will be filing police complaints for each of the cases, currently the only way the circumstances of police shootings and deaths in custody can be known outside of police circles until a coroner’s inquest takes place, usually years later.

Check out the latest story in The Province.

Tags: BCCLA Police Complaints, Death In Custody, RCMP, Transparency, VPD
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It’s a surprising change of tune, but still out of key: BC’s police chiefs and RCMP management admit that criminal conduct investigations of police officers, such as in-custody deaths, should not be done by the police.  However, the solution they offer is the creation of an investigative team of active police officers led by a civilian.  This is essentially the system that currently exists for the investigation of police complaints by members of the public.  This system has been found to be flawed in both the Frank Paul Inquiry and the audit of that system by a retired judge three years ago.

BC Police are not offering to give up much control.  The idea that adding one civilian to the current model will bring fundamental change is misguided.  The Special Investigations Unit in Ontario, which is a model much closer to what BC needs, was found in an audit by the Ombudsman of Ontario to be a “muzzled watchdog” starved of resources and loyal to “police culture”.  A shift in thinking, moving away from the reliance on active or former police officers as investigators, is paramount in breaking a police culture within bodies that investigate the police.

It is rather unfortunate that the BC police have framed the problem as one of public perception, still refusing to accept the findings of BC’s most in-depth investigation of the matter, the Frank Paul Inquiry, that there is real and systemic bias in police conducting criminal investigations involving their own members.  Using active police officers on loan from BC’s police forces does little to resolve this conflict of interest, and the lack of substantive change should do little to reassure the public that police officers are truly accountable for their actions.

As the BCCLA has stated before, frontline police officers, despite the position of police management, might welcome the creation of a civilian-led and civilian-staffed agency that performs criminal and death-in-custody investigations.  Should an officer be placed in an unfortunate position of having to kill another person in the line of duty, what is better: to be cleared of wrongdoing by a faulty investigation process trusted by no one, forever dogged by the perception of a cover-up, or to be cleared by an independent body, with no vested interest in anything but the truth?

Tags: Transparency
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The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner is ending its investigation of Solicitor General Kash Heed into allegations the former Chief of the West Vancouver Police Department intervened inappropriately in an investigation.

Check out the story.

Tags: Transparency
Posted in The Police Blog | | No Comments »

After an investigation by the RCMP, Crown has opted to charge a Kelowna RCMP officer with the careless use of a firearm following an shooting incident in February.  This follows an investigation by the RCMP and a use of force expert. The RCMP has not, and will not, release any details, as they advise us the matter is before the Court now.  The name of the officer will not be released until the officer’s court appearance on August 27th.

The only detail we can be certain of is that the suspect is known to police.

Tags: RCMP, Transparency
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Paul Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP, has concluded an investigation of the police complaint process and recommended that the RCMP cease its practice of self-investigation when RCMP officers cause serious injury or death. Kennedy, however, did not recommend completely independent investigations. In cases of death, Kennedy recommends that the investigation be done by a provincial criminal investigation unit or an external police service. In other cases, Kennedy recommended enhanced civilian involvement by including in he investigation team a civilian observer from the CPC. The CPC implemented the observer program in British Columbia in 2008 after it began as a pilot project in 2007.

It is unfortunate that Kennedy’s solution to the problem of the police investigating the police is to solve it with different police investigating the police. Ontario and Manitoba, along with numerous jurisdictions outside of Canada, have opted to create an independent civilian agency, or Special Investigation Unit, to investigate instances of serious injury and death caused by the police. In instances of serious injury, rather than have a special police unit conduct investigations overseen by an observer program, it would be simply better to refer such investigations to the same special investigation unit that investigates police-involved deaths. Kennedy recommends multiple solutions where one would suffice.

Kennedy’s recommendations go against his very argument. He states that “the very nature of an investigation by one police officer into another is fundamentally different from the police investigating a member of the public for the exact same crime. Police are held to higher account by the very nature of the work they do.” Rather than advocating for an independent special investigation unit, he speaks of investigations by external police forces and observers. However, an investigation by an external police force is still self-investigation, police investigating police. An observer program relies entirely on the information provided by the RCMP, and by its own admission, “it is not the goal of the CPC Independent Observer to assess the adequacy of the RCMP’s investigation“.

The idea of a special investigation unit is often attacked by those who claim that only the police have the skills and wherewithal to conduct an investigation. The idea that there is some divine right of investigation is absurd: many professions besides policing require knowledge of the legal system and investigative skills. In addition, Kennedy’s report is hardly reassuring to those who suggest Police would do a better job of these investigations than civilians.

Though not ideal, what Kennedy proposes is still better than what currently exists. In his report, Kennedy analyses 28 cases of self-investigation and paints a clear picture of the numerous problems that exist within the model of self-investigation.

For instance, he notes that in 68% of the cases under review, investigations were handled in an “inappropriate” manner. He also finds that in 25% of cases, investigators said they knew the officer they were investigating personally. And almost one-third of investigations were carried out by officers of an equal or lesser rank than the officer they were investigating, which created significant potential for intimidation.

In response to the recommendations in the report, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott has stated that “we [the RCMP] agree in principle with your assertion that although all Canadians, including RCMP members, are entitled under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be treated equally under the law, criminal investigations of RCMP members may necessitate different treatment from a procedural point of view.” Commissioner Elliott has promised that forthcoming policy changes will address many of the concerns raised by Kennedy’s report.

Check out the final public report by the CPC.

Tags: RCMP, Transparency
Posted in The Police Blog | | 3 Comments »

The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner (“OPCC”) has just released its Annual Report for 2008. Although many of the numbers have remained largely unchanged since 2007, there has been a significant increase in the number of complaints filed in New Westminster (from 17 in 2007 to 45 in 2008)

In addition to New Westminster, South Coast of British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service officers (“SCBCTAPS”), also known as the Transit cops, have received significantly more complaints this year than last year - 18 in 2007 compared to 28 in 2008.

The transit police also received notably more complaints than any other region for Excessive use of Force with Tasers (18 out of 34 complaints for Taser use were directed to SCBCTAPS).

Finally, as has been the trend in recent years, of all of the various categories of complaints, the OPCC received the most complaints for Abuse of Authority (514 out of 989 complaints).

The BCCLA and Pivot Legal Society boycott of the police complaint process continues, which may explain why Vancouver’s numbers have been flat as of late. Either that, or the local police are just doing a better job of behaving themselves.

Tags: Transparency
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