RCMP Watch

Nicki Thomas (Sun Media) - Fort McMurray RCMP officer is on desk duty after finding himself in hot water.
Const. Brian Vaughn, 29, is facing charges that include possession of stolen property, unsafe storage of a firearm and obstruction of justice.
A complaint alleging Vaughn was improperly storing a firearm was made last December, said RCMP spokesman [...]

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Vancouver, B.C. (Canadian Press) - Aeron Hall admits he’d had a few drinks before setting off on the walk home one spring night four years ago.
But Hall, who is disabled, said it was his limp and not excessive intoxication that attracted the attention of RCMP and set off a chain of events that ended with [...]

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Frank Peebles (Prince George Citizen) - The Citizen has learned the investigation into the on-the-job behaviour of Prince George RCMP Supt. Dahl Chambers has been upgraded from a simple fact-finding review to an official disciplinary probe by the RCMP.
It is nearly complete, according to RCMP sources, and does not, in itself, determine guilt or innocence [...]

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Paul Walton (Nanaimo Daily News) - A Nanaimo provincial court judge, in dropping a charge against a local man of assaulting police, instead blamed a Nanaimo Mountie for creating the violent confrontation.
The decision was handed by Judge Allan Gould on Monday in staying charges of assault police and uttering threats against Shane Owen, 48.
On Nov. [...]

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Thulasi Srikanthan (Ottawa Citizen) - Veteran Citizen reporter Gary Dimmock and his former colleague Greg McArthur picked up two awards from the Canadian Association of Journalists this weekend in Edmonton for their ground-breaking piece that sparked a parliamentary review of the witness protection program.
The pair won the Don McGillivray Award for Investigative Journalism, the CAJ’s [...]

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(Ottawa Citizen) - When police first started carrying Tasers, they were justified as being a safer alternative to guns. They would only ever be used, with reluctance, as a second-to-last resort.
That reluctance seems to be fading with time. Canwest News Service obtained documents, using an Access to Information request, that show the Royal Canadian Mounted [...]

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Steve Lillebuen, Edmonton, Alberta (Canwest News Service) - A Mountie has been stripped of three days pay and urged to enrol in anger-management classes after an internal disciplinary hearing into charges of disgraceful conduct.
RCMP Const. Gord Kroeker was found guilty Thursday of conduct unbecoming of an officer in an April 1, 2006, incident outside a [...]

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Neal Hall (Vancouver Sun) - The RCMP has changed its Taser policy and now trains officers only to use the weapon when a person exhibits “active resistance” to arrest or police commands, a provincial Taser inquiry was told Thursday.
The RCMP’s national use-of-force coordinator from Ottawa, Insp. Troy Lightfoot, told the inquiry the RCMP changed its [...]

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(CBC) - The RCMP is willing to change its Taser policy if a new set of guidelines is developed, senior members testified Thursday at an inquiry looking into use of the stun guns.
Assistant Commissioner Al McIntyre said when the Braidwood inquiry is complete, the RCMP will adapt.
“We are willing to change our policy, we are [...]

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Greg Joyce, Vancouver, B.C. (Canadian Press) - There are no obvious features on a body to indicate to a pathologist that a taser has directly caused a death, a former chief coroner told a B.C. public inquiry yesterday.
But John Butt, who was the chief coroner in Alberta and the chief medical examiner in Nova Scotia, [...]

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