RCMP Watch

The Montreal Gazette

If you have a complaint about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, you can go to an independent review board that will investigate, report and perhaps recommend changes in the way the force operates. It’s a reassuring notion.

So it is a powerful shock to have our noses rubbed in the fact the Mounties have their thumb on the scale. It’s just another one more stable for new RCMP Commissioner William Elliott to clean out. And it revives the case for a new and more potent oversight agency.

Few Canadians, we’re guessing, were aware that when the RCMP Commission for Public Complaints rules that a Mountie used excessive force, or otherwise acted improperly, top brass at RCMP headquarters very often over-ruled the finding. Complaints commission chairman Paul Kennedy emphasized the sad truth in his annual report this month (www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca). In the 12 months to last March, the report said, the commission issued in all 184 findings. Half of these upheld the force’s actions or policies, half did not.

But over half of adverse findings were re-written by the RCMP commissioner’s office, a practice that “strikes at the core of civilian accountability of the RCMP,” the annual report said, saying this “significantly undermines” civilian review and is “inherently biased” against complainants.

Few police forces welcome civilian review. Civilians aren’t in the club, don’t know the rules, don’t risk their lives, just don’t get it.

Tough. Civilians are the boss, and a serious review body, carefully assembled to hold police to a high standard, can be an important asset to public security. Vigorous, fair-minded oversight can increase public confidence in the force and can spur the brass to make sure that training - in both tact and tactics, in human rights law, in the doctrine of minimum necessary force - is vigorous and continual.

The RCMP complaints commission has proposed a new Federal Law Enforcement Review Board, with more staff, more money and more independence, “to address the growing gulf between RCMP powers and the commission’s authority to review police conduct.”

Kennedy also has said another police force should investigate Mounties’ actions in some cases. This is the practice elsewhere, as for example when a Montreal police officer is involved in a shooting.

And in British Columbia, after two controversial police shootings, the commission has now launched a pilot project in which commission officials will shadow RCMP investigators in cases when an RCMP officer shoots a civilian.

Public Security Minister Stockwell Day needs to pay attention to this issue. If he doesn’t approve of Kennedy’s proposal, he should offer his own. A robust complaints mechanism is an absolutely essential element in the restoration of the RCMP’s reputation.