Another cloud over the RCMP

Editorial (Winnipeg Free Press) – If anyone thought that an inquiry into the bungled investigation of serial killer Robert Pickton might not be required, such thoughts were dispelled when the RCMP disputed some of the findings of a damning Vancouver Police Department report Friday. That the two forces still are at odds about who did what, or who did not do it, is simply a continuation of the turf war that prevented police from seeing Pickton as an obvious suspect years before his arrest. The RCMP plan to release their own report in the next weeks, but it is clear that the only way to get to the bottom of this unseemly he-said, she-said dispute is through a public inquiry.

The 405-page report, produced five years ago by Vancouver Deputy Chief Const. Doug LePard but kept secret until Pickton had been tried and had exhausted his appeals, paints a not pretty picture of Vancouver police competence, but most explosively its finger points directly at the RCMP, charging that the force’s elitist mentality created a turf war that allowed Pickton to go on luring women to his pig farm for years after he could have been arrested.
It seems incredible in hindsight that Pickton’s farm was not searched in 1997, when he was charged with attempting to murder a sex worker, a charge that was dropped in 1998. But more incredible is that in 1999 Vancouver police gave RCMP, who had jurisdiction in Coquitlam where Pickton’s pig farm was located, evidence that should have caused alarm bells to ring, but didn’t. In addition to the 1997 charge, the RCMP were told a witness reported seeing bags of bloody clothing in Pickton’s trailer, that a source claimed to have seen a butchered woman hanging in Pickton’s barn, and that he served odd-tasting meat. To be sure, it was a rookie RCMP officer’s decision to search Pickton’s farm for weapons that led to his arrest and a massive search of the property that turned up DNA of 33 women and produced 27 murder charges, six of which he was convicted of. But that was in 2002, three years after the damning evidence surfaced. In the three-year interlude, 13 more women would disappear from Vancouver’s east side. The DNA of 11 of those women was found at the farm.

How could this happen? The LePard report indicates that the RCMP were simply dismissive of Vancouver police suspicions. In 1998, for example, Vancouver police and the RCMP created a working group to examine missing women. It disbanded within months and after only two meetings that were marked by “strenuous” argument. The next year a “review team” was created but Vancouver police could not convince RCMP that a serial killer was on the loose. About that time, another tip came in that a sex worker had been killed at the farm, but the RCMP doubted the credibility of the witness. A request for an interview with Pickton was stopped when Pickton complained that it was raining, which created extra work. An offer to search the farm was never acted on. And so on and so on.

It might be that the RCMP are correct, that the finger-pointing is unfair. It might be that given the force’s recent history, the exposure of a string of scandalously bad investigations going back to the 1985 Air India bombing unfairly leads to the conclusion that the Pickton investigation is simply more of the same, as the RCMP claim.
But that same string of scandals has so undermined the force’s credibility that only a public inquiry can clear the air. The families of at least 13 dead women deserve clarity.