(National Post Editorial) – In Canada’s public imagination, the RCMP is synonymous with law and order. But according to Paul Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, the force falls short when it comes to investigating in-custody deaths and other serious incidents.
Canadians already are familiar with high-profile cases such as the allegedly taser-related death of Polish migrant Robert Dziekanski in Vancouver, as well as the RCMP’s involvement with Maher Arar, who was shipped off by the United States to face torture in Syria. But what they may not know is that many RCMP internal investigations of such matters sometimes are performed using questionable methods. As Mr. Kennedy emphasized, many investigations are performed by officers who are known to the officers being investigated–or by officers who are lower in rank than those being investigated–or both.
Mr. Kennedy made the sensible suggestion that, at the very least, cases involving death should be investigated by outside police forces. Then, the public might have more confidence that justice was done in such cases as the 2005 in-custody death of Houston, B. C.’s Ian Bush, who was shot after being arrested for drinking beer in public. The officer who shot Mr. Bush — Constable Paul Koester — was cleared following an investigation… by the RCMP itself.
RCMP Commissioner William J. S. Elliott should take this counsel to heart. But instead, he seems to be exhibiting a knee-jerk opposition to Mr. Kennedy’s findings. “This creates an inordinately negative and inaccurate picture,” he told the media, playing down the relevance of findings that “relate to structure, reporting relationships and level of response.”
Yet such details as “structure” and “reporting relationships” are indeed important to ensure the integrity of self-investigations. And if the Mounties’ top brass doesn’t understand that, then perhaps outside investigators need to be deployed in all cases of alleged RCMP abuse.
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