RCMP Watch

Chad Skelton (Vancouver Sun) - A fired biker-gang investigator warned during settlement talks last year that if his wrongful dismissal case ever got to trial it would expose the dysfunctional relationship between the RCMP and B.C.’s municipal police.

“We expect to have several senior police officers willing to testify about the inability or unwillingness of RCMP senior management to cooperate with other police agencies,” Allen Dalstrom stated in a mediation brief.

Dalstrom, who was fired from the Organized Crime Agency of B.C. in 2004, has also alleged that animosity between the RCMP and the OCABC led to the failure of Project Phoenix, a multi-million-dollar investigation into several high-ranking members of the Hells Angels.

Police have repeatedly said the Angels are the most powerful crime group in B.C.

Rob Gordon, head of criminology at Simon Fraser University, said if Dalstrom’s allegations are true, and key Hells Angels members escaped justice because of police infighting, the provincial government needs to take a hard look at how B.C. is policed.

“It’s outrageous,” he said. “And no professional police service anywhere else on the face of the earth would tolerate it.”

Gordon said the current patchwork of RCMP and municipal police in Metro Vancouver simply isn’t working.

“If we ever have a hope of knocking these guys out, we [need] to be better organized,” he said. “There has to be a reason why organized crime has been so effective in taking root in this province. I think it’s sheer incompetence caused by [police] infighting and territoriality.”

Gordon added that he suspects Phoenix isn’t the only B.C. investigation that’s been derailed by police turf wars.

“If there was an inquiry into all of this, we’d probably find a lot more,” he said.

NDP solicitor-general critic Mike Farnworth noted the RCMP’s provincial policing contract is up for renewal in 2012 and it may be time to look at other options.

“It’s time that we have a very thorough look at the issue of regional policing,” he said.

Both Solicitor-General John van Dongen and the RCMP have refused to comment on the case because it is before the courts.

Dalstrom’s mediation brief was sent to defence lawyers in January 2007, but was only recently added to the court file. It states that a trial would raise questions about OCABC’s short history.

OCABC was created by the NDP government of the day in 1999 as an independent police agency.

Five years later, in 2004, it was folded into the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, a special unit made up of both RCMP and municipal officers but under the umbrella of the RCMP.

Dalstrom argues in his brief that the OCABC was created largely because of the RCMP’s ineffectiveness in tackling organized crime and that it was dissolved as an independent agency due to RCMP pressure.

“[A trial] will also raise the history of why the OCABC was created in the first place, and why it was dissolved a few years later, at the cost of many millions of dollars,” the brief states.

Dalstrom was fired by OCABC Chief Officer David Douglas.

One of the reasons cited by Douglas for firing Dalstrom is that he believed Dalstrom was the “OCA insider” quoted in Julian Sher’s book about the Angels, The Road To Hell, who said that, when it came to organized-crime investigations, the RCMP had done “f— all here for 25 years”.

Dalstrom denied making the comment. But, in his brief, he stated that if the case goes to trial, a judge might have to decide whether the statement, while crude, is essentially true.

“This, in turn, opens up two questions: first, whether the RCMP was opposed to the OCABC because it was seen as encroaching on the RCMP’s ‘turf’; and second whether the RCMP were in fact ineffective in policing organized crime in British Columbia,” Dalstrom’s brief stated. “We expect to have senior police officers available to testify on both issues.”

Much of the dispute over Dalstrom’s firing relates to his handling of Phoenix, an investigation launched in February 1999 in which an agent working for the police bought and sold drugs to several members of the Angels.

After the investigation was completed, some RCMP members who worked on it raised concerns with their superiors about how it had been managed, including that drugs were not properly marked as evidence, with narcotics purchased from one target later sold to another.

According to Dalstrom’s court submissions, an independent review of Phoenix in 2003 found no wrongdoing on his part and concluded that the case could be prosecuted.

“The multi-million-dollar Phoenix investigation could have been prosecuted, but the prosecution was derailed because of inter-agency jealousies,” Dalstrom quoted the review report as stating.

Federal prosecutors decided not to proceed, Dalstrom argues, out of fear that if the case went to trial, the infighting over the case between the RCMP and the OCABC would become public.

Dalstrom alleges in his brief that his relationship with the RCMP got so bad that, at one point, he was put under police surveillance because the Mounties claimed he was “emotionally unstable” and might harm the officers who criticized Phoenix.

“A more likely explanation is that someone at the RCMP decided to use expensive and scarce RCMP resources to spy on Mr. Dalstrom, hoping to come up with something that could be used against him,” the brief states.