Will Chabun, Regina, Saskatchewan (Regina Leader-Post) – British Columbia’s plan to create a civilian “special investigation unit” to look into police handling of violent or controversial cases is getting mixed reviews — and considerable discussion — in Saskatchewan.
One outcome, says the chairman of Saskatchewan’s five-year-old Police Complaints Commission, is that we’re near the end of the era where police investigate complaints against other police.
“It’s not that people don’t trust the police – but they just don’t trust the police them to investigate each other,” said Bob Mitchell.
Because the Canadian constitution makes the provinces responsible for justice, there’s no legal problem with them investigating municipal and provincial police services.
But the RCMP … that’s another matter.
It’s a federal agency. B.C. claims that Ottawa has agreed to let the province investigate RCMP members’ actions.
The idea of having non-cops investigate cases involving cops has been around for decades, but in B.C. gathered steam after a judicial review of a 2007 incident in which a Polish man died at the Vancouver airport after being Tasered by an RCMP member.
The oldest civilian SIU in Canada is the one that’s existed in Ontario for 21 years.
It calls itself “a civilian law enforcement agency independent of the police”. It is an agency of the Ministry of the Attorney General, but says “it maintains an arm’s length relationship with the Government of Ontario”. It website frankly admits it has been “the subject of controversy and scrutiny” and refers to friction with rank-and-file police officers and their unions.
Reduced to basics, cops think the Ontario SIU is out to get them in order to help politicians pacify angry ethnic and racial groups that are never satisfied with investigations. Meanwhile, ethnic and racial communities think the Ontario SIU is “pro-cop” because many of its investigators are retired police detectives.
RCMP members are not unionized and thus do not have independent spokespersons. But Bernie Eiswirth, executive officer of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers, said he’s not convinced there’s a need for a Saskatchewan SIU.
He said there are existing avenues for complaints, starting with the professional standards or internal affairs sections of municipal police services, the appointed police commissions that oversee those services, the provincial police commission and the Police Complaints Commission. The RCMP has its own complaints commission.
This system, “is working very well,” Eiswirth said.
Commission chair Bob Mitchell said Alberta switched several years ago to an investigative agency headed by a civilian, but using experienced investigators seconded from police services. Manitoba and Nova Scotia are moving toward similar agencies. He said Saskatchewan’s commission has three investigators: two former Mounties and one former Regina Police Service member.
Wherein a problem: the skills to do an investigation take years to develop and are most often found among veteran police officers. But that creates what Ontario’s ombudsman called bad “optics”: cops investigating cops with whom they might have worked in the past and might work again. Will they pull their punches?
“We’re all conscious of the fact that it just doesn’t wash,” said Mitchell. “It just doesn’t smell right. We’re all working in that environment across the country.”
When legislation to create Saskatchewan’s Police Complaints Commission was introduced in 2006, the SFPO supported the plan, saying it hoped the commission “will give confidence to the public that complaints against municipal police officers are taken seriously and are investigated properly.”
Mitchell noted that investigations could vary widely in their complexity. Looking into alleged beatings, for example, “aren’t rocket science and don’t involve forensic work or chemical analysis,” he said, adding, “it doesn’t take a lot of training up to a point where they (civilian investigators) can do a good job with these cases.”
But some other cases are so complex and detailed as that they’d require “years and years of experience and training to get to a point where they could do a good job investigating these cases,” he said.
NDP MLA Frank Quennel, who was Saskatchewan’s justice minister when the complaints commission was created, noted the legislation creating it requires members from First Nations and Metis communities. He also deemed it significant that the work of the commission has been so well-received that none of its members have been replaced since the government changed in 2007.
Morley Watson, vice-chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Nations, said that if Saskatchewan considered a “civilian-driven” investigative arm, “we would probably want to take a good, close serious look at it because, like I say, right now in a lot of the cases our people feel that it’s just not a fair body and it’s not a fair processes, and not a lot changes.”
But Eiswirth raised some practical problems with a hypothetical Saskatchewan SIU.
He said Ontario, with over 10 million people, is big enough to have an SIU with full-time investigators, and its own “ident” (or forensic investigation) sections. “A mini-police service”, he called it.
But in a province of only one million people, “what’s practical?” he asked.
Further complicating matters, Eiswirth said, would be the different standards under which RCMP and municipal police service members in Saskatchewan work. For example, municipal police on patrol don’t normally don’t carry Tasers; RCMP members do. “That’s just an example of the kind of disconnect,” he said.
Quennel said he suggested the RCMP open an office of its own complaints commission in Saskatchewan to supplement the one “two provinces away” in B.C., but was unsuccessful. Balancing that, in Quennel’s time as justice minister, the RCMP agreed that investigations into RCMP-related deaths would routinely include investigators from other police services plus civilians from the ministry of justice.
As for the RCMP’s attitude toward openness, Quennel said, “I think it’s changing — but it’s not changing fast enough.”
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