RCMP Watch

(Vancouver Sun) - To say that Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers have been involved in a number of controversial incidents is to put it mildly.

From several questionable shooting deaths in British Columbia to the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski after being Tasered at Vancouver International Airport, these incidents have led many organizations, including The Vancouver Sun, to demand greater oversight of, and greater transparency from, the RCMP.

But evidently those calls have fallen on deaf ears, since the Mounties have decided that less, rather than greater transparency is in order. Indeed, despite the understandable loss of trust in the RCMP in B.C. and across Canada, the Mounties are now telling the public that they ought to trust whatever the Mounties tell them.

And it seems they’re giving us less information than ever before. According to an investigation early this week by the CBC and Canadian Press, the number of Taser “incidents” — where officers have used or threatened to use the controversial weapon — have risen dramatically, from 597 in 2005 to 1,400 last year. The increase was greatest in B.C. — from 218 in 2005 to 496 in 2007.

This rise in use isn’t altogether surprising given that the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP has said that since 2001, RCMP policy has shifted significantly to allow the use of Tasers in much less threatening conditions. But the increased use of the stun guns is troubling given that the commission specifically recommended, in an interim report released last December, that the Mounties restrict the use of Tasers to situations where an individual is combative or where there exists a significant risk of death or grievous bodily harm.

Much more troubling, though, is that according to the CBC/Canadian Press report, the RCMP is now refusing to tell us under what circumstances Tasers have been used.

In fact, the records they released don’t tell us much of anything, including the dates of Taser incidents, what officers did prior to discharging the weapon, whether the person subdued was armed and whether he or she was injured by the Taser.

The Mounties insist that withholding this information is appropriate since they’re precluded from releasing it thanks to new privacy laws. This points to another worrying trend: The tendency of police and public institutions to use the privacy acts as an excuse to withhold information.

After all, the RCMP have not identified any section of any act that prohibits the release of such information, particularly when the name of the person Tasered is not released. This raises the spectre that the RCMP is simply withholding information in an attempt to avoid bad press.

While Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, after some public pressure, announced Thursday that the RCMP would examine previously censored information, it’s far from certain that the Mounties will actually release the relevant information in the coming weeks.

If the national police force refuses to release all the information, it will get worse press, and rightly so, for refusing to come clean on an issue about which the public is understandably concerned. Or as commission head Paul Kennedy has suggested, the Mounties are going to have to provide the details to the public if they ever hope to convince the public that use of Tasers is appropriate.

But evidently the RCMP don’t see it this way. And that just adds to the mountain of evidence that suggests our national force is in need of fundamental reform if it is ever to regain the trust of Canadians.