(Toronto Star Editorial) – Should the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigate their own officers when someone has died or been seriously injured in a run-in with the force? Clearly not. No police service should. The potential for bias or conflict of interest is only too obvious. It corrodes public trust.
Recognizing that, Ontario set up an independent Special Investigations Unit (SIU) nearly two decades ago to handle such cases involving police in this province.
Now Paul Kennedy, who heads the RCMP complaints commission, wants the Mounties to embrace a similar arm’s-length policy.
The RCMP should call in outside police forces or civilian investigators in all cases in which someone dies, Kennedy urges in a report released this week. The force should also use outsiders to probe serious injuries and sex assaults, or at least bring in a high-level team from Ottawa headquarters that includes commission oversight, he says.
The RCMP ought to heed this advice. The force faces an uphill slog rebuilding its credibility after the death of Robert Dziekanski, who was stunned by a Mountie team at Vancouver airport, and that of Ian Bush, who was shot dead at the RCMP detachment in Houston, B.C.
Yet RCMP Commissioner William Elliott greeted the idea with anything but enthusiasm. He agreed he’d prefer that the RCMP never probe its own, but quickly added that sometimes Mounties are the only police available. He took offence at “unduly negative” language in the report. He cavilled at its definition of “inappropriate” probes. And things aren’t “quite as bleak” as Kennedy says, he insists.
Elliott’s balkiness suggests the Horsemen need a tap of the spur on this. If Elliott won’t act on Kennedy’s advice, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government should direct the force to make the changes. Alternatively, Ottawa should create an SIU-type oversight body for the RCMP itself, as advocates of police reform have urged. With a budget of $4 billion and 26,000 staff, the RCMP can’t plead lack of resources. Without change of some sort, it will be impossible to regain trust.
Kennedy is far from the force’s harshest critic. He praises the RCMP for “highly professional” conduct, policy compliance and timeliness.
What he found inappropriate – and justly so – were cases in which the investigating officers personally knew the officer they were probing; cases in which only a single officer investigated another; and cases in which the investigating officer was of the same rank or lower.
All of this could feed perceptions of bias, conflict or intimidation, Kennedy observed. Just what any credible police force must avoid.
Elliott counters that in-house probes can be the only practical route in remote regions where the RCMP is the only law.
That is an argument for having the Mounties secure the scene until impartial investigators arrive. It is not a rationale for continuing to have the Mounties investigate themselves while the public questions its judgment.
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