RCMP Watch

The RCMP, defensive? That much was known. But it’s still a shock to learn that the RCMP commissioner has the right to overrule findings by the civilian body that handles public complaints against the national police force. And overrule findings he (and she) has done, regularly, says the annual report of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.The complaints report is further proof of just how “horribly broken” (as an independent review put it) RCMP management has been; the RCMP detests criticism and doesn’t do accountability. The problem is not only autocratic and high-handed leaders, but a structure that permitted and encouraged leaders to seal themselves off from criticism.

Even the organization created to keep watch on the RCMP couldn’t make its criticisms heard. More than half of all findings against the RCMP made over the past year by the complaints body were overruled by RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and his successor, Bev Busson. “The Commission noted a persistent practice of the substitution of findings by the RCMP Commissioner,” said the report by Paul Kennedy, the complaints commission’s chairman. The force simply plugged its ears against criticism.

He cites a case in which an Alberta man was attacked by an RCMP dog and needed seven stitches for his wounds. While the complaints body found that the injured man and another man told credible stories without the opportunity to collaborate on them, the RCMP commissioner said the officer’s version was more credible, but didn’t explain why. What’s more, the officer had been acting on nothing but a hunch in detaining the two men and should not have detained them, let alone released a police dog at them, Mr. Kennedy said.

It’s foolish to think that new commissioner William Elliott, the first civilian put in charge, can turn the RCMP around on his own. The

accountability rules need to be changed, and Mr. Kennedy offers good ideas for changing them, including one that would allow for an outside police force to investigate RCMP officers in some cases rather than let the RCMP investigate itself. With its $5.1-million budget, the complaints body is a pipsqueak compared with the $4-billion-a-year, 26,000-member RCMP; Mr. Kennedy has a point when he asks whether his organization has enough resources to be effective.

If Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day truly wishes to revamp the RCMP, he needs to open the police force up to criticism. Only in the inward-looking world of the RCMP could that be controversial.