RCMP Watch

Campbell Clark, Globe and Mail

RCMP Commissioner William Elliott must shake up the force’s top brass to ensure he has a loyal team prepared to revamp the organization, says the former civilian head of Quebec’s provincial police force.

Like Commissioner Elliott, Florent Gagné was a senior bureaucrat when he was brought in to head the Sûreté du Québec in 1998 after the force suffered its own scandals and went through a highly critical public inquiry.

Mr. Gagné said he knows from experience that Commissioner Elliott can expect to face skepticism and resistance, but that he must assert his authority and determination to change the way the force works.

“I think that the first thing to do is to surround himself with senior officers with whom he has an absolute bond of confidence, and officers who respond to the new values that he wants to instill in the police organization,” Mr. Gagné said in an interview. “You cannot survive alone in an organization like that.”

The commissioner must tell them that he’s not there to teach them about police work, but that he will examine how they do things - and he needs senior officers he can trust heading investigations, day-to-day policing and other key police areas, Mr. Gagné said.

Commissioner Elliott was appointed to the top RCMP post July 6 after a series of scandals, including criticism of the force’s role in the deportation of Maher Arar to Syria, abuses involving its pension fund and complaints that top brass do little to discipline those who break the rules or the law. But some Mounties questioned whether a bureaucrat with no police experience can lead them.

Similarly, Mr. Gagné took over Quebec’s provincial force after a public inquiry into evidence-planting by officers investigating drug smuggling by a major Montreal crime gang.

The Poitras commission found that the force was littered with abuses of power fed by a culture of silence and internal retaliation.

Mr. Gagné chuckled when asked if the rank-and-file reacted to a civilian boss with skepticism.

Like the RCMP, the force had a paramilitary culture where officers start at the bottom and are promoted through the ranks, he said.

“They are persuaded that the new boss coming in knows nothing about the police, and how is he going to manage a police force if he has never done a patrol, never done a criminal investigation, never done this or that? That is their profound conviction, because that’s their tradition,” he said. “And they imagine that the organization will collapse because a civilian has come in.”

His five-year tenure began with tough negotiations with the police union. Some officers held back initially; that made it more important to assert he was there to stay and to identify ways to change the force’s culture and move forward - including warnings to officers to get onside or they would be moved aside.

Many of those changes involved undoing “shortcuts” used by investigators convinced of a suspect’s guilt, through better training and new techniques such as videotaped interrogations, which reduced the “overly insistent” interrogations, Mr. Gagné said.

Some resisted, but Mr. Gagné said that eased as officers realized he was not spying on them, but aiming to improve standards. He said he told them that would not make it easier to convict suspects, but “it will improve you as police officers and your organization will come out stronger.”