Civilian probes would boost confidence in police
Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, February 09, 2007

The long-awaited report on British Columbia's police complaints process offers many solid recommendations, but it should have gone a lot further than it did.

The review, written by former B.C. Supreme Court and Court of Appeal justice Josiah (Joe) Wood, was launched after the Pivot Legal Society made serious allegations about police misconduct and the B.C. police complaints commissioner issued a harsh report condemning some officers' conduct during the investigation of those allegations.

Wood reviewed a total of 294 randomly selected cases of investigations into complaints about the police, and found that 56 (19 per cent) suffered from serious flaws. In eight of those 56 cases, Wood said officers were wrongly absolved of misconduct, while in the other 48 cases, it was not possible to tell if the resolutions were appropriate. Further, one in three investigations of complaints of excessive force contained major errors, and in several cases, police failed to refer files to the Crown when prosecutorial involvement was warranted.

Wood blamed the culture of policing for the poor track record of investigations, noting that some officers didn't take complaints as seriously as they should have, and others attempted to disprove the allegations.

Consequently, Wood issued 91 recommendations to remedy the flaws in the investigation process. Among the most important, Wood recommended that officers be statutorily required to cooperate with misconduct investigations. This should go a long way toward resolving the problem that became abundantly clear when the RCMP investigated the Pivot complaints and several Vancouver police officers, including Chief Jamie Graham, were less than cooperative.

Wood also recommended that the police complaints commissioner be given significantly enhanced powers, by requiring that police cooperate with the commissioner. Further, Wood advised that the commissioner should be able to order an external investigation outside the province, and should have the power to monitor investigations while they are occurring rather than simply reviewing them after they're complete.

While these recommendations should help to remedy the problems with the investigations, it's unfortunate that Wood didn't recommend a civilian body be created to investigate allegations of police misconduct.

After all, while the majority of investigations are properly conducted, a 19-per-cent failure rate is, as Wood admitted, unacceptably high. Since the failure rate is largely a product of the culture of policing, which will take a significant amount of time to change, it's unlikely that Wood's recommendations will solve all of the problems.

Further, Wood noted that the public believes police misconduct investigations are treated differently than other investigations. This apprehension of bias, whether or not bias actually exists, threatens to compromise the public's respect for the police.

The only way to resolve these problems is to create a civilian body to investigate police misconduct allegations. Both Pivot and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association have called on the government to introduce such a body, and the BCCLA notes that civilian investigation bodies exist in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec.

Although police departments tend to be resistant to external investigation units, a civilian body could bolster the public's confidence in the police, and more importantly, could ensure that the public is protected in the rare instances when police officers act inappropriately.