(This column was
published in the North Shore News on Jan. 21,
2004)
Police do a good job of policing themselves
By
Leo Knight
WHY is it now every time you turn on the television or thumb through newspapers, some hand-wringing, whinging lawyer is demanding some form of civilian investigative body to "police the police?"
In the weekend papers, it was Cameron Ward, no stranger to anti-police causes. Ward, you'll recall, was front and centre trying to make a federal case against the police after they were attacked by the violent APEC-kerheads in 1997. He was also involved in a civil action brought against the Vancouver Police Department accusing them of all manner of things, again, for defending themselves and doing their job in the so-called Riot at the Hyatt.
Ward was representing the family of Thomas Evon Stevenson, 47, who had the temerity to refuse to obey police commands while behind the wheel of a stolen car. He had a replica gun in his lap. He didn't do what the police ordered him to and got shot for his stupidity.
Oddly enough, when you are a bad guy, caught by police in a stolen car, they don't think your intentions are honourable. Equally, when they notice what appears to be a gun in your lap, it tends to reinforce their first impression. When they have their guns pointed at you and are yelling, it is considered smart to do what they tell you. And Stevenson was a bad guy. Back when he was in his early 20s, he was in jail for a variety of things in Toronto. Apparently he got in a huff when his keepers said he couldn't go home for Christmas. Strange, I know, but there was a day in this country when you were put in jail that the system actually expected you to be there.
Stevenson and three other ne'er-do-wells, greased themselves up with shampoo and slid between the bars of their jail cell. He was on the run for years, committing a litany of crimes all over the place. When he was arrested in the late '80s in California, he had 15 different law enforcement agencies chasing him. He got nine years in jail after that arrest. He was known in Canada by at least 13 different aliases. He was, to put it mildly, a habitual criminal and a total waste of perfectly good oxygen.
Now, I'm not saying this gives the police licence to shoot him. I'm simply providing a little background to fully paint the picture of the sort of individual the police were dealing with.
The end result of the mandatory coroner's inquest into the shooting, which I might add is a civilian review, were a number of jury recommendations to the solicitor general. One of these, no doubt championed by Ward, was to implement a special investigations unit (SIU) to mirror the one in Ontario.
The jury is naive. The SIU in Ontario is a brainchild of the terminally-stupid NDP government of Bob Rae. Frankly, they couldn't find an elephant at the zoo. Why on Earth would we want to mirror that bureaucratic stupidity here?
The Ontario SIU is, at best, a parallel investigative unit of the police internal sections. There isn't a solitary cop in the whole province who will co-operate with them. They simply do not trust they will get a fair shake, ergo, they stand mute.
It's not perfect, but at least the way things are now with an internal investigation section within police departments, officers do co-operate on some level.
Last week I engaged a Toronto lawyer, Julian Falconer, in a debate on this subject in a media broadcast. Falconer is, I'm certain, a competent and capable member of the defence bar. Yet he was arguing for something more than the SIU.
The broadcast used, as its baseline, the cases in Vancouver of the Stanley Park Six and in Toronto, the current corruption case against members of the Toronto Police drug squad.
Well, let's look at them.
In the Stanley Park Six case, when the information came to light, Chief Jamie Graham ordered a full call-out of the entire internal investigations unit. They went at the file hammer and tong and submitted their report within two weeks to Crown prosecutors for review. I might add by the way, that Crown office is actually a civilian review process too. But the hand-wringers don't acknowledge that. Crown approved criminal charges and the court process began, which ended in the guilty pleas and sentence rendered last week in Vancouver Provincial Court.
In the Toronto case, the information against the allegedly corrupt officers was brought forward and the RCMP took on the investigation and more than 40 criminal charges were laid against several veteran detectives.
How, in looking at these two cases, can we possibly say the police shouldn't be investigating other police officers? It seems to me they did a good job of investigating. Yet, the Falconer seemed to think that wasn't the case.
It's puzzling why crusading lawyers champion these pointless, left-wing causes. And it is a left-wing cause. You see, the left see the police as a "weapon" of the state. You and I see the police as those brave men and women who have the guts to risk their own lives to protect ours.
Scott Newark, a lawyer and former Crown prosecutor in Alberta and now a special adviser to the Ontario solicitor general, watched the debate. He fired off a blistering e-mail to the show's producers and shared it with me.
I'll leave the final word to him: "Julian Falconer, who is a dead straight, honest guy, has his professional conduct assessed by his peers, yet objected to the same standard being applied to people who do a far more challenging job fraught with far more opportunities for complaint than what he does, but I don't recall him advocating an end to lawyers reviewing lawyers' conduct or judges judging judges."
Indeed.
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