(Prime Time Crime exclusive Jan. 19, 2005)
Integrity testing a non-Starter
By Leo Knight
Demands by the PIVOT Legal Society to have members of the Vancouver Police Department undergo so called “integrity testing” should be treated with the disdain the proposal so richly deserves.
PIVOT’s leader, the tiresome John Richardson, is a self-aggrandizing lawyer – yes, I do know that is a redundant descriptor- who, despite his protestations to the contrary, comes off as a “cop hater”. VPD can do no right and the junkies, crack-heads, dealers, pimps, thieves and robbers who make up his constituency, can do no wrong. Whatever they say is gospel it seems.
Now, as I understand it, Richardson, the patron saint of all things unholy in the Downtown Eastside, is suggesting that random police officers should be subject to these integrity tests to see if they will do something wrong, ostensibly if provoked enough by one of Richardson’s loyal soldiers. In legal circles it’s called entrapment. Exactly the sort of activity that, if undertaken by the police while trying to put real criminals in a real jail, would cause the legal weasels to set their hair on fire.
A few years back, a young female VPD officer was working on an undercover “Buy & Bust” operation. She was set free in an area full of dealers and told to see what she could buy. Just go out and approach people asking for drugs and see if there were any takers. Needless to say, there were.
In one case of a dealer who went to trial, she was asked what instructions she was given prior to approaching the fine young man in the dock. None, she replied, other than approaching people in the dealing areas and trying to buy drugs. She was fishing, if you will, in well-stocked lake.
Well, the case got tossed and as a result, the police can no longer go fishing. To secure a conviction, they have to have specific information from a source or develop their own ‘intel’ through surveillance or other investigative means prior to making an undercover approach. They can no longer conduct what is called "Random Virtue Testing."
In fact, this is also what currently occurs when the police suspect one of their own is tainted. They already do integrity testing in the course of their internal investigations.
And, that great defender of individual rights, John Richardson, wants the city to trample all over the personal rights of innocent cops by engaging in random, entrapment exercises.
Yeah, the cops, you might remember them. They are the good guys. Or at least they used to be.
Not so, though, in Richardson’s topsy-turvy world. His constituents are the same people who have helped make Vancouver property crime central. You park it, they’ll steal it or steal from it. Richardson is doing his level best to handcuff the cops trying to handcuff the criminals. While I expect little from the collection of socialist navel gazers currently seated ‘round the Council table in City Hall, this is an issue that surely, even they can see is wrong and refrain from endorsing.
Surely.
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