When Canadian police kill or injure someone, they seldom face charges or discipline – and in B.C., they rarely co-operate with independent oversight bodies. The Globe reviewed thousands of cases to see the scope of the problem
Seven people know what was done to Myles Gray the day the 33-year-old business owner died in suburban Burnaby. All of them were officers with the Vancouver Police Department. And seven and a half years on, it is still not clear to anyone but them.
Officers rarely face charges and discipline is largely left to police departments. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to justice, experts say, is getting accused officers to participate in these investigations at all. Howard Morton, a Toronto lawyer who headed Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit for three years, says that if he was defending an officer, he wouldn’t let them sit for an interview: “But it’s the law that’s wrong. It’s the law that accounts for this lack of accountability and transparency – and everything else we should expect when somebody is seriously injured or dead. The reality is police“They carry a gun. They can pull you over on a whim. They can detain you.
The woman’s son called police, noting that Mr. Gray seemed upset and unwell. Mr. Gray was initially co-operative, according to the first officer to speak with him, but became agitated when she mentioned the hose. He then retreated to a wooded yard. In all, seven officers later followed him there. The Crown also laid out the damage done to Mr. Gray. Officers left him with a broken nose, a broken eye socket, brain bleeding, a broken voice box, a broken rib, a ruptured testicle, a possible dislocated jaw.
At least 1,129 Canadians have died in encounters with police since 2000, according to information from independent investigator reports, coroner reports, court records and news reports. In that time, 22 officers were charged with culpable homicide in the deaths of 13 civilians – three with second degree murder and 19 with manslaughter.
Decisions by Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes do not note co-operation by subject officers, and could therefore not be included. The Serious Incident Response Team of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan’s Serious Incident Response Team are too newly formed to be included. And the territories, PEI, and New Brunswick do not have police oversight agencies, though the latter is in the process of creating one.
In Nova Scotia, 15 per cent of officers under investigation fully co-operated with the province’s Serious Incident Response Team. In Ontario, 24 per cent of the 1,106 officers investigated by the province’s Special Investigations Unit agreed to full co-operation. Accused officers didn’t always refuse to participate in these investigations. In the first years following the SIU’s 1990 launch, officers sat for interviews as a matter of course, says Mr. Morton, who headed the Ontario agency to 1995. But their lawyers eventually put an end to the practice, arguing their clients had a Charter-protected right to avoid self-incrimination. In the late 1990s, Ontario adopted a regulation specifying just that.
“If police can remain silent – when often, they are the only person who knows what happened – the implication is that they can kill with impunity, without having to give any explanation for it at all,” Mr. Marin says. This attitude will do little to restore the public’s faith in the police in Canada, something that has been steadily declining across the country for the last half-decade, according to annual polling by Angus Reid.
The former head of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team complained bitterly about the “murky” and “unprincipled” methods she felt the Calgary police department was using to shield officers under investigation. The following year, the IIO, while investigating the death of Myles Gray, twice had to petition the B.C. Supreme Court to compel the co-operation of some officers. In B.C., as in other provinces, witness officers are required by the Police Act to attend interviews. But some in Vancouver were refusing, unless the IIO first provided them access to transcripts, recordings and other evidence.
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