RCMP watchdog, N.W.T. clash on public complaints handling

December 14, 2009
CBC News

An independent police watchdog says RCMP in Inuvik, N.W.T., should not have tried to informally resolve a serious public complaint that police used a Taser on a girl.

However, the territory's justice minister says that's how complaints about the Mounties should be handled.

The clash of opinion comes after the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP identified a number of problems with police handling of the 2007 incident, in which an officer jolted the teenage girl with a Taser at a youth correctional facility in Inuvik.

In a report released Friday, commission chairman Paul Kennedy concluded the officer was not justified in using the stun gun on the girl, then a 15-year-old inmate at the Arctic Tern Young Offenders Facility. The girl cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Among the problems Kennedy highlighted in his report was that RCMP failed to properly investigate a complaint about the incident filed by the girl's mother, instead attempting to resolve her complaint informally.

Not appropriate to 'talk it out'
Kennedy said there are cases when a public complaint against RCMP can be dealt with simply by talking it over, but the Taser incident in Inuvik was not one of those cases.

"If it's a minor matter — rudeness and things like that — of course, please go and talk it out. But there are also limits. This was beyond the limit," Kennedy told reporters Friday in Yellowknife.

Kennedy's commission has maintained that serious complaints against police, such as allegations of improper use of force, should not be resolved informally. Instead, he said, a formal investigation should take place.

In his report, Kennedy noted RCMP in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut most often tried to resolve "use of force" allegations informally.

Government has own approach
But N.W.T. Justice Minister Jackson Lafferty believes otherwise, saying in a letter to MLAs that complaints against police should only be brought to the attention of Kennedy's commission if all else fails.

In the letter, obtained by CBC News, Lafferty talks about a protocol the territorial government and RCMP have developed for handling public complaints.

Lafferty's approach suggests three stages for handling such complaints:

1.Try to resolve it by talking to the RCMP detachment or district commander.
2.If that fails, bring the complaint to Lafferty's office, where it would be assessed based on information provided by the RCMP.
3.Start an investigation if needed. RCMP would brief Lafferty and the complainant's MLA on the outcome.
If all else fails, Lafferty says the complaint can then be brought to the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.

"So we're the final resort, which means that you're having a system which is outside of the normal system," Kennedy said. "That, for me, merely compounds the problem I'm talking about."

A major part of the problem with RCMP resolving complaints informally is that there's often no record of how that complaint is handled, he added.

In his response to Kennedy's findings, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott agreed that the Inuvik complaint should not have been dealt with informally.

Editorial: Lawyer leaves public service on a high note

December 14, 2009
Law Times
By Glenn Kauth

At the end of the year, Canada will lose yet another valuable and outspoken civil servant when lawyer Paul Kennedy leaves his post as chairman of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.

After finishing his law degree in 1972, Kennedy spent 25 years with the Justice Department that included stints as a criminal prosecutor and later senior general counsel for the federal prosecution service. Then, after rising to become a senior assistant deputy minister with two different ministries, the government appointed him to the RCMP watchdog role in 2005.

Since then, Kennedy has established a reputation for pulling no punches against a federal police force that in recent years has come to define government secrecy. He’s been particularly forthright about the need for the RCMP to stop investigating itself in cases of serious allegations against its officers, an issue the 2005 in-custody death of Ian Bush at a B.C. police detachment helped bring to public attention.

This week, we saw Kennedy come out swinging again in his report on the infamous Taser incident involving Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport in 2007. The events that led to the Polish man’s death “represent a defining moment in the history of the RCMP,” Kennedy said.

In what amounts to an official validation of what most people have likely been thinking, Kennedy said police claims about the threat they felt from the stapler Dziekanski was brandishing didn’t justify using a Taser on him.
“The members demonstrated no meaningful attempt to de-escalate the situation nor did they approach the situation with a measured, co-ordinated, and appropriate response,” he wrote in his report.

Kennedy, in making his 16 recommendations, also criticized the officers involved for inappropriately meeting after the incident before giving their statements. In addition, he deemed that their version of what happened lacked credibility. “Overall, I found that the conduct of the responding members fell short of that expected of members of the RCMP,” he concluded.

In coming out so strongly in one of his final acts as head of the public complaints commission, Kennedy has demonstrated his value to our federal bureaucracy. But the government’s decision last month not to reappoint him raises questions about whether it’s merely pushing aside someone who has been a thorn for highly ranked public officials in recent years.

In fact, while Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has so far declined to provide details on the reasons for the move, it was only last December that he praised Kennedy for his commitment “to achieving excellence in policing” in announcing a one-year extension of his term.

So far, it’s unclear whether the decision to end Kennedy’s posting has anything to do with his outspokenness. But we’ve seen such scenarios play out already, including in the firing of former Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen after the agency ordered the shutdown of the Chalk River reactor.

Similar issues arose in the case of Military Police Complaints Commission chairman Peter Tinsley, who also clashed with the government and isn’t getting reappointed.

So, whatever the official reasons the government gives for its moves, they do raise concerns. Given the important role people like Kennedy and Tinsley play in upholding the rule of law, we need to keep them in our public service. Just this week, Kennedy proved his worth once again.

Mountie wrong to taser girl, 15, watchdog says

December 12, 2009
Tu Thanh Ha, Globe and Mail

Just months before Robert Dziekanski died in a 2007 confrontation with taser-wielding RCMP officers in Vancouver, at a juvenile centre in the Northwest Territories, a Mountie tasered a 15-year-old girl while she was handcuffed and lying face down.

Yesterday, in a scathing report about the incident in Inuvik, NWT, the RCMP civilian watchdog concluded that the officer was wrong to stun the girl, and that the Mounties improperly tried to brush off a complaint from her mother and conducted a biased internal probe.

Paul Kennedy, chairman of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, said that many deficiencies he found in the case "paralleled the systemic concerns" he has previously raised about the force's use of stun guns.

"This incident is a compelling case which ought to cause the RCMP itself to be concerned and take action," he said.

A steady critic of the RCMP's taser policy and its internal investigation system, Mr. Kennedy is in his last month on the job.

Ottawa is not reappointing him.

Yesterday's findings came three days after his report on the Dziekanski case, in which he said four Mounties used substandard policing when they tasered the Polish immigrant.

The Inuvik report also came on the day relatives of Clayton Willey were shown security-camera footage of the 2003 tasering of the 33-year-old aboriginal man from Prince George, B.C.

Mr. Willey died hours after the RCMP zapped him while he was handcuffed and face down at the local detachment.

His family has to decide whether the video will be made public.

In the Inuvik incident, Constable Noella Cockney was called to a youth facility on March 13, 2007, after a girl refused to take her prescribed antidepressant and became agitated.

She was handcuffed and three youth workers held down her arms and legs.

Constable Cockney told the girl several times to co-operate.

When she refused, the officer pressed the taser against her back and stunned her for five seconds.

Constable Cockney didn't keep proper notes and didn't mention in her report that the girl was tied and held down, Mr. Kennedy said.

His investigation concluded that the girl didn't pose a threat at the time she was tasered. Also, the constable's taser certification was expired.

The watchdog also found that detachment officers improperly tried to dispose informally of a complaint by the girl's mother.

It was only nine months later that the force acted on the complaint.

But the staff sergeant who reviewed the complaint was Constable Cockney's taser instructor, and he urged her to add more details to her notes, the report said.

Mr. Kennedy said the staff sergeant's probe was biased and speculative.

"The RCMP's approach to internal investigations is flawed and inconsistent ... those types of investigations do not engender confidence," Mr. Kennedy said.

His recommendations aren't binding on the RCMP.

"Obviously, your report identifies a number of significant failures on the part of the RCMP and members involved in this matter," RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said in a letter replying to Mr. Kennedy's findings.

He said the force has changed some of its policies dealing with public complaints and taser use.

RCMP had no grounds to use Taser on N.W.T. girl: report - Police force also accused of protecting officer

December 11, 2009
CBC News

An RCMP officer in Inuvik, N.W.T., was not justified in jolting a teenage girl with a Taser stun gun in 2007, a federal police watchdog agency has concluded.

Furthermore, the Inuvik RCMP detachment appears to have tried to cover up what happened, according to a final report released Friday by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.

"The manner in which the RCMP handled this matter was at best negligent and at worst biased," commission chairman Paul Kennedy wrote in his report, which was in response to a complaint filed by the girl's mother.

It's Kennedy's second damning report this week on the RCMP's use of Tasers. On Tuesday, he reported on the October 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport. making 16 recommendations that were highly critical of the actions of the four officers involved and the RCMP's followup investigation.

In Inuvik, two RCMP probes cleared the officer of any wrongdoing. A similar investigation by the N.W.T. Justice Department also cleared corrections officials who were involved in the incident.

Handcuffed, held down
The girl, whom Kennedy identified as "Miss X" in his report, was a 15-year-old inmate at the Arctic Tern Young Offenders Facility in Inuvik when on March 13, 2007, she was subdued with an RCMP Taser while she was handcuffed and held face-down on the floor by jail staff.

Miss X cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, as she was a minor at the time.

Kennedy said the officer who used the 50,000-volt stun gun, Const. Noella Cockney, had been called to the youth facility by staff who said the girl was not co-operating with their orders to go into a segregated area.

After Cockney gave Miss X several warnings, the girl swore at her and told her to go ahead and use the weapon. The officer "deployed the Taser for a full five-second cycle, causing Miss X to co-operate," Kennedy wrote.

2 versions of report
Cockney filed a report afterward, but it was undated and printed nine months later. Kennedy said that report did not provide any detail on what Miss X was doing to justify using the Taser.

Cockney was not certified to use a Taser at the time, as her qualifications had expired, Kennedy found.

In November 2008 — as Kennedy was launching his own investigation of the Arctic Tern incident — a second version of Cockney's report was produced with "substantive amendments" portraying the girl as "combative."

That RCMP report stated the girl "was pulling and kicking, trying to get up or away from the workers" and she "became more aggitated [sic] and was swearing and pulling harder at the workers to let go."

Kennedy said that portrayal of Miss X's behaviour was quite different from what he had heard from the youth workers who were there.

Inuvik RCMP officials told Kennedy they told Cockney her original report had "insufficient detail" and asked her to articulate better what happened.

Kennedy concluded that the girl was in no position to harm anyone.

Resolved complaint improperly
He also ruled that the Inuvik RCMP detachment tried to resolve the girl's mother's complaint informally, which Kennedy said is an improper practice in response to allegations of improper use of force.

"The RCMP's handling of Miss X's mother's complaint was deficient in its management, timeliness and the adequacy of the investigation, such that it leads to a strong perception of bias," Kennedy stated.

"Moreover, attempts to informally resolve the complaint, and the failure to properly document it, were contrary to RCMP policy."

Kennedy's report makes 14 recommendations, ranging from additional procedural training for the Inuvik RCMP officers to broader policy changes for the national police force.

"This public interest investigation revealed that many of the identified deficiencies paralleled the systemic concerns addressed in broad-scale analyses of RCMP processes, policies and conduct," Kennedy said in a release Friday.

"In fact, this incident is a compelling case which ought to cause the RCMP itself to be concerned and take action."

The RCMP has had Kennedy's report for almost three months, but it has yet to respond.

The commission is an independent, civilian-run agency created by Parliament to make sure complaints made by the public about RCMP members' conduct are examined fairly and impartially.

Kennedy's term at the commission ends on Dec. 31 and the Conservative government has said he will not be reappointed.