National Post (National Edition)
Why won’t police in Edmonton name murder victims?
There’s no crime quite like murder. Though obviously personal, in that an individual has been killed, it also has a uniquely public aspect: One of our own has been taken, and there exists a genuine collective loss. Who was the victim? What might he have become? What might she have done with her life had she been allowed to keep it?
Murder’s public nature has been recognized for almost as long as there has been law; that principle is embedded, for instance, in the motto of the Ontario coroner’s office, which holds in part that its investigations, and sometimes inquests, ensure that no death of a member of the community “will be overlooked, concealed or ignored.”
But in Alberta this week, they took a significant step to changing all that.
Since mid-January this year, the Edmonton Police Service has been withholding the names of some homicide victims — about a third of the 29 murders in the city so far this year, in fact. The practice is already so ingrained there’s a pro forma little paragraph at the bottom of the news releases where the force has determined the victim won’t be identified: “The EPS has decided not to release the name of the deceased in this investigation for the following reasons: It does not serve an investigative purpose, there is no risk to public safety and the EPS has a duty to protect the privacy rights of the victims and their families.”
The driving force behind the change in Edmonton is unclear — it just abruptly changed in mid-January — but certainly, when the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police met this week to adopt the “decision framework on naming homicide victims,” the mandate was clear — and clear, too, was the fact the tedious document wasn’t written by cops.
“In response to a request from the Minister of Justice,” the preamble says, “the AACP has adopted this framework to be used by all AACP member police services …”
The AACP president, Medicine Hat Police Chief Andy McGrogan, said Thursday in a phone interview that the minister was simply asking that the various forces be consistent.
And the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP) referred to throughout the document makes it plain this is the Alberta version.
(There’s a federal FOIP too, and the provinces have their own, and generally speaking, their titles could have been taken directly from Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth was in fact the propaganda ministry.
In other words, these pieces of legislation in my experience exist to do the very opposite of what their titles suggest — to thwart, hide and to render un-free.)
In any case, Alberta’s police have now cheerfully agreed to a complicated seven-part consideration process that will have them (and lawyers and privacy officers) weigh whether it’s in the “public good” to release the name (that being such factors as the transparency of the force, increased public confidence, allowing community members to pay their respects, etc., etc.), whether the family of the victim wants the name released, and whether and how much other information is already in the public domain, etc., etc.
Waging a lonely battle against the new policy — simply by reporting upon it — has been veteran CBC courts and crime reporter Janice Johnston, who has pointed out some of the absurdities: That, for instance, the Alberta RCMP, which years earlier had stopped naming murder victims, was now naming them again just as Edmonton was refusing; that when a teenager named Brandon Provencher was murdered at an LRT station, the force refused to name him even as he was quickly identified through social media posts and a fundraising page; and when an 11-day-old baby died of a methamphetamine overdose and her mother was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, the mother was identified but not the baby.
The name of the baby was learned, and published, when just days later court documents identified her as Eliana.
(EPS spokesman Scott Pattison told Postmedia Thursday in an email that he believes there were “several reasons” for the change, including privacy legislation.)
But that raises another issue: What happens when these cases come to trial, the accused killers in court? Will another arm of the state, prosecutors, feel empowered or obliged to seek publication bans on the names of those who have been killed?
FOI and privacy legislation has been in existence for decades, though it feels much longer — federally since 1990, in Alberta since 2000. Nothing huge appears to have changed in the intervening years.
These are maddening acts to read, and I’ve read them, but can find nothing that specifically refers to homicide investigations or the disclosure of victims’ names.
Rather, the Alberta chiefs appear to have adopted legal interpretations of what are very broad laws that should be used to protect citizens’ privacy in the ordinary course.
Murder is the antithesis of all that, exceptional, a crime against the public order, the public good, the body public: It isn’t prurient to want to know who’s been killed. It’s smart, and in a democracy that took openness seriously, it would be routine.