Police chief wants oversight changes
Ottawa police Chief Charles Bordeleau wants police oversight investigations to be shorter, with final reports sent directly to him, and wants to see the quality of civilians who investigate police improve.
Meeting with the Citizen’s editorial board Wednesday, Bordeleau said the Special Investigations Unit, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director and the Ontario Civilian Police Commission need to be subject to accountability themselves.
“If you look at the track record for the SIU, it hasn’t been stellar,” he said. “I believe in oversight. We need that. But I think that there’s changes that need to take place from a structural perspective in these three bodies, and there needs to be a higher accountability of their results and the outcomes that they have.”
Since 2011, the SIU has criminally charged nine Ottawa officers. None has been convicted. Six officers were acquitted, had charges withdrawn or had them downgraded to non-criminal offences. Three others are still awaiting trial on charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and breach of duty after a botched tactical training exercise in the summer of 2014.
The province announced on April 29 an independent review of the three oversight agencies, prompted largely by public outcry over the police shooting death of Andrew Loku in Toronto and the secrecy that shrouded the SIU’s investigative report into the shooting. That review is expected to take until the spring of 2017.
Bordeleau said SIU investigations are very lengthy and that the watchdog doesn’t communicate with the force throughout the process or even afterward.
“The reports that director (Tony) Loparco produces, I don’t even get to see them. I get a letter,” he said.
“I’d like to see those reports sent to me as opposed to just the attorney general.”
Bordeleau also said the mandates of the OIPRD and OCPC sometimes overlap and that there is an opportunity for the province to “streamline” the oversight bodies.
“The OIPRD — I think there’s plenty of opportunities there to make that system a lot more efficient. I’ve had officers go through complaints to the OIPRD where the quality of the investigators is not very stellar,” he said.
Three days before the province announced the review, two Ottawa police officers were acquitted of misconduct under the Police Services Act after an evisceration of the lead OIPRD investigator on the stand at their disciplinary hearing.
The OCPC was asked by the Ottawa police board in March to investigate Bordeleau’s involvement in his father-in-law’s traffic court appearance.