Stronger discipline, better police boards key to rebuilding trust
Ontario’s broken-down old system for minding police discipline and keeping chiefs accountable for the failings in their forces is doing neither citizens nor officers much good, says Justice Michael Tulloch’s report on police oversight in Ontario.
We need police officers who prove themselves worthy of the respect we all want to give them, the respect they need if they’re going to do their difficult and sometimes dangerous jobs. The current system is not guaranteeing it.
Ottawa police officers have been in revolt against Chief Charles Bordeleau as recently as last summer. One is facing manslaughter charges for a brutal takedown of Abdirahman Abdi in Hintonburg, and others are wearing wristbands to declare their public support for their brother officer. A bunch of others have been busted for lying about giving traffic warnings. We had a record number of shootings last year and a near-record number of killings.
We know how this works. Something bad happens involving the police. Mayor Jim Watson says it’s a matter for the police services board, which he doesn’t sit on. Board members say operational matters aren’t their bailiwick.
If the matter is potentially criminal, it goes off to the remote and secretive Special Investigations Unit. Bordeleau says he’s very concerned but let’s let the process unfold; the police union says it’s a witch hunt. Nothing publicly happens for months.
If it’s a matter of discreditable conduct — something repulsive but not criminal, like misusing police information, fudging those traffic warnings or disparaging the late artist Annie Pootoogook for dying while Inuk — it’s handled locally, through court-like hearings typically led by current or retired senior officers. For a good long time the Ottawa police regularly turned to Bordeleau’s wife, Lynda, a lawyer, to handle the prosecutions.
Everyone involved could be competent and principled as an angel. We’d still never set a system like that up from scratch today. As a workplace disciplinary process it’s wildly overdeveloped compared with most. As an instrument for maintaining public trust, it’s pathetically inadequate.
“I have heard from the police who potentially stand accused that they have no confidence in the fair adjudication of their matters,” Tulloch wrote. “Members of the public have also told me that the internal prosecution and adjudication of complaints about police by police is one of the main reasons they would not make a complaint. Both police and potential complainants see the process as ‘rigged’.”
Even police chiefs don’t like the system, he found. “They explained that hearing officers drawn from the ranks of current or retired senior officers possess ample policing experience, but often are ill-equipped to decide complex legal issues,” Tulloch wrote.
Tulloch recommends a formally independent disciplinary process with prosecutors and adjudicators who don’t answer to the chief, similar in many ways to the regulatory colleges that discipline doctors and lawyers.
Meanwhile, when it comes to big-picture challenges facing the police force, when a pattern of inadequacy or misconduct emerges, nobody’s really in a position to ask questions or make demands.
The system of is a relic from a time when municipalities and the provincial government shared the costs of policing. They still do that in smaller towns, much less so in cities like Ottawa and Toronto. Here, residents pay the bills, but oversight of the police service is handled by a board of appointees that hires the chief, monitors the budget in the most general way, and not very much else.
Ottawa’s police services board has three councillors — West Carleton’s Eli El-Chantiry as its chair, plus Kanata South’s Allan Hubley and Beacon Hill-Cyrville’s Tim Tierney.
It has a city council appointee: Sandy Smallwood, an expert on heritage buildings and a onetime Rockcliffe village councillor.
And it has three provincial appointees: Jim Durrell (the exmayor and car dealer), Suzanne Valiquet (a marketer) and Carl Nicholson (the executive director of the Catholic Immigration Centre).
When they’re named, nobody explains why they’re good choices or what specific useful skills they bring.
All the board members have personal qualities that are not to be dismissed: El-Chantiry was born in Lebanon. Valiquet is francophone. Nicholson is black and deals with new arrivals to Canada on a professional basis. Hubley has acute family experience of mental illness. They’re all smart people who care about Ottawa.
But as a group they are not especially knowledgeable about policing, criminology, the culture of paramilitary organizations, the lives of urban Aboriginals, poverty, social dislocation, mental health, or drug policy, to catalogue just a few important areas of their inexpertise.
Among them they’ve been on a lot of boards. It’s important to understand what a board of directors does when you serve on one, but boy would it be helpful if our police-board members were subject-matter experts who could confidently call Bordeleau out on something from time to time.
In Toronto, a subsequent inquiry found the police board let its force run wild when the G20 summit came to town in 2010, failing to plan and make due demands of then-chief Bill Blair, whose cops violated people’s rights left and right. In Peel, the police board asked its chief to stop her force from asking people for their ID papers on the street and she shrugged and said no, they were going to keep doing it.
“Effective oversight requires confident, independent, and knowledgeable police services boards,” Tulloch’s report says. He recommends mandatory training for police-board members, and standards for selecting them that go beyond being an adult Canadian who’s not currently imprisoned.
These are almost footnotes in Tulloch’s report, which is mainly about reforming provincial-level bodies. But they’re a big deal for demanding better from the people we trust (and pay very well) to keep us all safe.