Unlikely police watchdog
Felix Cacchione, former Supreme Court justice, takes office as head of Serious Incident Response Team
After more than a decade of studying police oversight agencies, Kent Roach sees Felix Cacchione’s appointment as the director of Nova Scotia’s law enforcement watchdog as a potential game changer.
Most Canadian jurisdictions choose former prosecutors to watch the police, said Roach, a prominent University of Toronto law professor.
But Cacchione, the grandson of Italian immigrants to Montreal, is a veteran superior court judge and criminal lawyer — he retired from the Nova Scotia Supreme Court just weeks before being named director of the province’s Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT).
“The appointment of a former supreme court justice and former legal aid lawyer is exceptional,” said Roach in a recent interview.
The leaders of Canada’s special investigatory units have tended to focus on their main mandate: deciding if officers have broken the law and recommending prosecutions in serious incidents involving the police, ranging from shootings to sexual assault. But Roach says there’s also a role for directors to refer cases that may not meet that bar to police complaints commissions, and to describe changes in policing that might avoid future incidents.
Roach — who has researched the special units in Ontario — says Cacchione could bring a “gravitas” that lends weight to anything he says on the underlying problems in policing, along with his recommendations on criminal prosecutions.
But Cacchione, 68, displays a judge’s prudence when asked if he will wade into wider policy issues when he handles investigations or in his annual reports.
“Depending on the situation, it may not be off limits,” he said during an interview Wednesday.
After growing up in Montreal’s east end, Cacchione studied at Dalhousie University’s law school in Halifax. He says he went into law and legal aid in part because he recalled his own parents lacking the money to afford legal help in a civil case. Cacchione has had over 31 years of experience reviewing police investigations — including some that impressed him and others that left him shaking his head over their inadequacies.
The director says he’ll now turn his attention to becoming the overseer of the team’s inquiries, adopting a Europeanstyle “inquisitorial system” as he works with the office’s investigators and poses questions to them about each case.
He said any preconceptions he had that his staff or seconded officers might be biased towards police officers have been rapidly blown apart in his first days on the job.
“I’ve found these officers ... don’t like anything that would smell of a dirty cop,” he said.
Cacchione said at this point, he’s focused on the basics rather than vision statements.
He’s already occupied with a high-profile case alleging a Halifax police officer assaulted a homeless man outside a shelter on Feb. 25. Ten days ago, two more cases came in, one from St. John’s, N.L., and a second in Nova Scotia, alleging sexual assault by an RCMP officer, swiftly exhausting the resources of his four-person unit.