Laws alone can’t make bad cops good

Agovernment alone cannot, with the stroke of a pen or the deliberations of a legislature, change entirely the nature of interactions between police and citizens, or the tragedies that sometimes occur. These are the products of centuries of policing culture and practice.

But Yasir Naqvi, Ontario’s attorney general, and Corrections Minister MarieFrance Lalonde are making the effort, with legislation announced Thursday that will radically change police oversight in Ontario.

Will it fix all the problems among the 26,000 officers in Ontario and police oversight? Absolutely not. But it’s a big reform, make no mistake, and years overdue.

The bill broadens the list of potential Special Investigations Unit probes, sets out a fine of up to $50,000 for officers who do not co-operate with investigations into their colleagues’ behaviour and allows referrals of investigations between watchdog agencies.

While these changes may not lead to more charges and convictions against bad cops, they do help civilians see justice done in a way that, ideally, makes the outcomes more explicable and, one hopes, comprehensible.

The legislation aims to fix problems that have frustrated SIU investigators for decades, such as officers not co-operating.

The Office of the Independent Police Review Director, which handles public complaints, becomes the Ontario Policing Complaints Agency. It’s a small gesture, but user friendliness goes a long way in an effective public complaints process.

This body will take over, within five years, all public complaints against cops. As it stands now, only a fraction of such complaints are independently investigated.

But much of the change that’s needed won’t be reformed in legislatures. The change must come from the police. How police view their work is what affects policing, day to day, on the streets.

In an ideal world, training changes (improved de-escalation in mental health crises, for example) and local “community safety and well-being plans” mandated by the bill will help improve approaches to mental health and addictions.

Still, the bottom line is that police culture affects real people. When officers view themselves as a thin blue line, manning civilization’s parapets against chaos and unrest, they view the public with suspicion, and that justifies otherwise unthinkable behaviour, in the name of keeping the peace.

The cold, hard truth is that the Ontario’s police watchdogs exist because of the behaviour of some police officers.

That’s where the hard work remains.