Give police watchdog teeth
If you were caught tampering with a law-enforcement investigation, you would probably end up in jail. Yet, as the Star’s Wendy Gillis reported on Monday, the same isn’t necessarily true for police in Ontario. It’s a persistent and troubling failure of accountability that the province should move quickly to redress.
Whenever a clash between police and civilians leads to death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault, Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit is supposed to step in. Yet, as Gillis reports, police do not always let the SIU know about such incidents in a timely manner nor do they always live up to their legal duty to co-operate with the watchdog once it is involved.
In fact, as former Ontario ombudsman and SIU head André Marin told the Star, the law meant to safeguard the SIU’s independence is “continually and regularly ignored by police services with impunity.”
Through a Freedom of Information request, the Star obtained a cache of letters sent from the SIU director to the Toronto police chief between 2013 and 2016. Twelve of them point to separate incidents in which officers violated their legislated obligation to co-operate with the agency.
In one case, it took police more than four years to alert the SIU to a civilian’s serious wrist injury. This created an “evidentiary vacuum,” wrote SIU director Tony Loparco to Toronto police chief Mark Saunders, which “effectively denied . . . the broader public the benefit of a thorough investigation into serious allegations of police misconduct.”
In another case, then-acting SIU director Joseph Martino alleged that officers threatened to undermine the integrity of an investigation by attempting to access and copy security footage before civilian investigators arrived on the scene. This would seem to be part of a larger pattern. The same concern was raised in the SIU report on the shooting death of Andrew Loku.
These and other cases of apparent uncooperativeness or active interference with the agency’s investigations are deeply disturbing, not least because there is little the SIU can do about them other than complain. Police have no obligation to respond to concerns raised by the watchdog, and it is the Toronto Police Service’s explicit policy not to do so in writing.
In their defence, Toronto police say they investigate “each and every comment” made in SIU letters, but these investigations are neither independent nor reliably transparent. As Marin has observed before, the public impression is that “the police service simply shrugs and that’s the end of it.”
That’s not good enough. In 2014-15, a mere 5.1per cent of the cases referred to the SIU resulted in charges, a rate no doubt driven down by police recalcitrance. As Ontario looks to revise the Ontario Police Services Act and continues its review of police watchdogs, it should give the SIU the tools it needs to do its important work.
In particular, the province should heed the longstanding call of critics and give the watchdog the power to compel police to cooperate with its investigations. Moreover, it should change the law to establish stiffer consequences, including possible jail time, for officers who interfere with SIU investigations.
The mandate of the SIU is “to maintain confidence in Ontario’s police services by assuring the public that police actions resulting in serious injury, death or allegations of sexual assault are subjected to rigorous, independent investigations.” This intended function is clearly crucial, yet in its current form, the watchdog can’t succeed. It’s time the province gave it some teeth.
Cases of apparent uncooperativeness or interference with the SIU’s investigations are deeply disturbing