Voices of reason on Quebec’s police shootings bill

Now that hearings by a National Assembly committee on the proposed legislation on investigations into police shootings have wrapped up, the government should have heard enough to persuade it to make substantial changes to the bill.

The division in points of view presented to the committee were perhaps predictable.

Police spokespersons held almost unanimously to the line that the present system, whereby shootings by members of a police force are investigated by officers from another force, should be maintained because only police have the expertise to conduct such investigations.

The process proposed in Bill 46 would perpetuate that system with the addition of a layer of civilian oversight. This proposed new bureau of civilian observers would be empowered to review the reports of the police investigations of fellow officers.

But that was denounced as effectively flawed by a succession of spokespersons for human-rights groups and other civilian organizations who advocated something akin to the system adopted by neighbouring Ontario and four other provinces, whereby investigations into police shootings are conducted by civilian bodies.

The Bill 46 proposal was also denounced from the outset by Quebec’s ombudsman, Raymonde Saint-germain, who dismissed it as “a blatant waste of public money,” and by Gaétan Cousineau, president of the Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse, who said it was “far from satisfactory” and “not credible.”

What critics object to is the limited scope the bill allows the civilian overseers. While they will be assigned to scrutinize the reports of police investigating police, they will be restricted from actually questioning officers involved in an incident, and they will not be able to question the officers conducting the investigation.

They rightly maintain that this would perpetuate a system in which public trust has been severely shaken, particularly among visible-minority groups, for its lack of independence, transparency and accountability. As Cousineau noted, it seems troubling that of 339 investigations into police actions causing death or serious injury over the past dozen years, only three have resulted in criminal charges being laid.

Most people today would surely be inclined to agree with André Marin, former head of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit that investigates police shootings, who said there is good reason to suspect that police do not investigate fellow police, even if from a different force, with the same dispatch and impartiality applied to investigating civilians.

A glaring local example in this respect was the case of the shooting death of unarmed teenager Fredy Villanueva. The officers involved were not kept apart before questioning – thus giving them the opportunity, if they so chose, to collude in formulating their version of events. This would not happen to civilians in similar circumstances.

It is true that setting up an entirely separate unit to investigate police shootings would be costly and not without inherent problems, such as finding competent people without ties to police forces to conduct the investigations.

But a compromise solution between the toothless oversight body the legislation proposes and a fully independent civilian investigative unit has been proposed by a range of credible intervenors at the hearings, including the Quebec Bar Association, Montreal’s civic administration and Montreal police chief Marc Parent.

What they generally recommend is a more active role for civilian overseers in the investigations – for example, allowing them to speak to the officers under investigation and to those doing the investigation; to visit the scenes of shootings; and to ensure officers involved in a shooting are interviewed promptly and kept apart until questioned.

These are reasonable proposals that should make for a substantial improvement in the system and enhance public trust in law-enforcement authorities.

If the government is serious about seeking advice on the bill, and not merely holding these hearings for show, it should accept these recommendations and amend the bill accordingly.