Mounties to ‘discuss’ B.C. native abuse claims

The RCMP will meet Friday with authors of a damning report that accuses officers of harshly mistreating native women and girls in Northern British Columbia.

“There are some very serious allegations, clearly, brought forth in that report,” Chief Supt. Janice Armstrong told reporters at a news conference Wednesday.

“That’s going to be part of the discussion that I’ll have with them on Friday: We need to get to the bottom of those allegations.”

The report by Human Rights Watch, a New Yorkbased monitor, contains unproven allegations by several women and girls in northern B.C. who say they were abused physically or sexually by police officers, and that the RCMP has generally failed to protect them.

The lengthy report does not name the accusers, saying they fear retribution from police if identified.

Armstrong said Human Rights Watch posed questions to the RCMP five months ago about their research, but she insisted police couldn’t investigate the accusations if they didn’t have names of the women or the officers.

“It is impossible to deal with such public and serious complaints when we have no method to determine who the victims or the accused are,” Armstrong said, adding complaints can be made against police without fear of retribution.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and B.C. Justice Minister Shirley Bond also called on Human Rights Watch to share information with police about the allegations of abuse.

But the women and girls who allegedly suffered abuse at the hands of RCMP officers don’t trust the justice system enough to reveal their names, said Asia Czapska of the Vancouver-based group Justice for Girls.

“Women and girls very much fear coming forward with this information,” said Czapska, whose group works with impoverished young women in B.C.

Justice for Girls was the catalyst for the report after asking the international agency in 2011 to investigate concerns about degrading police treatment of aboriginal girls over the past decade.

Czapska will attend Friday’s meeting with the RCMP, and hopes police brass will commit to implementing some of the recommendations in the report. The main recommendation is for the federal and B.C. governments to participate in a national commission of inquiry into alleged abuse. That recommendation was backed Wednesday by the Assembly of First Nations, and the federal NDP and Liberal parties.

For now, the federal government has asked the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP to look into the allegations raised in the report, Harper said.