A commission in need of repair
Don Braid
Oct. 7, 2004
Broken systems should be fixed. And the Calgary police commission looks positively fractured as a vehicle for handling complaints against police officers.
Bound by strict and even archaic provincial laws, the appointed commission has little power over police conduct.
What it has should be taken away, for everyone's benefit.
The current fuss over allegations of brutality shows how easy it is for a commission to be accused of covering things up or favouring the police.
I'm far from convinced anything like that has actually happened. But sometimes an allegation can be as damaging as guilt.
We never want our cops to face the hostility that festers in cities such as Toronto, where perceptions of bias became so powerful that a large part of the population grew to hate the cops.
When hostilities start to boil over in a growing city, everybody should believe they'll get fair treatment (and that certainly includes police officers as well as citizens).
The best solution is for the province to set up local panels of citizens whose sole job is to review complaints, and penalize both officers who behave badly and citizens who complain maliciously.
These could well be offshoots of the provincial Law Enforcement Review Board, a three-person panel that investigates serious complaints.
It's a useful body, but far too lofty and distant. That could easily be fixed by creating groups with authority over all local police forces.
Such panels would immediately free both the police and the commission from the suspicion that investigation of complaints is an inside job.
The cops could get on with catching the bad guys, and the commission could do what it does best -- support the police in the endless hunt for money, oversee the chief's work, ensure the quality and staffing of the force, and set policy.
One idea has to be tanked right away, though: City council should not get more power over the commission.
Council appoints all the commissioners, including two aldermen, but there its role should end.
Oversight by council would quickly bring political interference on a grand scale -- an American trend we don't need here.
Only the province can solve this problem. And the sooner it gets police commissions out of the whole area of police conduct, the better off everyone will be.
Under the current absurd setup, the commission can only investigate complaints against one person -- its sole employee, the chief of police.
All other officers are entirely out of its jurisdiction.
This includes every single street cop who might manhandle a citizen, since chiefs aren't generally known for that sort of thing.
The chief investigates such complaints against his own officers, and if the commission doesn't like his decision, it has no power whatever.
It can only refer the case to the Law Enforcement Review Board.
The commission employs precisely one toiler, called the citizen complaints monitor, to review all the chief's decisions.
None of this is the fault of the commission or the police.
The province sets these rules and tolerates no local variations.
But faulty rules should be fixed to benefit everyone. In this case, the biggest winners would probably be the police themselves.
© Calgary Herald 2004
