Quebec police are refusing to answer questions from the oversight body investigating civilian deaths and serious injuries during police interventions. This is after
[Police] unions also challenged the obligation for officers to meet with … investigators. They argued that those rules infringed on their members’ constitutional rights to stay silent and not incriminate themselves.
It’s part of a national trend:
in British Columbia, police officers rarely co-operate with the Independent Investigations Office …, while they often only partly co-operate with independent oversight bodies in other provinces.
Not cooperating with oversight investigators should be a fireable offence. Just straight up your job has a higher standard of conduct. If you want your right to not talk that’s fine but you can do that as a civilian not a police officer.
It’s long past time to force officers to be held accountable.
100% this. The role of police is too important to let thugs hide behind “I don wan be incwiminated”.
Exactly. Oversight is part of the job. Don’t want to do the job? Fine, the door’s wide open.
And they wonder why nobody trusts them anymore. It’s long past time to take away their civilian rights. As an officer of the law, they need to be held to a higher standard, and not be able to hide behind the rights designed to protect civilians from them.
It’s shitty, because many cops are reasonable, trustworthy people most of the time.
But policing organizations have sick cultures that ignore public safety - just look at the report from Nova Scotia’s mass casualty commission for proof of that.
It will be impossible to fix that culture as long as cops avoid external enquiries.
Meet more cops. That’s really, really not true. They’re mostly unhinged bullies. Like many sociopaths they can be charming and appear normal but they are not.
Refusing to participate in an investigation is obvious criminality. If they did nothing wrong, they shouldn’t have anything to hide. Hypocritical disgraces to this country. Too busy killing native women and prostitutes. Old habits die hard, and let’s not forget how many cops sided with the “Freedom” convoy, and opposed the black lives matter movement. Pigs will be pigs. 🐖 🐷. Eternal useful idiots to despotism.
“If they did nothing wrong, they shouldn’t have anything to hide,” sounds EXACTLY what one of the cops you’re concerned about might say.
That’s why I said it
Anyone else you think doesn’t deserve the protection of the Charter?
Pig spotted. 🐖
And that’s why I don’t agree with it. However, it does indicate a clear inability to do their job, and warrants an investigation into their behavior, particularly non-police witnesses and recordings. Let’s get cameras on our cops, with the data not curated by them, and penalties if their equipment isn’t on during interactions with the public.
AC AB
Our section 11c allows for the defendant’s right not to give testimony directly against oneself,
11 Any person charged with an offence has the right
(c) not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence;
but it doesn’t allow for one defendant not to give testimony against another – just, via section 13, indemnification against that witness in a separate proceeding when previous testimony is compelled (via lack of a right to silence when potentially incriminating others).
13 A witness who testifies in any proceedings has the right not to have any incriminating evidence so given used to incriminate that witness in any other proceedings, except in a prosecution for perjury or for the giving of contradictory evidence.
So, cops don’t have to testify against themselves, but they don’t get to be silent. And they get indemnification if they do speak up, so it seems a dumb move not to say “yeah, me and Bobby totally beat the hell outta that guy” and use that section-13 clause to skate.
Hmm. But they’d be bounced out of the force on Ethics, but I guess at that point they’re no longer cops anyway; just thugs (and if you’re all ACAB about it, you need to know why that’s toxic).
I don’t know enough about law to say whether those excepts are the only rules that would be relevant in this scenario.
It is clear that police officers and unions are systematically undermining public safety through legal appeals and non-compliance.
Because they fundamentally believe that laws do not apply to them … they only enforce, not obey.
I know Police Unions in the USA are obscenely powerful (and corrupt) is it the same in Canada?
I don’t want to make general statements, but Canadaland did a podcast on the horrible injustices within the Thunder Bay Police force.
One example of some pretty messed up stuff.
