Who watches the watchers?

This past week, an enormous amount of people took to the streets in Canada and around the world to protest police violence against minority groups, specifically black people. The demonstrations were sparked on May 25, after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes while he was handcuffed on the street. The scene was captured in horrific detail by a bystander and in the difficult to watch video, Floyd repeatedly states that he can’t breathe, to no avail. For the last three minutes he is motionless, but the officer’s knee remains on his neck.
The killing was eerily similar to the 2014 slaying of Eric Garner by officers in Staten Island, as he also repeatedly told the thugs arresting him that he couldn’t breath while lying face down in the street. Both Floyd and Garner were arrested on suspicion of incredibly minor offences, passing a counterfeit $20 bill and selling loose cigarettes respectively. It’s hard to imagine having a loved one killed over something so ridiculously petty and the callous response by the officers in these videos and numerous others over the years, is rage inducing.
The protests spread to dozens of cities and towns across the US and internationally last week and ironically, more sickening footage of police brutality was documented, from unprovoked beatings and tear gassing to even vehicle rammings.
A peaceful march was held in Ottawa on June 5 and was attended by our Prime Minister, who symbolically took a knee in solidarity with the protesters. It’s odd, because he was ostensibly protesting himself, as his government has been in power for the past five years, four of those with a majority of seats. While it was an important optics win for a media-savvy head of state, Canadians should be wondering if there will be any meaningful legislation introduced that will back it up.
It should also be mentioned that these mass protests are taking place during a global pandemic, and even with the widespread use of face masks, they could multiply the number of cases that everyone has been working to flatten. Protesting police brutality is a worthier cause than going to the beach or having a party, but we’ll see in two weeks if there are some adverse side-effects. If there is no significant rise in cases, we should be questioning the restrictive guidelines that our governments have laid out for us.
But enough digression.
The federal government has oversight of Canada’s largest police force, the RCMP, an enormous bureaucracy that functions as our equivalent of the FBI, while simultaneously providing local police services to enormous swathes of the country, including large populations of Indigenous people. Activists and journalists have long decried the organization’s opacity when it comes to access to information requests. Often times, they are delayed for months or even years, and heavily censored when they are finally released to the public. Even the independent civilian review board that is supposed to provide oversight for the RCMP has had their requests and complaints fall on deaf ears.
Trust is built with accountability, and you can only have accountability through transparency. The feds need to introduce much stronger disclosure laws that apply to all their departments and actually punish the organizations that don’t comply.
This holds true for provincial and municipal police forces as well. This newspaper tried to determine the amount of COVID-19 related fines and orders to quarantine that were made by the local SQ detachment, but were stymied by the regional communications flack. If the local police aren’t keeping tabs on such basic data, are they also not recording region-by-region rates of other infractions, like domestic violence or assault? Our MRC pays a hefty price for their services, so do our tax dollars come with some semblance of oversight or are we merely paying mafia-esque protection fees?
Transparency is only the first step. There needs to be severe consequences for officers that are out of line. The Bureau des Enquêtes Indépendantes (BEI) investigates any situation where someone is killed or seriously injured during a police intervention in Quebec, and was created in June 2016. Since its creation, the BEI has investigated more than 100 cases (including at least two in the Pontiac area), involving dozens of deaths. No Quebec police officer has ever faced criminal charges after a bureau investigation. In the years prior to the BEI’s creation, between 1999 and 2016, only 10 officers were charged in the province which means, according to a CBC investigation, just under two per cent of investigations led to charges. Are our province’s officers really so blameless, or is the watchdog toothless? Would the mandatory use of body cameras by police during interactions with the public make a difference?
The reality is, most violent crime in Canada has been declining or stagnant for decades. A large number of police calls are to deal with people who have mental health or substance abuse issues. Since social workers and councillors are much cheaper to hire than sworn police officers, shouldn’t we shift our focus to caring for people rather than detaining them?
All of this unrest comes down to a lack of public trust in the people that are sanctioned by the state to protect the rest of the population. While Canadians like to think of themselves as superior to our counterparts in the US, we have plenty of issues of our own. Overt bigotry and a lack of oversight have led many people to believe that they are neither served, nor protected by the police in our communities. It is up to our elected officials, at all levels of government, to refrain from pandering photo ops and actually get down to the business of overseeing our nation’s police forces. It is up to the masses of people that turned out for these rallies to hold their feet to the fire.
There are lives at stake.

Caleb Nickerson