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Diana Murru and Paul
Ryan report on the summary of the RCMP’s investigation
into Pivot’s To Serve and Protect report.
When Chief Graham
came out on March 31 to address the morning press conference
announcing the RCMP investigation findings, he declared
that the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) had been
“cleared” of any misconduct.
What Chief Graham neglected
to mention was that the VPD hadn’t actually been
cleared of all the reports of misconduct involving the
residents of the DTES at all.
He had internally reinvestigated
the nine cases of police misconduct that the RCMP had
found to be valid; then he had cleared the VPD himself.
The rest of the cases were also open to
interpretation, as it was because of non-cooperation
by the VPD officers with RCMP inspectors that many of
the cases weren’t counted.
The actual report, in which the RCMP detailed
their investigation of VPD wrongdoings, was given directly
to the VPD, without disclosure to Pivot or the complainants.
The VPD, to date, has refused to provide the original
report.
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A
few days later, Pivot director John Conroy’s reaction
was widely quoted: “There were allegations of
bias, so the investigation was handed over to the RCMP.
Then the independent investigation is given back to
the group originally accused of bias. Is this really
a cover-up by the Vancouver police department?”
This quote was run alongside the cartoon entitled "Free
Ride" in The Province on April 6.
On April 7 The Vancouver
Sun said that the events surrounding the RCMP probe
of the Pivot document “suggest that we need to
conduct a thorough review of the internal investigation
process... That the RCMP and the VPD came to different
conclusions, reveal that the investigation process is
broken… An [independent review of the internal
investigation process] could highlight what works and
what doesn’t, and could determine the efficacy
of allowing police to investigate themselves. In doing
so, it could simultaneously protect both innocent members
of the public and innocent members of the police.”
Continued...
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