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.

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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