Canadian Police Want to Create a System to Track Bad Cops

Canada's federal police service plans to pull in a renowned American scholar to help it deal with cops behaving badly.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) posted a contract to a government tendering website this week, seeking experts in the field of police accountability who can help train the federal police force on how to keep its nearly 30,000-strong force in line.

It's all a part of their plan to implement the National Early Intervention System (NEIS), which is widely used by law enforcement in the US, Australia and New Zealand.

As the government announcement reads, "these systems are designed to identify officer performance issues early and assess the need for an intervention."

From there, management can take "a series of actions or steps to assist a member in a positive and supportive way such as training, counseling or personal development."

That is a very nice way of saying that the NEIS will be cataloging officers' misdeeds and allowing management to flag trouble spots and discipline them accordingly. And, if things go further, to take more serious action.

"An early intervention system is a data-based management tool that scans incidents, such as public complaints and police motor vehicle accidents, and produces a flag if a member has exceeded a certain threshold of activity over a specific period of time," an RCMP spokesperson told VICE News.

"These incidents by themselves may or may not indicate the need for an intervention; however, when analyzing indicators such as public complaints in conjunction with other sources of information, the combination may present a pattern in need of an intervention before it escalates."

The contract being sought isn't to develop the system itself. Instead, the RCMP is looking for "a widely known and quoted expert on policing and early intervention systems for law enforcement agencies."

That's where Samuel Walker comes in.

Walker is a retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who has authored 14 books on policing and police accountability — including one specifically on policing and race relations in America — and has won awards from a litany of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

He's already been flagged for the contract, valued at $25,000. The work includes training supervisors and members on how the system is supposed to work, increasing awareness inside the service about the NEIS, and providing recommendations on how to run the program better.

"Following discussion with other police agencies and extensive research, Professor Samuel Walker is the only known supplier that meets the minimum essential requirements," the government's note reads. If someone else thinks they're capable, they have until June 30 to apply.

The RCMP told VICE News, however, that they went with an American for good reason.

"[The system] is established in the US and still relatively new in Canada, which is why the only recognized expert the RCMP could find was in the United States," a spokesperson said in an email.

While Canada's cops haven't faced as many high-profile incidents as their American brethren — who have been caught on camera doing everything from apparently stealing pot candy to pointing their weapon at teens at a pool party to shooting and killing a 12-year-old with a toy pellet gun — the RCMP have had their share of controversy.

A handful of officers were chastised after they fired their Tasers at Robert Dziekanski, a Polish immigrant, in a Vancouver airport, which tragically led to his death. In one of the biggest scandals for the Mounties, hundreds of women have come forward to allege that sexual harassment and sexual assault are rampant in the force.

One of the officers involved in Dziekanski's death is being sentenced on Monday for a perjury conviction. Constable Kwesi Millington was also found guilty of colluding with his fellow officers prior to testifying at an inquest into the death. His colleague, former RCMP corporal Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, had a conviction of obstruction of justice under his belt before the fatal Taser incident at the Vancouver airport, as well as an incident where he struck and killed a cyclist.

The announcement of the system has been met with cautious optimism.

Related: Cops Are Still Disproportionately Arresting People of Color for Pot Crimes in Colorado 

"It sounds like a positive idea," Josh Paterson, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, told VICE News. "One of the big problems with the RCMP, as far as we can tell, is the tracking of complaints and disciplinary incidences across the force is very poor."

The CBC filed a request to obtain public complaints against RCMP officers, prior to Dziekanski's death, and it took the force four years to produce the records, because they didn't have a central database to track the reports.

"They couldn't tell if they had any endemic problem, as far as we can tell, because they weren't tracking it in any meaningful way," said Paterson.

The RCMP has begun to track officer use-of-force incidents in a central database. They, however, have refused to release the data to the public.

The Subject Behavior / Officer Response Database is a collection of data detailing every time an RCMP officer has deployed force. Currently, however, the only details made public from that database are statistics on how often officers have used Tasers in the field.

The database also contains information on how frequently officers employ physical force, their baton, and their weapons, but repeated requests by VICE News for that data have been refused.

"While the RCMP is not currently producing use of force reports, the analysis of Subject Behavior/Officer Response (SB/OR) reports assists in the development of [conducted energy weapons] and use of force policies and training," a spokesperson told VICE News in 2014. "Data extracted from the SB/OR database reveals that less than 0.09% of RCMP encounters results in use of force."

Paterson does not expect the RCMP to proactively release that data, which he thinks may shed some light on racial bias in policing. "The RCMP doesn't want to talk about it," he said.

Oppositely, the FBI is much more forthcoming with statistics regarding their interactions with the public. Local police services, however, are generally less so.

Paterson says police services should want to release the data.

"It would improve practice over time, if this information was made public."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter: @justin_ling

Watch the VICE News episode of Talking Heads: A Look Back at the Violence in Ferguson.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the BC Civil Liberties Association filed a request for complaints about the RCMP. In fact, it was the CBC.