This Web site began by recounting my own experience, but the site expanded as I kept finding information that the media weren’t reporting. For what it’s worth, here’s one of the original pages.
Some issues arising from my experience
with unaccountable cops and security guards
in Vancouver
Although my experience pales in comparison with in-custody deaths and some other cases of police misconduct, it does reflect several ongoing problems with private security guards, Vancouver police officers, cop-on-cop investigations and B.C.’s Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.
Private security guards in B.C. operate in a hazy world of poorly understood regulations and sometimes a deliberate disregard for the Criminal Code. Moreover some Vancouver police officers fully support illegal actions by security guards, including gratuitous violence.
In my case, two security guards handcuffed me, shoved me to the ground (with my hands cuffed behind my back), tried to push my face into the pavement and then forced me to kneel in a painful stress position for several minutes. They did so because I was standing on a public sidewalk writing down one of their licence plate numbers. (More info here.)
The three police officers who arrived on the scene displayed vehement hostility towards me right from the start. They flatly refused to investigate the assault. They ignored the security guards’ tough-guy demeanour and reinforced their support for the security guards by behaving respectfully to them and offensively to me.
The police also violated the Privacy Act by forcing me to give my name, home address and birthdate to the security guards. A Pivot Legal Society report later found that some Vancouver cops routinely violate the Privacy Act for the sake of security companies.
Before and after the police arrived the security guards acted with total confidence that the police would support them, suggesting that the compliant police response was routine. A Georgia Straight story has brought out the close relationship that police maintain with private security companies, most of which are owned or managed by ex-cops.
My formal complaint against the security guards went nowhere. The provincial staff who handle these complaints twice told me that the process is secret. After I wrote directly to B.C.’s solicitor general, he replied that no action was taken because the security guards were unlicensed and therefore immune from regulation.
After I lodged a formal complaint against the three cops, Vancouver Police Professional Standards officers conducted a thoroughly dishonest investigation. Officers Ian Upton and Rollie Woods covered up the fact that the three officers refused to investigate the assault and violated the Privacy Act. Upton and Woods also deliberately misinterpreted Section 494 (1) and (2) of the Criminal Code, claiming it gives security guards the right to arrest and handcuff people on a public street when the guards can explain their actions only with vague, contradictory allegations. This astonishingly stupid interpretation of straightforward legislation has to be deliberate.
Along with its other flaws, the VPD investigation was so obviously deficient that it must reflect an ongoing problem. Upton and Woods demonstrated the inherent corruption of police investigating police.
Their investigation was rubber-stamped by deputy police complaint commissioner Bruce M. Brown. Like Upton and Woods, he fully supported the three police officers and, by extension, the two security guards. Brown went to great lengths to rationalize contradictory statements made by the security guards about why they handcuffed me. Brown refused to act on the violation of the Privacy Act. He supported the dishonest interpretation Upton and Woods gave to Section 494 of the Criminal Code. He even praised Upton’s work, claiming it was “thorough and complete.”
Like the investigation by Upton and Woods, Brown’s review was so obviously flawed that it has to be deliberate and reflect an ongoing problem. Yet Dirk Ryneveld, who was then B.C.’s police complaint commissioner, fully supported Brown’s sloppy, dishonest review.
These are people who know what they can get away with. The security guards knew Vancouver police would support an illegal arrest and assault. The three cops knew Upton and Woods would support them. Upton and Woods knew that Brown would rubber-stamp their investigation. Brown knew the police complaint commissioner would support his review. The police complaint commissioner (and by extension all his staff) knew they can get away with almost anything because they answer to absolutely no one — not the provincial Ombudsperson nor anyone else.
But, as their work shows, OPCC staff are exactly the wrong people to be trusted with such immunity. Their work — and their background (they’re all ex-cops or people very close to the police) — shows they’re the wrong people for their current duties.
Yet the B.C. government is talking about expanding their duties. As a result of his inquiry into Robert Dziekanski’s Taser-related death, Thomas Braidwood has recommended B.C. create a civilian agency to investigate deaths and serious incidents involving both B.C Mounties and municipal police. Braidwood emphasized that the new agency (the Independent Investigation Office) should answer to the Ombudsperson. But the BC Liberal government responded that it might instead put the IIO under OPCC jurisdiction.
The OPCC would entirely defeat Braidwood’s intention — and the cause of police accountability.
Read how this started