In June 2022, Sunny Marriner from the Improving Institutional Accountability Project posed a question to Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners: If women who’ve been sexually assaulted aren’t coming forward to the police, and even when they do, there’s very rarely a conviction. Shouldn’t we try to figure out why? She made her case when she gave her presentation to the board. She told them that for every 100 sexual assaults that happen, 95 are never reported to police. Of the five that are reported, only one will make it to charges. From there, half don’t go to trial, and half again don’t result in a conviction. And sometimes the case will get thrown out with a judge saying something like “clearly, a drunk can consent.” For every 100 sexual assaults that happen, only 0.25 of them result in a conviction.
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Marriner suggested that the board start what’s known as a violence against women case review process, or VACR, which is the Accountability Project’s raison d’etre. In the VACR process, closed sexual assault case files are analysed by experts outside the police department with an eye to understanding and, ideally, improving the dismal conviction statistics. The board, via motion from then-commissioner Harry Critchley, decided this was a good idea and voted to direct the Halifax Regional Police to talk to Marriner’s organization and start an external VACR process.
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Talks between the HRP and Marriner were going well, and 15 months after the board directed this work to start in June 2022, there was a meeting on October 4, 2023. At that meeting commissioners expected to make decisions on implementing case review in the HRM. In that meeting, then-commissioners Lindell Smith and Critchley expressed frustration, with Smith telling then-acting-but-now-current police chief Don MacLean that his predecessor had promised action by this meeting. In response to Smith’s comments, the board learned that when the old police chief retired, the work on this file kind of stopped.
MacLean told the board that he was just getting up to speed. But thanks to some reports like this one from acting deputy chief Andrew Matthews, he could tell the board that the HRP had done a jurisdictional scan of other case review programs and found that “while increased workload and resource allocation challenges were acknowledged, agencies unanimously emphasize that the benefits far outweigh any associated drawbacks.” According to the police, in Halifax those drawbacks are about 40-80 hours of work per quarter; the large volume of sexual assault cases; and also that since the pool of sexual assault experts is so small, they may know the victims. That last one, according to Matthews a year earlier, had the potential for conflicts of interest.
Even though the board’s direction to the police was still Crichley’s motion to consider an external case review system, and even though they wouldn’t formally be directed to do so until March 2024, a few months earlier, in October 2023, MacLean told commissioners that the HRP had been working to adopt the RCMP’s Sexual Assault Investigations Review Committee model. He told the board that their jurisdictional scan of other police forces found “there’s a wide spectrum of third-party organizations that are being used in different locations and my understanding is that that’s the decision that’s actually made by the person that actually runs the actual program.” He also told the board that he’s been working with the RCMP to try and figure out how the HRP should decide which cases to bring to the RCMP’s review committee, because if they had do all of the sexual assault files, the HRP wouldn’t have the capacity.
What this timeline shows is that as the board was waiting to make a decision on which VACR model to bring to Halifax, it seems like the HRP had already decided. Because even though the board would direct the police to look into which model was best a few months later in August 2024, a report from Matthews to the board said that “in the meantime, HRP has been working collaboratively with RCMP on integrating files investigated by the Integrated Sexual Assault Investigation Team (SAIT) into the RCMP H Division (Nova Scotia) Sexual Assault Investigations Review Committee (SAIRC) process.”
Marriner, often cited as the reason this work is happening at all, has gone public with her disappointment at the police going in this new direction. In May 2024, Marriner wrote a report explaining the many issues with the RCMP’s SAIRC model. In June 2024, she told the Halifax Examiner she was disappointed the city had decided to abandon the VACR model she had pitched, and Critchley had asked for, in favour of the RCMP’s SAIRC model.
The issue, in brief, is this: The Board of Police Commissioners exists to provide “civilian governance and oversight for the Halifax Regional Police on behalf of Regional Council.” They have to do this because historically, the police have been pretty bad at holding themselves accountable. There are examples of this dereliction of accountability from the Wortley Report, to the Mass Casualty Commission, to the time the police lost all their evidence, to the time they lied about using AI surveillance or lied to the Board of Police Commissioners about fixing issues identified by an IT security audit. Hell, there was even the time when the RCMP showed up to the press conference about the Mass Casualty Commission report without even reading the fucking thing.
The fact the Board of Police Commissioners exists at all is due to the dire need for independent, external oversight of the activities of police. Instead of doing that, at their latest meeting—on Wednesday Dec 4, 2024—the board voted to let the police be in charge of their own oversight.
Here’s how this new system, the RCMP’s SAIRC, will work for Halifax police: If one of the rare sexual assault cases that gets reported to police does not go to trial, it will be placed in a pile of cases that are eligible for review. The police will then decide which of those cases should go for further review—using their discretion to pick some cases to bring forward to a panel of experts. The experts on the panel are chosen by the police. The police will make notes about what those experts have to say. The police will take those notes and write a report. The police will then present the report to the Board of Police Commissioners.
But the problem with this can be found in one of Matthew’s reports to the Board: “there is a potential for conflicts of interest to arise in advocate case reviews when advocates may become aware of reports of people they have knowledge of.” Matthews is correct, which also means there is massive potential for conflict of interest to arise when police choose (or don’t choose) cases involving their co-workers. Or when they write reports about their co-workers’ mistakes opportunities for improvement.
The good news is that Wednesday’s vote to start this case review program was a vote to start a pilot project. The police will report back in six months to a year on how the program is going, and there will be time then for the board to correct this mistake. But don’t hold your breath: Does anyone want to take any bets on how glowing the police report about the police’s work on cases the police have selected will be? And besides, it’s extremely unlikely the board will change direction to the external review process as first directed by Critchley’s motion. It would require the Board to think critically about the RCMP’s SAIRC process and understand that what they approved makes it almost impossible for them to do any oversight into the police’s handling of sexual assault cases. And if they understood that, they wouldn’t have approved this pilot in the first place.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.
