Outside of a handful of traffic tickets, I have had almost no direct contact with police in my lifetime. Yet, in my darker moments, I have always suspected that it would be fairly easy to run afoul of them, be it through an angry word or gesture that could, with an ill-trained or unbalanced officer, quickly escalate into something of tragic proportions. Let's just say that, with so well-documented cases of police abuse of their authority, some of which I have dealt with in this blog, I have but a guarded trust in them.
It was therefore with considerable and justifiable consternation I read the following headline in The Hamilton Spectator:
Police board won't open fatal shooting reports: Hamilton Police Board decides — in secret — to keep secret lessons from police shootings
In a closed-door meeting this week, the Hamilton Police Services Board decided to keep secret a series of reports into fatal shootings and woundings of civilians by police officers.
In the wake of last summer's fatal police shooting of Steve Mesic, The Spectator asked for the reports in an effort to understand what Hamilton police had learned from their internal investigations (as opposed to the SIU's criminal investigations) of the 11 civilian shooting incidents police have been involved in over the past decade.
Not only was this decision made in secret, but it also appears to have been influenced by the heavy-handed tactics of Hamilton Police Chief Glenn De Caire, who, in an apparent effort to stop the board from voting to release the sought-after information, issued this threat:
... releasing the reports would require him to "sanitize" his reports in the future, leaving board members less well informed about shooting incidents.
Given the very questionable shooting of Steve Mesic and others in the recent past, one cannot escape the conclusion that both Chief De Caire and the Police Services Board have things to hide from the public:
Several police services — Ottawa and Durham, for example — release all or part of the reports and discuss them in open sessions. In Hamilton that has never been the case; the 2012 reports for example are summarized in a single sentence in the Professional Standards annual report.
To state the obvious, how can concealing information that the public should have a perfect right to be justified in an open and democratic society?
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