Halifax police agrees withholding information was wrong, settles legal case with CBC
CBC
Police and Public Trust, a CBC News Atlantic investigative unit project, scrutinizes the largely off-limits police complaint and discipline systems across the region. Journalists are using access to information laws, and in some cases court challenges, to obtain discipline records and data.
Halifax Regional Police has acknowledged it should not have withheld information about its internal discipline decisions from the CBC, according to an agreement approved recently by a Nova Scotia judge.
CBC went to court last year to get information about internal discipline at the department, in an effort to better inform the public during a time of close scrutiny of police conduct.
In the agreement between HRP and CBC, approved July 27 by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice, the department admitted it did not adequately review the records when it refused to release them last year following a freedom-of-information request.
It also acknowledged it has a duty to make "every reasonable effort" to help a person requesting information, but that it took two reviews and a court process for the department to fulfil that obligation.
In Halifax, police have been criticized in cases such as the death in custody of Corey Rogers, a traffic stop where Kayla Borden alleged she was racially profiled, and the handling of Carrie Low's rape case.
In each of these high-profile cases, an internal discipline decision eventually became public — but in the vast majority of other cases, the internal decision is not known.
Mount Saint Vincent University professor and activist El Jones said she sees problems with the Nova Scotian and Canadian access-to-information system.
"Access to records, unless there's a really compelling reason for us not to have them, should not be something that's a struggle," she said.
Jones chaired the committee that delivered a report defining defunding the police to the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners. She said discipline records can help the public understand what kind of discipline issues are coming up and determine whether there are any patterns.
"We can't really get a full picture if we don't have access to these kind of records," she said, referencing the movement to re-examine the role of police.
"How are we supposed to even begin to understand where reforms need to be made — or where resources need to be put, if that's what you want to do — if we don't really have a good picture of where the failures are?
"I think some of that is captured in these kind of records."
CBC's Atlantic investigative unit wanted to see what kind of complaints police were receiving from the public and how departments handled them. In each Atlantic province, journalists filed freedom-of-information requests as part of a project called Police and Public Trust.
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