Inside the fight to make Halifax police discipline records public

When it comes to the way police forces interact with the public, the last few years have been the social equivalent of an earthquake. 

"The grounds have shifted," says Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology at the University of Alberta and president-elect of the Canadian Sociological Association. 

"There's been a fundamental seismic change in people's expectations, in beliefs, in attitudes towards the police."

Police forces in North America have been criticized and scrutinized after the deaths of people like George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Pacquet, and Chantal Moore. The Toronto Police Service apologized for disproportionate use of force on people of colour earlier this year, and Halifax Regional Police (HRP) made a public apology for the use of street checks on Black Nova Scotians in 2019.

CBC's Atlantic Investigative Unit began a project in the spring of 2022 to examine the police complaints process in Atlantic Canada. 

That's the process by which any member of the public can file a complaint against a police officer. 

Some people who have used that process in the past include Carrie Low, who said Halifax police failed to properly investigate a rape committed against her. 

Other cases include a man who complained he was wrongfully Tasered and arrested on Quinpool Road in Halifax in December 2019. 

Another case is that of Kayla Borden, who complained that she was racially profiled by Halifax police after being pulled over while driving.

CBC News journalists filed access-to-information requests to the RCMP for the entire Atlantic region as well as all municipal forces. The only exception was municipal forces in P.E.I., where discipline information is already publicly accessible. 

In Nova Scotia, CBC News asked to see 11 years' worth of discipline decisions resulting from public complaints made to each department in order to understand what the complaint was, the result of the internal investigation, and in cases of substantiated officer misconduct, what kind of discipline was applied. 

All of the municipal police forces in Nova Scotia responded. Seven agreed to disclose the requested information with some redactions, and two said they had no records for the requested time period due to their file-retention policy.

Halifax Regional Police, which is by far the largest municipal police department in the province, responded to the access-to-information application. However, HRP said it would not disclose any information on the grounds that it could endanger the safety of an officer or some other person, and that the request was an unreasonable invasion of privacy. 

According to annual reports from the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner — an arm's-length agency funded by the Nova Scotia government — there were more than 900 complaints against HRP from members of the public for that time period.