Investigations into police-involved shootings not transparent enough, Murray Sinclair says
CBC
Former senator Murray Sinclair says Manitoba's Independent Investigation Unit is neither independent enough nor transparent enough to properly investigate police-involved fatal shootings.
As a result, the former associate chief judge of Manitoba does not trust any of the recent rulings made by the IIU, he said.
"I don't have a lot of faith in the Independent Investigation Unit that's in place right now to look into police officer conduct," Sinclair told CBC Manitoba.
"I can't think of an instance where they've truly done a transparent thorough investigation that has convinced me … that their decision is the right one in the circumstances."
Sinclair spoke to the CBC about the 30th anniversary of the release of the report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry this month. He was co-commissioner of the inquiry, which was mandated to probe the role that racism played in the 1971 homicide of Cree teenager Helen Betty Osborne and the 1988 police shooting of Indigenous leader John Joseph Harper.
The report made 296 recommendations to guide the province's efforts to reduce the presence of racism in the justice system.
It included a recommendation to create a special investigative unit, independent of both police and the Crown, to handle any complaints "where possible criminal acts are alleged against the police, or where a person dies or suffers serious injury in an incident involving a police officer," the report says.
In 2015, the province created the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba.
In the past two years, the unit has investigated three separate police-involved shootings. In two of the three, the report recommended that no charges be laid against the officer involved. A report into the third case has not yet been released.
"It's the lack of transparency, I think, that really drives me around the bend," said Sinclair, who also chaired the more recent national Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Specifically, he's concerned that the evidence presented is filtered through the police agency under investigation.
The unit's information comes from "what they're told by the police" and "what they're told by witnesses who are called by the police to give them reports," Sinclair said.
"They don't reveal who they spoke to. They don't reveal what the evidence is that they've gathered."
He also says those doing the investigations and those being investigated are — in one way or another — too close to each other for comfort.
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