Quebec police are refusing to answer questions from the oversight body investigating civilian deaths and serious injuries during police interventions. This is after
[Police] unions also challenged the obligation for officers to meet with … investigators. They argued that those rules infringed on their members’ constitutional rights to stay silent and not incriminate themselves.
It’s part of a national trend:
in British Columbia, police officers rarely co-operate with the Independent Investigations Office …, while they often only partly co-operate with independent oversight bodies in other provinces.
And they wonder why nobody trusts them anymore. It’s long past time to take away their civilian rights. As an officer of the law, they need to be held to a higher standard, and not be able to hide behind the rights designed to protect civilians from them.
It’s shitty, because many cops are reasonable, trustworthy people most of the time.
But policing organizations have sick cultures that ignore public safety - just look at the report from Nova Scotia’s mass casualty commission for proof of that.
It will be impossible to fix that culture as long as cops avoid external enquiries.
Meet more cops. That’s really, really not true. They’re mostly unhinged bullies. Like many sociopaths they can be charming and appear normal but they are not.