By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times
TORONTO, Canada -- The harsh image of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers raiding a newspaper reporter’s home and confiscating her files on a criminal warrant to investigate leaks last week roiled this country, which is proud of its heritage as a global proponent of human rights and civil liberties.
But it was just the latest example of public discomfort over a series of episodes in which the police have been accused of abusive practices or corruption.
Police officers have been accused of robbery of jewelry and drugs and of rigging evidence to put suspects behind bars in Toronto, of dumping intoxicated Canadian Indians on isolated snowy roads to freeze to death in the prairies, and of abusing drug addicts in Vancouver.
Most Canadian police officers still appear to be as polite as the population at large. But the arrest two weeks ago of six Toronto narcotics officers on a variety of brutality and corruption charges has shocked prosecutors and local criminal lawyers.
“Each and every day in some courtroom in Toronto, some police officer gives perjured testimony, in my opinion, based on over a decade of experience,” said Edward Sapiano, a lawyer whose database of accusations against Toronto officers spurred an official investigation into a city narcotics squad.
The Toronto scandal has followed a pattern that has emerged in New York and other U.S. cities in recent years in which officers succumbed to the temptations of the huge amounts of money involved in the drug trade, while internal department investigative units were inadequate to monitor them.
One affidavit released by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police task force investigating the narcotics squad, which has been in existence since 1995, included a report that a narcotics dealer passed a lie-detector test in which he reported that several officers had stolen the equivalent of $50,000 in jewelry and cash when they raided his home.
In another, officers were reported to have stolen $70,000 from a safe-deposit box using a fake search warrant.
Canada is policed by a web of local and provincial police forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a national agency with a longtime international reputation for efficiency.
The RCMP image was bruised last week when officers raided the home and office of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill, who obtained secret documents about a Canadian citizen arrested in the United States as an al-Qaida suspect and expelled to Syria.
Prime Minister Paul Martin was stunned by the raids, which were intended to find the source of the leaked secret documents, and he called for a review of the law protecting government secrets that was the basis for the search warrants.
But O’Neill’s computer files and other personal documents still have not been returned to her, and newspaper editorials and opposition politicians are questioning whether civilian control of the police is adequate.
“It is starting to look as if the RCMP is out of control,” The Toronto Star said Friday in an editorial. “It needs its political masters to call it to account for its outrageous actions.”
Such commentary is rare in a country in which the brave Mountie on horseback in his smart red uniform is one of the primary national icons.
“While brutality and fabricating evidence is fairly widespread, we really don’t want to look too closely into police corruption because corruption is kind of a Canadian taboo,” said Jean-Paul Brodeur, a criminologist at the University of Montreal.
But that attitude is being tested.
A much publicized, continuing official investigation into the 1990 death of Neil Stonechild, an Indian teenager found frozen on the outskirts of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, has found that the Saskatoon police have followed a practice of picking up drunken Indian men from the street, transporting them away and abandoning them in the snow. Over the last decade or so, at least four Indian men have been found frozen to death in the snow around Saskatoon. Human Rights Watch, an international human-rights group, issued a report last May documenting cases of police abuse in Vancouver against drug addicts, including beatings, illegal searches and arbitrary arrests. But Mayor Larry Campbell disputed the report’s conclusions and methodology.
Last week, the British Columbia police complaint commissioner called for a public inquiry into the 1998 death by exposure of a drunken Indian man after police officers released him from custody and dumped him in an alley.