POLICE BIAS, INDIFFERENCE AND SLOPPY WORK

The above headline comes from today's Waterloo Region Record. The title of the story on pg. A3 is "Police bias let Pickton kill so many women:inquiry". The results of the inquiry by Commissioner Wally Oppal were released yesterday and they paint a damning picture of both the Vancouver Police and of the RCMP. The link I have to the Record story is actually from their paper of two days ago. I have no idea why today's incredible story isn't on-line yet.


"There was an institutional, systemic bias against the women... They were poor. They were aboriginal, they were drug-addicted and they were not taken seriously." All of this is bad enough but the incredibly sloppy and amateur investigation should have lead to dismissals if not outright criminal negligence charges. These police officers were paid to do a job. This was not a difficult whodunit. It was an in your face, outright obvious case that received short shrift from beginning to end. The serial killer Robert Pickton had been caught and charged in 1997 for the attempted murder of a prostitute but the prosecuters stayed the case. Mr. Pickton went on to kill at least nineteen more times. The surviving prostitute advised officers that she believed other sex workers had been to Pickton's property. Clearly she was ignored.

This inquiry was important but I wonder if it went far enough in determining the reasons for the incompetence of two police forces. I still wonder what parameters, credentials and or qualities are looked for when police officers are promoted from on the beat street work into investigative or detective work. What kind of supervision is there? What kind of accountability for results is there? How do two police forces overlook a man who admittedly violently assaulted a prostitute; during an ongoing years long investigation into a serial killer of prostitiutes?