Number of police-involved shootings in BC down
Posted July 12, 2015 8:50 am.
Last Updated July 12, 2015 8:54 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The number of police-involved shootings in this province has gone down since an independent watchdog was put in place a few years ago but investigators can’t say what’s behind what appears to be a downward trend.
Over a one year period ending in April of 2014, there were 58 cases and that dropped to 49 the following year. And since April 1st of this year, there are nine open investigations from Fort St. James, to Port Hardy to Burnaby.
“These things seem to have a life of their own and to try to come up with explanations one way or the other… each one has its own set of facts and differences. There’s no way we could draw any kind of conclusion as to what would be the cause of the numbers going up or down at this point,” explains Ralph Krenz with the Independent Investigations Office.
He adds there are another nine cases pending which means the IIO hasn’t taken over yet. “They’re pending in the sense to determine whether there has been serious harm or a connection to a police action. So, there may be medical information or something else that we’re still waiting to determine whether it meets the test of the legislation that we maintain jurisdiction and complete an investigation.”
Krenz says the average notification time by police forces in BC is about 90 minutes following a serious incident. There is no one jurisdiction or city that has more police-involved shootings. “The RCMP, for example, is the largest police service in the province, so just by sheer numbers they would probably have the most.”
“We’d have to crunch the numbers because the nature of the serious harm or death or injury — there are differences in the scales of injury. At this point in time, we haven’t really done that detailed of an analysis. I would imagine as we approach year five and we have better amounts of data and larger volume of a data-set to make that analysis we’d be in a better position to make those kinds of observations.”
The IIO began operating in September 2012.
