‘Just scratching the surface’: Police misconduct database in Alberta touted as first of its kind in Canada

EDMONTON—A new database with hundreds of police-misconduct records going back decades has been launched in Alberta and is believed to be the first of its kind in the country.

Police all over the world have been under mounting scrutiny in recent years, as high-profile cases, such as the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in the United States, have sparked demands for reform, as well as more transparency.

the Alberta Police Misconduct Databaselaunched Tuesday, was cobbled together by a group of lawyers, academics, students and other professionals who used news articles, freedom-of-information requests, judicial decisions posted online on the CanLII site and publicly available disciplinary decisions to fill it out.

Devyn Ens, the project-lead for the database and a paralegal, says she began putting it together more than a year ago, with the information was loosely organized in a Google drive.

“It’s great that we had an opportunity here as a third party, a neutral third party, to come in and say, you know, look at all this data, look at all these incidents,” she said.

“The province should probably be doing something like this, on this scale, itself. It shouldn’t really be left up to third parties.”

The database currently has about 400 records of misconduct listed online. The majority are focused on the Edmonton Police Service, since that’s where most of the people involved in the project were based and gathering information. Ens said it will be updated as more information becomes available, including records for the RCMP.

Now, those who are involved in the project say they hope it moves the needle toward more police transparency in Canada, where many outfits have relied on internal disciplinary processes that critics say can be shrouded in secrecy.

Tom Engel, chair of the Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association’s policing committee, says some of the information in the database evolved from a banker’s box of files that were handed over to him from a predecessor some 20 years ago.

Since then, a network of people in Alberta’s law-enforcement community have shared what they could with one another about various police officers who had been found to have committed some type of misconduct over the years. It currently has information dating back to 1993.

Now, members of the public have a place to seek such information.

Still, the database is currently “just scratching the surface,” said Engel, since most rural areas of Alberta and RCMP misconduct findings aren’t in it yet.

“I don’t think that police services, generally, police unions, especially, and governments are all that interested in making public findings of misconduct against officers,” Engel said.

That’s a mistake, he said.

Keeping records of misconduct inaccessible hurts the credibility of those involved, Engel said, and hurts a public that has a massive interest in how police services handle officer misconduct.

Many other professions, including lawyers, have transparency around findings of misconduct. It’s something of a “double-standard,” said Engel, who noted that findings of misconduct against lawyers in Alberta are made public, and rightly so, since lawyers can do a lot of harm to people if they engage in misconduct.

“That is exactly the way it should be with every police service,” he said.

“I always hold that up and say, ‘Look, lawyers don’t run around arresting people and using force on them, maybe even killing people. Police officers do.’”

In a Tuesday statement sent to the Star, the Edmonton Police Service said it welcomed “any new mechanisms that promote understanding and awareness.”

“The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) believes transparency and police accountability are paramount to maintaining public trust,” said spokesperson Cheryl Sheppard.

Sheppard noted that media notices about criminally charged officers are mandated to go out and that disciplinary schedules, which are open to the media, are made public. Disciplinary decisions are made public as well, she added.

“Less than one per cent of all calls for service dispatched for police response in 2021 resulted in a complaint being made, as was the case for the last five years,” Sheppard said.

In a statement to the Star, the Calgary Police Service said it supports “the use of tools and resources that are meant to educate and provide accountability and transparency, especially around tough but necessary conversations of racial discrimination within law enforcement.

“Until we are able to examine the information and the details from the database, we are unable to comment on specifics, or speculate the overall impact to our service and its members and communities we serve,” it said.

After a number of years in Alberta — five years for serious offenses and three years for less serious ones — officers can have misconduct findings expunged from their records, Engel said. This database ensures that even those expunged records remain in the public domain.

There are other findings of misconduct made by police chiefs, in certain instances, and since those are internally deemed as being not serious, “that never gets disclosed,” Engel added.

“We try to convince the public that they should be demanding this of their politicians,” he said. “This database is going to help in that regard.”

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