After the public broadcaster took the police to court, HRP admits it should have released information
Police and Public Trust is a project of CBC News Atlantic’s investigative unit. It looks at the police complaint and discipline systems in the region, which are usually kept secret. Journalists use access to information laws and, in some cases, go to court to get discipline records and other information.
In an agreement that was just approved by a Nova Scotia judge, Halifax Regional Police said they shouldn’t have kept the CBC in the dark about their internal disciplinary decisions.
Last year, CBC went to court to find out more about internal discipline at the department. They did this to better inform the public during a time when police behavior was under a lot of scrutiny.
In the agreement between HRP and CBC, which was approved by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge on July 27, the department admitted that it had not done a thorough enough review of the records when it refused to release them last year in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
It also said that it has a duty to make “every reasonable effort” to help a person who asks for information, but that it took two reviews and a court case to meet that duty.
- Inside the fight to make police disciplinary records public in Halifax
In Halifax, police have been criticized for things like the death of Corey Rogers while he was in custody, a traffic stop where Kayla Borden said she was profiled because of her race, and how they handled the rape case of Carrie Low.
In each of these high-profile cases, the internal decision about punishment was eventually made public. In most other cases, however, the internal decision is not known.
El Jones, a professor and activist at Mount Saint Vincent University, said that she sees problems with the way Nova Scotia and Canada give people access to information.
“Getting access to records shouldn’t be hard, unless there’s a really good reason why we shouldn’t have them,” she said.
Jones was in charge of the committee that gave the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners a report about what it means to cut money from the police. She said that records of discipline can help people understand what kinds of discipline problems are happening and see if there are any patterns.
“We can’t really get a full picture if we don’t have access to these kinds of records,” she said, referring to the movement to re-examine the role of police.
“How can we even start to figure out where reforms need to be made or where resources need to be put, if that’s what you want to do, if we don’t have a clear picture of where the failures are?
“I think some of that is captured in these kinds of records.”
Police and public trus
The CBC’s Atlantic investigative unit wanted to find out what kinds of complaints people were making to police and how departments were dealing with them. As part of a project called Police and Public Trust, journalists in each of the Atlantic provinces asked for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
In Nova Scotia, CBC News used access-to-information laws to ask every municipal police department in the province for 11 years of discipline decisions.
Every force gave the records, except Halifax. In July 2022, Halifax refused to give out any information at all.
As is the right of people who want to get access to information, CBC went to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia.
But before a judge could hear the case, a lawyer for the police and city reached a deal with CBC. The police slowly gave out more and more information over the course of a year. Cell phone users: Check out the file (PDF KB) (Text KB)CBC is not in charge of content from other sources.
The CBC thought that locations, pronouns, and even inanimate objects were redacted too much in early versions of the information that was released. This made it hard to understand some of the cases. Both CBC and HRP agreed that the names of the complainants and the officers could be changed to protect their privacy.
CBC kept pushing until it thought the police and city had done enough to meet their responsibilities and enough information had been shared. When that happened, both sides agreed to end the case with a consent order.
The case between the public broadcaster and the municipal police is over now that this agreement has been signed. The police in Halifax agreed to pay CBC $1,500 to cover costs.
After the case was over, the department didn’t want to do an interview, but acting public information officer Melissa MacInnis gave a statement.
“HRP knows and agrees that there are more and more people who want access to information about policing, and we have a responsibility to look at our processes and how we’ve done things in the past,” she wrote.
“At the same time, neither our resources nor our systems for getting information have kept up. We are looking at how we can help this area better with the resources we already have and at what other supports might help.”
The statement didn’t say why HRP didn’t look at the records well enough or why they decided to keep them secret in the first place.
Information accesse
CBC got written decisions from more than 120 Halifax files. Most of the decisions came from complaints that were handled between 2019 and 2021. The police looked into all of the complaints and found that most of them were not true.
When senior officers looked into the complaints, they often found that there was either no evidence or not enough evidence to back up the claims.
- Over the last ten years, Nova Scotians have filed hundreds of complaints against the police. Before a CBC investigation, most people didn’t know what happened to them.
CBC talked to Tricia Ralph, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Nova Scotia, about how important the access-to-information system is and how hard it is to go to court to get documents released.
Ralph said that Nova Scotians need to know about their government, but going to court may be too expensive for many of them.
Ralph said, “It’s up to the applicant to get the resources, time, and money it takes to go to court and fight their provincial government or a local government to get access to the records.”
“It seems pretty clear to me that it’s a lot harder for a regular Nova Scotian to do that than it is for a big government to do that.”
Ralph said that she has been asking for updated laws to make it easier for people in Nova Scotia to get information. The laws we have now have not been changed since 1993.
Ralph said that her office and all offices that have to follow access-to-information laws are having a hard time keeping up with the amount of work that needs to be done. He said that these offices should have more money and staff to help them out.
“When someone asks for information, it’s often done in a different way than when the laws were written. It’s not like you can just go into someone’s desk and take a few notes and papers. She said, “Sometimes it’s tens of thousands of pages of emails and text messages.”
Ralph said that organizations may sometimes think that requests for access are not important and that other work should come first.
“But it’s important to remember that as a society, we’ve decided that it’s important for Nova Scotians and Canadians to know what their elected officials are doing, and that’s written into the law. And it’s important that we keep respecting and following these laws,” she said.
Cell phone users: Check out the file (PDF KB) (Text KB)CBC is not in charge of content from other sources.