BC is planning to change the police complaints process. In theory, this is good news: the complaints process in this province is widely criticized. It’s so bad that the Pivot Legal Society and the BC Civil Liberties Association have been boycotting the existing process because they know it doesn’t work.

Some of the proposed changes are major improvements that civil liberties advocates have been demanding for a long time:

External investigations will be mandatory when a person has died or been seriously injured while in police custody.

Under the bill, officers being investigated will have to provide statements within five days of a request or risk being charged. The legislation will also require complaint investigators to report any possible misconduct by officers who are not the focus of a particular investigation.

Unfortunately, though, there are also some very serious problems with the proposals. For example, groups like Pivot and BCCLA, which play a big role in keeping the cops accountable, would be sidelined:

David Eby, spokesman for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the changes target watchdog groups.

He said such organizations can no longer file a third-party complaint with the commission if a witness or someone directly affected by an incident has already filed one.

Mr. Eby said that means his association could no longer file complaints about in-custody deaths, for example, to ensure an investigation is done.

He said the commissioner’s office now discloses information to the group about an investigation and its outcome, but that will no longer happen under the proposed changes.

And then there’s this:

Mr. Eby also criticized the new mediation process that requires a complainant to participate in an information process with the police officer against whom the complaint was filed.

In other words, the cops will be given an opportunity to intimidate their victims into withdrawing their complaint. I was at a conference a couple of years ago where the Vancouver Police Department’s complaints commissioner talked about how he’d moved the complaints office out of VPD headquarters precisely to avoid this sort of problem.

So, we’ve got a few good changes, a few bad changes that will make things worse — and nothing at all to change the sick institutional culture of our police departments, where harassing the poor is a matter of official policy; where cops are taught to stand up for one another even when they do horrible things; where misdeeds are defended and covered up at the highest levels; where police brutality is treated as less serious than violence committed by ordinary citizens, rather than as more serious (since it’s an abuse of power).