Pubdate: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC) Copyright: 2005 The Vancouver Sun Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477 Author: Camille Bains, Canadian Press POLICE CLEARED OF BEATING, TORTURE, KIDNAP ALLEGATIONS 56 Complainants Can't All Be Lying, Society Responds An RCMP investigation has cleared Vancouver police of 56 complaints including alleged torture, kidnapping and assault, Police Chief Jamie Graham said Thursday as he slammed the group that demanded the examination. An angry Graham said the Pivot Legal Society pressured the RCMP to investigate alleged Vancouver police misconduct between May 2001 and May 2003 by using slick tactics to draw media attention. "They managed to leverage this coverage by putting pressure on the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner to force an investigation that would eventually span 18 months and cost more than a million dollars," Graham said. On top of that, the Vancouver police department spent an estimated $200,000 and three to four months doing its own probe of the "libellous and slanderous charges," he said. Pivot, an activist group for drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless in the Downtown Eastside, produced 56 sworn affidavits from people who said they were illegally searched, arrested on insufficient grounds and mishandled by police. "The evidence simply does not exist to substantiate these alarming and irresponsible allegations," Graham told a news conference. "Both the RCMP and the Vancouver police investigators concluded there was not a single case of criminal activity by a Vancouver police officer, not one," he said. "I find it very disturbing that this protest group purposely chose to make these far-fetched accusations with little or no evidence to substantiate them." John Conroy, a Pivot director, said there's an obvious bias when the police department is investigating its own officers. "We know there was substantial non-cooperation with the RCMP investigation," Conroy said, adding documents provided to Pivot by the Mounties suggest 60 police officers out of 100 didn't co-operate during the probe. Conroy said not everyone who complained could have been lying about being mistreated by police. "It's hard to believe that they're all making up a story." The findings of the two investigations means disadvantaged people won't report police misconduct, he said. "They're going to once again say, 'What's the point of complaining -- we're just the people down on the street, nobody believes us and there's no remedy when police beat us up.'" Graham acknowledged that the two investigations revealed the department had some problems with administrative procedures. The department is taking immediate steps to deal with the issues, he said, citing the example of two officers searching a drug suspect's knapsack without sufficient grounds. The Vancouver police have been under fire for police misconduct before. Last year, six officers pleaded guilty in Provincial Court to assault for the January 2003 beating of three suspected drug dealers they'd driven to Stanley Park. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin