RCMP official who offered rosy review of Pickton investigation to testify

By: James Keller, The Canadian Press

Posted: 01/10/2012 12:41 PM

VANCOUVER - The author of an internal RCMP review that concluded the force's Robert Pickton investigation went smoothly and that none of the officers involved would do anything differently is set to explain that controversial assessment.

Supt. Bob Williams testifies Wednesday at the public inquiry into the case. He penned a 28-page document for the RCMP in 2002 in response to a civil lawsuit from the families of two of Pickton's victims.

The Vancouver Police Department has shown some contrition in recent years, admitting the force made mistakes and offering several public apologies, including at the ongoing public inquiry.

But the RCMP has neither apologized nor admitted to any mistakes, instead insisting questions of what went wrong are for the inquiry to answer.

Williams, then an inspector working in Edmonton, interviewed key figures inside the RCMP's investigation of Pickton in Port Coquitlam, the suburban community east of Vancouver where the serial killer's notorious farm was located.

Williams wrote investigators were "dedicated and diligent" and cautioned "we should not be critical of the strides that investigators took" to determine whether Pickton was a viable suspect.

"We (Williams and his review team) are of the opinion the RCMP acted appropriately and followed-up investigative leads with respect to Robert William Pickton," says the report, tabled as an exhibit at the inquiry last fall.

"There is little doubt that the RCMP attempted to exhaust all investigative avenues relative to the suspect. ... Based on our experience and from the interviews conducted, it is suffice to say that nothing would have changed dramatically if those involved had to do it over again."

Specifically, Williams concluded:

— The RCMP considered Pickton its top suspect in the missing women investigation and shared that opinion with the Vancouver police and other departments.

— There was "excellent" co-operation between the RCMP and the Vancouver police department.

— Any delays in the Pickton investigation were the result of several other high-profile cases that were competing for the Coquitlam detachment's limited resources.

— The RCMP was the driving force in the creation of a joint missing women task force with the Vancouver police, named Project Evenhanded.

— Pickton was not the only suspect.

Williams' relative rosy assessment stands at odds with earlier testimony at the inquiry, specifically from Deputy Chief Doug LePard of the Vancouver police, who authored his own internal review that was publicly released in 2010.

Vancouver police and the RCMP each headed up separate but related investigations — Vancouver into the disappearances of sex workers, and RCMP into information implicating Pickton, who had already been accused of trying to kill a sex worker there in 1997.

LePard's extensive report was critical of both forces, but the document saved its harshest criticism for the RCMP.

The Vancouver officer said RCMP investigators were too quick to discount information from several informants who claimed Pickton was murdering prostitutes and disposing of their bodies at his pig farm. All those claims turned out to be horrifyingly accurate.

LePard wrote that the Mounties resisted information from informants even though their allegations were similar to the 1997 attempted murder case. Prosecutors stayed charges against Pickton then.

DNA from two other missing women was on clothing seized from Pickton during that investigation, which sat for years in an evidence locker and was never re-examined by the RCMP until after Pickton's arrest.

The RCMP allowed the Pickton file to remain idle for months in 1999 even as Pickton rose to the top of the suspect list, wrote Lepard.

LePard testified at the inquiry that the RCMP was slow to embrace the idea of a joint investigation, which he said was actually spearheaded by a Vancouver police officer.

And LePard was especially critical of an interrogation in 2001 in which two inexperienced officers interviewed Pickton without first consulting with Vancouver police.

In the interview LePard characterized as poorly planned and sloppy, Pickton consented to a search of his farm, but the RCMP never took him up on the offer.

In the end, the RCMP and Vancouver police department's separate investigations into missing women and Pickton failed to crack the case.

Pickton was essentially caught by accident when a junior RCMP officer with less than two years on the force followed up on a tip about illegal firearms and obtained a search warrant.

That officer brought members from the missing women investigation along, where they immediately stumbled upon the butchered remains and discarded belongings of missing women, setting off a massive search of the farm.

Pickton was eventually convicted of six counts of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole for at least 25 years.

The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm, and he claimed to have killed 49.

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Police repression puts sex workers at risk: experts

The Canadian Press

Date: Monday Jan. 2, 2012 10:43 AM ET

MONTREAL — It wasn't so long ago that prostitutes were a common sight on Montreal's historic lower Main, standing on street corners in high-heeled boots.

For years, the intersection of Ste. Catherine Street and St. Laurent Boulevard was the epicentre of the city's bustling red light district.

Over the past decade, though, nearly all the strip clubs and street-level prostitution has been pushed to the outskirts to make way for a city-backed development of office buildings and trendy shops.

The changes may be good for business -- but they also have sex workers worried about their own safety.

Repression from police has pushed prostitution into more dangerous, isolated parts of the city, making sex workers more vulnerable to violence, said Anna-Louise Crago a sex worker and a clinical coordinator at a sex-trade support and advocacy group known as Stella.

"There's incredibly heavy police repression against any sex workers trying to work on the street in this area," said Crago.

"Criminalization and police repression against sex workers, our clients, and our work places make it impossible to work in safer conditions."

Experts say the same pattern of repression has been repeated in other cities across Canada, making prostitution a more dangerous job.

In Vancouver, police engaged in a decades-long campaign to move prostitutes into the more isolated Downtown Eastside, where serial killer Robert Pickton spent years hunting his victims, said John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University.

That made it easy for Pickton and other predators to target women, said Lowman, who testified at the Pickton inquiry.

"One of the things that just about everybody agrees on is that the current laws don't make sense," he said in an interview. "It's a problem that needs a fundamental solution."

It's not illegal to be a prostitute in Canada, but many of the activities associated with prostitution are classified as criminal offences.

Lowman said the ambivalence has caused confusion in the courts and made it difficult for police to do their job.

Efforts to protect sex workers often appear to be at odds with the police's attempt to crack down on prostitution.

That seemed to be the case in December when Ottawa police chief Vern White, faced with a possible serial killer targeting prostitutes, warned them to be extra cautious.

Advocacy groups countered that it was the force's very own tactics of aggressive policing and repression that had forced them into more dangerous situations.

A study by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS suggests that's the case.

The report, based on interviews with more than 200 sex workers between 2006 and 2008, found a link between prostitutes who reported having been harassed or assaulted by a police officer and the likelihood they were victims of violence in future.

In Montreal, Stella has recorded between 50 and 60 cases of violence, including rape, brutal beatings, and attempted murder against sex workers annually.

Yet only four or five cases reach the courts every year. The victims are often afraid to press charges, said Emilie Laliberte, director of Stella.

Across the country, 171 female prostitutes were murdered between 1991 and 2004, and that 45 per cent of those cases went unsolved, a 2006 Statistics Canada report found.

But because many such killings go unreported, that number is "almost certainly lower than the real figures," a House of Commons sub-committee concluded in 2006.

Since then, of course, grim details have emerged about Robert Pickton, who murdered sex workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Vancouver area.

The debate about how to cut back on the violence may end up being settled by the courts.

The federal and Ontario governments are trying to overturn a lower court ruling in which a judge struck down three laws against prostitution, saying they force people in the sex trade to choose between obeying the law and keeping themselves safe.

Sex workers argue that the laws prevent them from working indoors where it's safer, taking time to talk to a potential client to assess the risk they pose and hiring bodyguards.

The Harper government maintains that protecting victims of exploitation and supporting the enforcement of existing laws should be a priority.

Whatever the Appeal Court decides, its likely the ruling will be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The top court's ruling in support of the Vancouver safe-injection site Insite has given advocates cause for optimism. They are hopeful the Harper government will be forced to make changes to the country's prostitution laws.

"That judgment gives us a lot of hope," said Laliberte, who is also a former sex worker.

"For us, it's a really important sign that even though the government doesn't want to respect our rights the courts will."

Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20120102/sex-workers-police-repression-120102/#ixzz1iK5wN8OU