"This is a small victory in a complaints system we have no faith in,” says Robert Holmes, President of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. “Even though the deck is stacked against accountability, and it took almost two years to get to this point, we can find a silver lining that there will at least be some semblance of an investigation."

The report from the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP says that the effect of the RCMP terminating these in-custody death conduct investigations may not have been intended to avoid accountability, but “the result of this decision [by the RCMP] may be exactly that.”

In B.C., the conduct of RCMP officers is governed by federal complaints legislation, not the provincial Police Act. The BCCLA has pressed for years for the RCMP and municipal police forces in B.C. to be brought under a single provincial complaints system that is civilian-run and provided with effective investigation powers to ensure public confidence in the accountability of law enforcement officials.

“This incident is just one more example of why the police should not be permitted to investigate themselves when someone dies in their custody,” said Holmes. “That the RCMP would attempt to terminate conduct investigations into four separate deaths in the period of ten days shows that they’re not the people to be making these calls.”