Conducted Energy Weapons and Selected Police Complaints Audits — Issue No. 6

SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO THE USE OF CONDUCTED ENERGY WEAPONS AND TO AUDIT SELECTED POLICE COMPLAINTS

Present: Murray Coell, MLA (Chair); Kathy Corrigan, MLA (Deputy Chair); Gordon Hogg, MLA; Joe Trasolini, MLA

5. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

• Dave Maedel, Executive Director and Chief Sheriff, Sheriff Services Corporate Programs

• Greg Ducharme, Field Training Coordinator, Sheriff Services Corporate Programs

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO
INQUIRE INTO THE USE OF CONDUCTED ENERGY WEAPONS AND TO AUDIT SELECTED POLICE COMPLAINTS


CONTENTS
Page
Restoring Public Confidence: Restricting the Use of Conducted Energy Weapons in British Columbia	61
T. Braidwood
J. Morris
C. Weaver
B. Merchant
P. Coulson
K. Jardine
D. Maedel
P. Robinson
G. Ducharme

M. Coell (Chair): Good morning. Today we have one witness this morning, Justice Thomas Braidwood, and then we will break for lunch. Then we have witnesses this afternoon: Jonathan Morris, Canadian Mental Health Association; Brent Merchant, assistant deputy minister, and Peter Coulson, provincial director, Ministry of Justice; and Kevin Jardine, assistant deputy minister, court services. So we have a full day.

I'd like to, first off, welcome Justice Braidwood. I know you've been following our Hansard Blues over the last few weeks. We're grateful to have you here, and it's an honour to have you here.

With that, I'll turn it over to you, Justice Braidwood, and hopefully, we'll have time for questions. We have the committee meeting between now and…. Your recommendation was to have our findings available to the government by the end of the year, which we will do.

Restoring Public Confidence:
Restricting the Use of Conducted
Energy Weapons in British Columbia

T. Braidwood: Well, I want to start by saying thank you very much for having given me the opportunity to come here today to discuss my report on conducted energy weapons and, indeed, the province's implementation of those recommendations.

Let me begin by saying that I've been very impressed with the province's response to what I have said. Partway through my remarks at the opening, when I first delivered my report publicly, a reporter interrupted to say that the minister had just announced that the province had accepted my report and would be implementing all of my recommendations. Now, for a commissioner in a public inquiry, it just doesn't get any better than that.

Of course, the tragic events that led to my two inquiries demanded prompt government action. Conducted energy weapons in British Columbia were at that time poorly regulated, and the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver International Airport was not only tragic but also was avoidable. Today there is good reason for the public to be assured that lessons have been learned.

I would like to reiterate that I am very impressed with the composition and work of the special committee. Having said those few remarks, late yesterday I was delivered a Hansard report, and I had an opportunity to read it. I'm compelled, I think, to make a few remarks about the evidence of Dr. Webster. I was disappointed by that evidence. His review of misleading, needless, unscientific evidence back in the history is really nothing to do with what we're about now.

During the hearings we called the hon. Mr. Dosanjh, who was the one, then, who allowed and recommended the implementation of the use of the Taser. Of course, when he took the stand, he was appalled at the lack of accurate and scientific information that he was supplied with in order to make that decision.

I'm compelled to say, with the greatest deference to the good doctor, that that has nothing to do with the remarks today.

The issue still is: what is better — to shoot someone with a weapon or the use of the Taser? Now, the good doctor didn't mention this, and that's what this is all about.

I was totally aware of the lack of rigorous testing and the fact that the use, as Taser International did, of an average current in order to say the force of the weapon rather than the peak of the current. That was well known throughout the hearing, and it doesn't really advance anything to say it again, the way that the good doctor did.

Also, the use of the Taser in the United States and other places. Their experience doesn't help us, because they do not have the test that is now implemented in the province of British Columbia.

The whole thrust of the report and what the special committee has done is to emphasize de-escalation in handling situations, and indeed, there must be imminent bodily harm before its use.

To talk about Dr. Lu's evidence and what he said is totally contradicted by the whole of the report that I wrote. Indeed, my recommendations Nos. 13 and 14 deal with the independent testing of the conducted energy weapon.

I hope I'm not going too far here, but as you can probably realize, I was somewhat upset by some of the things that I saw there. On page 21 of the Hansard report he talks about things in the U.S. He says that appellate judge Mary Schroeder noted: "One could argue that the use of painful, permanently scarring weaponry on non-threatening individuals who were not trying to escape" was excessive, and so on.

Well, what is the point of saying that, with deference to the good doctor? That's not what we're talking about, not at all. Non-threatening individuals — that's in the past.

Then again, citing Dr. Lu: "Tasers are generally shown to be relatively safe." Nonsense. That's totally against the report.

I'd like to discuss two issues. As you can imagine, I'd written this before I got the report last night. First, the extent to which the province has acted on my recommendations; and second, the extent to which the RCMP in British Columbia has complied with the new rules respecting conducted energy weapons that are applicable to
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provincially regulated law enforcement agencies.

Before moving to those issues, I would like to comment on the differing roles of government and the police.

In our system of responsible government the police are ultimately accountable to civilian authority. It is this fundamental tenet that distinguishes Canada from totalitarian or dictatorial states. Police officers have a legal duty to carry out their task in accordance with standards set by the legislative and executive branches of government. There is equally onerous duty on civilian authority to set such standards in the first instance.

During my inquiry into the use of conducted energy weapons it became clear that in British Columbia, civilian authority had abdicated this fundamentally important responsibility. In fact, the former Attorney General in his earlier commission, Wally Oppal, has made the same comments.

There were no provincial-wide standards respecting conducted energy weapons or when they could be used. It was left to each municipal police department to set its own standards and develop its own policies. That meant that the rules for conducted energy weapons use varied from city to city. Of more concern, it meant that the police, not the civil government, was setting the rules.

That dangerous precedent has now been reversed. In the new provincial-wide standards applicable to conducted energy weapons, our civilian leaders have set the rules and the police have agreed to act in accordance with them. I commend the province for assuming that important responsibility and the policing community for accepting that they are ultimately accountable to civilian authority.

Now, the role of the province. As you heard from Assistant Deputy Minister Pecknold last week, earlier this year the province adopted provincewide standards applicable to conducted energy weapons. I would like to go through the most important of my recommendations in turn and offer my views as to the extent to which the province's new standards have implemented them.

Recommendations 2 and 6, setting the subject behaviour threshold. An officer is prohibited from deploying a conducted energy weapon unless "the subject is causing bodily harm or the officer is satisfied, on reasonable grounds, that the subject's behaviour will imminently cause bodily harm."

This is perhaps the most important of my recommendations. It significantly raises the threshold for use of the weapon and adopts language that can be applied by the officer on the street, who must act quickly.

Obviously, when we came up with that, it had to be easily taught, and in the moment of tension the officer could rely on it. It wasn't academic. It wasn't complicated. It's straightforward. The new standard that has now been set implements my recommendation using virtually identical language. That, in my view, is to be admired.

Recommendation 3 requires an officer to consider a lesser-force option and de-escalation under crisis intervention techniques before deploying a conducted energy weapon. I am satisfied that the new standard implements this recommendation.

My recommendation 5 deals specifically with emotionally disturbed people and requires that the officer consider de-escalation and crisis intervention techniques. I am satisfied that the new standards deal with this situation under the general provision. Of course, you've heard much evidence concerning the use of the word "delusion" and the proper implementation of it and indeed what an officer has been taught when he sees a subject that exhibits certain signs.

Recommendations 3 and 5 and others dealing with training recognize the importance of de-escalation and/or crisis intervention techniques. Before my inquiry the training of police officers was based on material provided by Taser International, the manufacturer. Those materials dealt not only with how the conducted energy weapon worked but the circumstances under which it could be deployed. They instilled in officers an erroneous understanding that the use of the Taser was always safe. Mr. Dziekanski's death can in part be traced to that misunderstanding.

I am very pleased that in British Columbia we have developed our own rules for the circumstances in which a conducted energy weapon should be used. It is appropriate to use a manufacturer's material on the technical aspect of the weapons but no further.

From my reading of Assistant Deputy Minister Pecknold's remarks to this committee last week, it appears that the use of conducted energy weapons in British Columbia is now more disciplined and that de-escalation techniques are being accepted by the policing community and routinely applied.

Recommendation 7, restricting the use of multiple deployments. An officer is prohibited from discharging a conducted energy weapon for more than five seconds unless the initial discharge was not effective and a further discharge would be effective in eliminating the risk of bodily harm. This new standard implements my recommendation.

Recommendation 8, requesting paramedic assistance. My recommendation required that paramedic assistance be requested in every medical high-risk situation and gave examples of the types of situation that are high risk. The new standards implement this recommendation and actually go beyond my recommendation by, specifically, deployment against a child.

Recommendation No. 9, requiring that whenever a conducted energy weapon is assigned to an officer that the officer have an automated external defibrillator available for use. I don't know if the committee is familiar with this particular piece of equipment. I was shown how it
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worked, and my goodness, it's pretty much foolproof. It even tells you when not to use it. I use the general expression "available for use" to give the province and policy forces some flexibility.

You will see that in the new standards, the province has distinguished between communities of less or more than 5,000 population. In the former, the officer must have a defibrillator in his or her police cruiser, while in the latter, all on-road patrol supervisors must carry a defibrillator.

I understand that the reasoning behind that standard is that on-road patrol supervisors will be alerted to an event in which a conducted energy weapon might have to be deployed and will be able to reach the scene before a defibrillator will be needed. I think that this standard addresses my recommendation, and I defer to the judgment of those who are preparing this standard that it'll be effective in getting defibrillators to the scene.

Now recommendations 11 and 12, requiring training and retraining in the use of conducted energy weapons and prohibiting a trainer or trainee's exposure to the electric current of a conducted energy weapon. The new standard requires police officers to pass training before they are permitted to carry a conducted energy weapon, although I do not have any information about the content of that training. The new standard also prohibits exposure to the electrical current of a weapon.

Recommendation 4, requiring that the province approve a curriculum for crisis intervention training and requires such training for all police recruits and currently serving officers. The new standard substantially implements the recommendations respecting training. I don't have any specifics, but then I'm not really qualified to talk about the specifics of training.

Recommendations 14 and 15, requiring that every conducted energy weapon be periodically tested by an independent body — I can't help but saying that the good Dr. Webster didn't mention this — and that a conducted energy weapon be withdrawn from use and tested when used in an incident and there are injuries or death proximate to the weapon use.

The new standards comply with my recommendations. I don't have any technical expertise to say whether the matters to be tested meet or exceed the matters set out in my recommendation.

Recommendation 16, requiring the province develop a provincewide reporting scheme for conducted energy use. My recommendation was very detailed and technical, but the overreaching purpose was to ensure that every use of a conducted energy weapon was documented and reported. Of course, that's underway, and I'm very pleased about that.

Before moving on, I would like to comment on one of the statistics cited by Mr. Pecknold last week. He told the committee that there was an 87 percent decrease in discharge incidents in 2011 compared to 2007.

When I conducted my inquiry, it was clear to me that when you balance the effectiveness of conducted energy weapons against their potential harm, they were being used far too frequently. That was one of the reasons why I recommended a significantly higher threshold before such weapons could be deployed.

In one sense, the dramatic reduction in use of conducted energy weapons is a good thing, but that one statistic alone leaves many questions unanswered. Has the use of service revolvers increased? I understand they have not. Have more police officers been injured while restraining violent subjects, or have officers discovered that other tools in their arsenal, such as training in crisis intervention techniques, have resolved many of these potentially dangerous confrontations without resource to the use of conducted energy weapons? It would appear to be a fruitful area for more research.

Let me just anecdotally say this, and don't take this as a recommendation or anything. I was very impressed with one of the witnesses that was called, when he was describing de-escalation techniques. One of the events that police officers really are bothered to attend is a domestic dispute. So to give a scenario. I'll make it up.

Two police officers arrive at the door of a dwelling. It's partly open. They can hear screaming inside. They go in, and perhaps one has some blood on them. Maybe a knife is in the hand of another, a frying pan in the other. Goodness knows what they'll see. Now picture this. The first officer sits on the floor. Not to be stupid about it, the second officer is ready to help. That changes everything. The impact of that on that situation is dramatic. So anyway, that's de-escalation.

Let me repeat what I said in my report. I'm satisfied that on balance…. Let me pause again too. You've all seen the tape of when the four officers approached Mr. Dziekanski. Obviously, I had to sit and watch that poor man die, day after day, when those things were displayed. But we blew it up and stopped it piece by piece. As the officers approached, Dziekanski faced them with his hands by his side, and he just stood and looked at them.

The first officer did a nice thing. He sort of said: "Hey." But just think what would have happened if the first one had pulled up one of those chairs and sat down. He'd have been alive today. So that's what this is all about.

Let me repeat what I said in my report. I am satisfied that on balance our society is better off with these weapons in use than without them. I'm a strong advocate of giving the police the tools they need to do the job.

The challenge that you, as legislators, and the police community face is finding an appropriate balance so that weapons such as this are used in appropriate circumstances and not in others. Obviously, I'm of the opinion that what is now being recommended, taught and implemented meets this balance.

I had written some things next about the RCMP, but
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that was before I got the Hansard copy last night. As you know, in my report I recommended that the contract between the province and the RCMP contain the necessary language to compel the use of these recommendations.

But having said that, I'm not criticizing at all what happened. When I read the evidence of Assistant Commissioner Beck, one cannot help but be impressed with the cooperation of the RCMP. I forget the number, but I think that they police — what is it? — 80, 70 percent or something of the whole province. So I have to recommend that that is very satisfactory.

That concludes my remarks. I think obviously, from what I've said, I am very pleased with the response. I think that what the special committee has done is excellent and meets everything that I had hoped would occur.

M. Coell (Chair): Thank you very much, Justice Braidwood. Those are very good remarks to hear. I'll throw it open for questions.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you very much, Mr. Justice Braidwood. I was so impressed, when I read your original report, with the depth, the thoughtfulness of the recommendations. Certainly, from both sides of this committee, representing both parties, we have been impressed with the government responses as well.

I do have some specific questions, and I appeal to your legal background on this one. One of the things that had been said in the presentation of the province police services division during the commission was…. It was an oral presentation. "It is anticipated that my staff will establish a new set of high-level policing standards that will be sanctioned by regulation."

I don't know if you saw in Hansard that I had asked some questions about the fact that there are not regulations attached to this. It is standards. I asked some questions about the legal force of that. When you have regulation, there is a little more legal clout attached to it, as opposed to standards. I've asked several questions about accountability and enforcement, which is slightly different and which happens at the local level.

I'm wondering if you have any comment on the fact that there is not regulation but rather standards and what kind of legal effect that has.

T. Braidwood: Well, I can only go so far in my answer to that. As I understand it, standards have the force of law, but they have the benefit of being easily changed. That, as I understand, is why they're put forward rather than regulations and bylaws.

That's about the best I can say about that. It is a good matter to be brought up, and I read that in one of your questions, but that's as far as I can go with it.

I am not used to, and I've not dealt with, the concept of standards. I'm really just repeating what I read in one of the Hansard reports.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): One of the recommendations that you made was that the training for the use of Tasers should be done centrally. You were concerned about the patchwork of training that had happened.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): That, for various reasons, is not being done. The training for the Tasers is not being done at the Police Academy or at the Depot. But there is standardized training that is being done, partially on line and partially through a module that has been created by the province.

I'm wondering if you are in any way disappointed in the fact that it's not being done centrally — and universally as well. Training for Tasers is not being done for every officer. I'm wondering what your perspective is on that.

T. Braidwood: I'm a little bit concerned. I understand the motive behind it is an economic one and that it would be very expensive. I forget how long the course is, but it would mean that officers from outside of Burnaby would have to be housed and fed, and go there and go back, and that would be so with many, many events. I understand that the price of that is pretty high.

The alternative, then, is to send these specially trained individuals to the various locations in order to train them. I think that…. It has to be watched is about all I can say about it.

If the pocket was deep enough, I'd prefer what I'd said, but I can understand the need to conserve funds, the same as in the use of the defibrillator.

Okay, I'll ask a couple more then. When somebody else wants to, I will defer to them.

You spoke today about de-escalation and how central de-escalation is to the changes that are positive in this province. I would agree.

One of the things that I raised previously was the fact that the reporting mechanism, the form that is used to report incidents of force including Tasers, has very little reference to de-escalation. In fact, it doesn't even use the word "de-escalation." The only thing it includes is: "Did you use words or did you discuss or have any verbal interaction in this incident?" Sorry. The exact words are: "Did you use communication in this incident?"

My feeling was — and I don't know if you saw this in Hansard — that because de-escalation is so important, and tracking of the incident so that we can learn in future about what is happening in these incidents, I was a little
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concerned about the fact that there is not more specifically in the reports that talked about: "How did you try to de-escalate the situation?"

T. Braidwood: Yes. When I first saw that, I have to confess that I did. Immediately what jumps to mind is that…. There's a slight feeling afoot, too, that maybe the use of the Taser has gone down at least to some extent because of the officers' reluctance to fill out forms. I know that those that I saw in my committee hate filling out forms. On the one hand, somebody has to balance. I guess those that trained these officers would be ones that would be those that could comment on this. I mean, again, in an ideal world, I completely agree with you. There's no question about it. But would that hamper the use of it?

Now, you said the use of the words "Did you communicate....?" That's pretty close to de-escalation, and I don't know whether they are being taught as to what to say about communication.

T. Braidwood: Is that all it is? Oh, I see. Well, again, I would suggest that maybe those that teach these things should be asked about it to see whether or not there's too big a downside to expanding that. What you're talking about is writing out a paragraph by the officer, and that paragraph goes to the superior and goes to Ottawa. God knows where it goes. So you have to think about that.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Does anybody else want to ask a question? I'll take a break. I'll come back later.

G. Hogg: If I am appropriately interpreting, what you're saying is that the policies that have been implemented both by the state and by the local police departments and the RCMP in particular are…. You used the words — very glowing phrases, I think, in response to the actions taken.

G. Hogg: So often we get good policies, and in this instance, where there was a dearth of policy…. As you appropriately stated, the ultimate responsibility of the state is to ensure that police are accountable to the state through the Legislature or through elected officials and consistent with standards.

Now we have the standards and the policies. I think "policy" was a word that was used quite often by some of our previous witnesses. You've used the word "standard." My understanding of policy as a definition, and I put it to one of the previous witnesses, was that policy is a guideline intended to be employed in most circumstances. Therefore it wasn't a law or a regulation — "You must do this" — but it leaves some latitude for judgment.

I'm interested in your use of the word "standard" as opposed to "policy" and whether or not you would see the definition of policy, as I've just put it and as a previous witness put it, as an appropriate flexibility within the framework, or should it be tighter than that?

T. Braidwood: Oh no. There have to be standards. Policy is why you make the standards. The policy is principles in the use of the Taser: de-escalation, reporting, testing — this type of thing. Those are policies. But the standards are "Let's do it," and then next of all: "Did you do it?" Those are the standards. I think they're written, and I think they're well-written.

G. Hogg: So the skill-testing part for any organization, and going back to my days as a mayor in a community with RCMP policing, is: once the policies are in place, how do you ensure there are enough resources to be able to follow through with those, to hold the accountability, to be able to monitor them in significant fashion? I know that's going beyond your recommendations, but I guess ultimately, you're very positive about the actions that have been taken. Do you have any guidance for us with respect to the accountabilities? We certainly had some questions with our previous witnesses regarding that.

That, I think, is one of the concerns that we have in our responsibility as the state — to ensure that there are standards set, and now that that is being done and has been done, to ensure that there is action taken and accountabilities in place. Again, that, I think, is going to be the true test of how effective we are in moving forward with this.

T. Braidwood: Well, I totally agree with you. That's what this paperwork is all about. Those forms should allow analysis of indeed what happened on the ground. The independent investigation people where police have been involved in a violent situation…. I've used the word "violent." I can't remember the exact word. They are an oversight, and they have reports too. So that's what that's about. And yes, I totally agree with your remarks.

G. Hogg: So I think the balance that then starts to be generated for us is…. We want to have all of this information in terms of what took place. But if you're sitting out there, and you're at an event…. We know what happens, for instance, with impaired driving. In some instances there's an extended amount of paperwork that's necessary to put the accountability in place — to the point where it inhibits, in some instances, the action of the officer to carry forward with that.

My concern is being able to find…. You used the word "balance" there. How do we find that balance that exists between "Here's what the state requires in terms of the
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accountability"…? But I'm out there, and I've got enormous pressures. I'm getting all kinds of calls. How am I going to sit down and fill out this checklist, fill out this form? I think that's the challenge that we face in terms of the operational implementation of the policies that we put in place.

T. Braidwood: There's no question about that. I have to say, you know, my background in law…. I was a criminal defence lawyer for years, and then I prosecuted for the Crown too. I was very much involved in what you say. In my early, younger years I did the simpler cases, like impaired driving, and then in my more mature years I did the murders, rapes — as we used to call them — and all the rest of it. Then, of course, I was a Supreme Court judge and then a Court of Appeal judge.

So I've seen what the officers go through — there's no question about it — and that's why this test. I'm so proud of the test. You've got to have it in your mind right now and fill out the forms. But paragraphs — argh. I don't want to comment on that.

G. Hogg: In my experience, using your linear approach, in my earlier days or my more immature days as a youth probation officer, I rode with the RCMP in Surrey. I went to domestic violence calls as well as to youth gang…. Those were the primary responsibilities we had on Friday and Saturday nights. Certainly, seeing the demands, travelling around in a car those evenings, you could see the kinds of pressures that were put on them.

You also saw the value of de-escalation. Somebody, in many instances, like me, coming in without a uniform and not having the training in police intervention, saw the true value of de-escalation in those situations but also knew that if we'd had to sit and spend a whole lot of time documenting that, we probably wouldn't have done it. We would have done the work, but we wouldn't have followed through with it.

I asked the question about whether or not some of the reporting with respect to the decreased use of CEWs could be as a result of non-reporting. I suspect there are certainly some pressures. In fact, one of the witnesses said that that would have been one of the pressures which would have influenced that. So we still have, I think, some challenges facing us in terms of that side of it.

T. Braidwood: I think the cultural change…. This doesn't happen overnight. We fought a huge culture that said the thing was safe. That's gone now, thanks probably to that video that was taken of the Dziekanski incident, where everybody saw it, and the hearing itself. But again we come back to the bottom line: restoring public confidence. That's what you're doing, and that's why I'm congratulating you.

J. Trasolini: First of all, I want to thank you for the fantastic work that was done during the time when the report came out. I was still involved in chairing a police board in the city where I was the mayor, and we saw the results of your report as invaluable. It was just amazing concepts of training and approaching the problem head-on, and I believe that the tremendous results of the reduction of the use of the Taser is directly related to the focus that you brought to the issue.

Saying that, as we go into the future…. Perhaps this is a general question, and you may or may not be able to shed some light into it. Because the training is not being done centrally and applied universally and also the reporting is not emphasizing the details of the de-escalation experience that the officers have on site and not implementing regulations, it's not going with standards.

This may be okay today because of the good work that has been done and the fact that this issue is paramount in an officer's mind. But if I'm looking into the future, knowing the culture of a department where that is not front-central anymore, do you think that these issues need to be flagged now rather than lose the emphasis of their impact in the future? I know it's a general question.

T. Braidwood: No, no, I think you're right. The culture, you know, can become complacent. These forms are there to monitor this, and there's a balance that has to be struck. Now I stayed away in the report from saying exactly what should be in the forms, because I didn't think I was competent to do that, and I didn't hear any witness that really addressed the situation head-on, the way you people have.

So that's up there, and all I can say is: good luck in balancing that huge problem. It is a problem. You've struck a nerve, but what to do? You need expert people to tell us.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): I wanted to just ask a little bit about the…. I know this is not directly related, necessarily, to the recommendations and the implementation, but it was a large part of your report and of other reports that you talked about as well.

I'm just going to quote one that you quoted in your report, which is the observation by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety in June of 2008. The quote that you included was: "Current research is conducted in police circles and is neither independent nor peer-reviewed." And there were similar quotes on subsequent pages that really came to the same conclusion.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): I know that you're not doing research anymore and you don't have people who are keeping you up to date, necessarily, on what's happening, but does that continue to concern you? Apart from the medical evidence…. There seems to be some medic-
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al evidence. But the research on the weapons themselves and the fact that there's not an international standard, that the Tasers are not CSA-approved…. Does that continue to concern you?

T. Braidwood: Well, yes, of course. I think somewhere in the report I said that you get a hair dryer and a toaster, and they're certified. And here's this weapon that isn't.

Now there's a little bit of a history. And I'm reaching back, and I hope I get it right, but generally I'll be right.

T. Braidwood: Yeah, generally I'm right. A testing lab, the name of which I can't remember, did a test. They contradicted something that Taser International said, and they were threatened to be sued. So they changed their report.

Now, as I said a few moments ago: in simple terms, you can't use an average on the current. What is the spike? I mean, it's that simple in some of it. And you need an independent testing lab to do that. When I wrote the report, I didn't think there was one. Now, whether there's one today, of course, I can't tell you. But these things have to be tested, and they have to be tested independently — no question. These are mass-produced.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Yes. So it is an area that we maybe should look at a bit more as….

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Yes, and I don't believe we're there yet. That's my understanding from the materials that we've received.

I don't know if you're aware that there are those that have been reluctant to come to this committee as witnesses because, apparently, they were sued by Taser after your commission.

T. Braidwood: Oh, sure. When I wrote my report that we're discussing, they immediately challenged it and went to court. In fact, they put in their then-recent policies that it could be dangerous. They were asked in this court proceeding: "Why did you put that in?" "Well, because Braidwood said that it was, and we're afraid of being sued for negligence." That was kind of a tit-for-tat. Anyway, the courts looked at what I said and said, "No, it was amply supported by the evidence," and the case got dismissed. It went all the way to the Court of Appeal.

On the second report, too, the officers sued me. A little flak — that's okay. We weathered it all. And I must say that the budget was low too. I'm proud of my budget.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): I'm wondering. This is completely an aside, and you can answer it or not. Do you think there should be legislated protection in place for people who are witnesses in commissions, which would prevent them from being sued in cases like this?

T. Braidwood: It's the way it is in court, you know. If you're a witness in a court case, everything you say is immune from proceedings. I don't know why this should be any different.

J. Trasolini: A thought that came to me yesterday…. We were talking about the fact that Tasers are not CSA-approved. In the departments — the idea of weapons in the arsenal of tools — there was a huge distinction between a revolver, which is intended to be and, in fact, is tested to make sure it is a lethal weapon, and the Taser, which professes to be something that prevents the use of a lethal weapon.

My opinion, and I would like to seek your view on that, is that this is why it's paramount, very important — in my opinion, mandatory — that we have that assurance that it's CSA-approved, because it's not supposed to be a lethal weapon.

T. Braidwood: That's right. There's no question. I agree with you. That's in two of my recommendations. It's right on. It has to be tested — and after its use, too. That's one of the recommendations, if I remember right. Yes, that has to be done.

G. Hogg: With respect to that item, certainly we now have in breathalyzers that they have to be pretested, post-tested, and standards are in existence with respect to those. I am assuming that those standards should be applied, then, to Tasers, or a very similar set of protocols in terms of their ability to stand up within a court proceeding and be able to be justified.

Was that the type of protocol you would think would be appropriate with respect to Tasers, or very similar to that?

T. Braidwood: Oh yes, certainly. You set up the standards that the manufacturer says that these Tasers comply with, and then test them to see whether it's right. They can vary from Taser to Taser.

The experience is, overwhelmingly, that the use is beneficial. These things we're talking about do the balance, and there's the balance. Somebody said to me, "Oh,
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we should ban Tasers," and I said: "Yeah, and then we'd just shoot them in the stomach." It's the balance, and I think we've got the balance here.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): A small thing, and then a general thing. First of all, the small thing. We were talking about several balances. One of them is the balance between trying to have good information that can move us forward to better understand the circumstances and improve our practices — right? That's reporting and then analysis of the reporting.

I asked a question yesterday of Assistant Commissioner Beck about one of the stats that he included, which was that a certain percentage — I think it was somewhere in the range of 70 percent — of officers believed, in the incidents where a Taser was used, that the individual who ended up being tasered had had a weapon — a gun or a knife or another weapon.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): A belief that there was. And I asked about what the numbers were in the end. In how many did it actually turn out that they did have a knife or a gun or some other weapon? He didn't have that information, which I thought would be useful to have as we try to move forward and have better practices.

Do you think that would be useful information? Or do you think the analysis that is being done now is adequate? I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at it. It's one area that I've had a little bit of trouble with. I don't get the sense that there is an awful lot of analysis of the information, either by the RCMP or provincially, that is happening, but I could be wrong.

T. Braidwood: Well, in terms of justification — and I'm talking about proper justification for the use of the Taser — the recommendation is: "On reasonable grounds, do you believe that there is imminent bodily harm?"

T. Braidwood: The report, as I understand it, deals with that, and that is the justification in the balance for the use of it. Now whether, in fact, there was a weapon…. Without thinking about it — and I haven't had a chance to really think about it — I don't quite know where that would go. Say that you were told that there was a weapon in 50 percent of those cases and there was not a weapon in the other 50 percent. You'd immediately then say: "Well, on what basis did you reach the reasonable grounds that he had it?"

There'd be no end to what you'd be talking about. It would be an individual thing, and he'd say: "Well, I thought he had it because he went in here." You see? Then you'd have to investigate that circumstance. "Well, what did he have on to go in?" Is this really where it's at? Certainly, it goes to curiosity, but just sitting here, I couldn't quite get where it was going.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Well, I just recall that there was a coroner's inquest several years ago — that my husband, a practising lawyer at the time, was involved in — where exactly that question was: was it reasonable to expect? It was a fatal incident where a young man was shot.

A lot turned on whether or not it was reasonable, and I thought that perhaps that kind of information and perhaps others — and that's just one example — could be instructive to us. If over time you found that there was a change…. You know, officers believe in 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent…. Is that too high? If it was only 10 percent that, it turned out, actually had had weapons, to me that's important.

I know that it does go back to the issue of: how much are you going to record of these incidents, and how important is that? I guess that's just a matter of judgment.

T. Braidwood: All right. I mean, I couldn't quite see immediately where it was going, but I can see what you're saying now. As I understand, what you're really saying is: is it just a wishful excuse for the use of the Taser, or is it real? That's what you're talking about. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's what I infer from it. So I can see where you're coming from.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you. You put it much more succinctly than I did.

Just as a general…. The other part that I said I wanted to ask. Is there any recommendation or area that you considered that, in retrospect, you wish that you had gone into more or that you had made slightly different recommendations? Have you second-guessed yourself or had new knowledge in this area since you wrote the report that would have changed how you did things?

T. Braidwood: No. It's a good question, and I have to say — hopefully, with a lack of conceit — that I have not come to any such conclusion. I think this covers it.

Now there are vague areas for others to deal with, and you've identified at least one of them. But I didn't think it was for me to say those things. I tried to be careful about how far I could go, because others have expertise in these matters.

G. Hogg: I think we're getting close to becoming repetitive in some of this. I just want make sure I understand — particularly, contextualizing your comments with respect to Dr. Webster. He made a number of comments and I think in some ways looked at trying to reframe some of the issues that we were talking about.

I think your point is that he missed the point entirely. And the point is simply the use of a Taser. Is that better than the use of a gun? It is that simple. That's the crux…

T. Braidwood: I'm slow to criticize the good doctor. He came here with every ounce of sincerity he had, but as I point out, why is he talking about these things that have nothing to do with it? This doesn't support a point because it's not relevant — what Dr. Lu said. It's not relevant. And what the good judge said. Non-threatening individuals. What's that got to do with it?

G. Hogg: But I think what you have done is quite eloquently, from my perspective, refocused it around the purpose of the report, and that was the role of the state with respect to this in ensuring that role of the state is carried out. You're saying that your review of the practices, standards and policies that have been put in place in fact address the role of the state in the fashion that you saw in your report, the intent that you had, and you're quite satisfied that in fact that has happened.

Now our issue, our challenge, is around the issue of standards with respect to Tasers, making sure that we have those tests done — again, part of your recommendation — and ensuring that we have whatever accountability processes we can put in place to support the standards.

If those things are done, then I'm assuming by your testimony, that you're quite pleased with the actions taken and will monitor our ability to carry out the second part of that.

M. Coell (Chair): Well, with those, I would like to thank Justice Braidwood for being here today. Thank you for the work you've done on the two reports for government, and for your testimony here today.

M. Coell (Chair): We have a number of witnesses this afternoon before us. The first is the Canadian Mental Health Association, and it's Jonathan Morris and Camia Weaver.

I'd like to thank you very much for being here and presenting to the committee. We have until the end of the year to produce a report on the recommendations of Justice Braidwood, and we will be able to do that. I greatly appreciate you being here, as I said, and I turn it over to you.

J. Morris: My name is Jonathan Morris, and I'm the director for public policy and campus mental health at CMHA B.C. Also, I brought along Camia Weaver, who is an independent consultant and in the past has assisted us with a considerable amount of work related to justice and mental health and who was a key part of the consultation process related to the Braidwood Inquiry a few years ago.

First off, I really want to acknowledge the invitation to present some of our thinking and some of our analysis of the ongoing work with regard to implementation of recommendations. One of the key points before we move into the substance of our presentation is really wanting to acknowledge how encouraging it is to see many of the recommendations that were made by mental health partners during the initial Braidwood Inquiry showing up in such formative ways as we move forward.

We've definitely got some commentary based on those recommendations, particularly as they intersect with individuals experiencing emotional distress or mental distress as it relates to the use of conducted energy weapons. We're very appreciative of the invitation to provide some input to you.

In keeping with the initial invitation, we've got a short presentation of about 20 to 25 minutes to share with you covering some of the domains that are listed on the screen in front of you.

For the first few moments, we think it's important just to retell and re-outline some of the scope of the issue as it relates to the interface between law enforcement and people with lived experience of mental illness. Much of this work has been led by the Mental Health Commission, and Camia actually was a respondent on a report we're going to provide some context around. We'll make some written materials available afterwards.

Following that, we're going to outline some key issues that we framed as questions that we still feel and think reflect the current state of affairs with regard to use of force — of course, the subject of this inquiry, the use of conducted energy weapons and, more broadly, the interface of police and law enforcement with individuals. We've got some commentary based on our up-to-the-date analysis of some of the implementation of recommenda-
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tions, and then we'll close with some recommendations at the end of our short presentation.

Just for those of you who may not be familiar with CMHA, we're a national organization. To catch you up very briefly about our interest in this particular area, we hold a strong commitment to promoting the mental health of all British Columbians. We're a national organization, so we're interested in the mental health of all Canadians as well.

We have a strong stance with regard to the support of resilience and recovery of people experiencing mental illness. Actually, we have one of the broadest mandates and we're one of the oldest volunteer organizations in Canada with regard to mental illness and mental health. We often work very closely with allied organizations like the Schizophrenia Society, the Mood Disorders Association and other groups, who I think also have provided some commentary in the past with regard to the issues in front of this committee.

As I mentioned, our broad mandate includes policy, advocacy, education. We here in British Columbia work closely with 19 branches throughout B.C. Some of our policy priority areas include justice, mental health, substance abuse, planning, benefits and welfare reform, and primary health care.

Justice, as it intersects with the use of conducted energy weapons and police, has been a strong interest of ours for a number of years. We have authored a number of reports, provided feedback during the initial Braidwood Inquiry process and continued to do work in this area to advance thinking and innovation and evidence-based work with regard to this context. We are very interested, and hence, we really were appreciative of the invitation to look at the interactions between the police — RCMP, municipal police — and individuals living with mental illness.

Here we're not going to get into definitions too much due to the limited time we have in front of you today but really conceptualize what we mean by mental illness. In the Braidwood recommendations it was articulated as emotional disturbance, and I think that's a piece that we agree with. It's not just someone experiencing the effects of psychosis or someone who perhaps is in profound distress. It really is emotional. Also, the effects of what's called mental illness.

As we know, as we go into some of the statistics in a few minutes, police and law enforcement in the day-to-day work are encountering individuals experiencing distress on an increasingly regular basis, and that of course has profound implications for their use of force, including the use of weapons like a Taser.

Very quickly, we'll skip through some very up-to-date data, which I think supports the case for the scope of inquiry before you — that this is a significant issue, specifically the interface between law enforcement and people with a mental illness and also how use of force, including the use the conducted energy weapons like a Taser and/or firearm and/or chemicals, has significant policy implications.

Some interesting work was done by the Mental Health Commission of Canada in a report that was looking at perceptions of people with lived experience of mental illness of the police. Some of their work, which involved meta-analyses, literature reviews and other examinations of the current knowledge base, found that 2 in 5, or close to 40 percent, of people experiencing a mental illness have been apprehended in their lifetime. We're deliberately using the word "apprehended" there because they may have been involuntarily transported to a hospital or a treatment facility or apprehended because of an allegation of criminal activity.

Then 3 in 10 — so 30 percent — have had police involved in their care pathway at some point, which is quite a striking statistic. The VPD report — I think it was called Lost in Transition — highlighted how police in many ways have become a gatekeeper for the public mental health system, which of course is something that needs to be addressed and thought through, but it's a reality right now in our communities. And 5 percent of police dispatches or encounters involve people with mental health problems. This was data drawn directly from that MHCC report.

The stats I want to show you quickly here just emphasize that there's often a lot of mythology out there related to the link between violence and mental illness. I think the stats that the Mental Health Commission of Canada brought forward are interesting here: 1 in 5 are in relation to an alleged violent criminal act, but 2 in 5 encounters with police involve non-violent or less serious criminal acts. I think that's an important statistic to hold in conjunction with the last bullet point that's on the screen in front of you, that 2 in 5 encounters with police involve situations completely unrelated to criminal conduct.

So 4 out of 5 encounters with police are linked to situations or circumstances that don't include an issue or an incident related to violence, which I think is an important thing to hold as we look at this next set of statistics, before I situate our interest a bit more and call upon Camia to provide some input as well.

This report that comes from a very respected group in Canada, the Mental Health Commission of Canada, concluded that people experiencing mental illness are very significantly overrepresented in police shooting and also conducted energy weapon incidents and fatalities. Conducted energy weapons specifically, which is the subject of this committee's work, were deployed in at least 50 percent of mental health and suicidal incidents. This was based on a study actually brought forward by the RCMP that's cited in that report. It compares to 39 percent in non–mental health suicidal incidents.

The report itself didn't go into lots of detail, and of
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course, many of the Braidwood recommendations do suggest that in the context of self-harm the use of a conducted energy weapon may actually be justified and helpful in saving someone's life. But an interesting statistic just to hold up there for a few moments.

Mental health cases. Again, there weren't strong conclusions drawn in relation to the third bullet point in front of you that mental health cases were more likely to involve use of weapons by law enforcement. And 41 percent of CEW deployment in British Columbia were deployed with individuals experiencing mental illness.

Given this background data, before we move into a bit of an examination of some of the implementation of Braidwood Inquiry recommendations, our organization represents an important perspective with regard to mental health. The substance of your terms of reference links to looking at the medical implications, the scientific utilization of devices like Tasers and some of those elements. But from our understanding the other track that came out of the Braidwood Inquiry piece was some attention and consideration related to individuals experiencing mental distress. That's our perspective that we really want to advance here with you this afternoon.

We're concerned about the use and safety, and we continue to be in light of the continued implementation of recommendations of CEWs with individuals experiencing mental illness. More broadly, we represent a collective interest and concern about supporting an improved police response to individuals in mental distress, irrespective of whether a weapon or a type of force is used whilst interfacing with them.

We're going to move into some consideration of three distinct recommendations that came out of the Braidwood Inquiry, specifically the first one that's up in front of you, which speaks to thresholds for use, which is one of those key components early on in the report that came out of that inquiry.

We're going to talk about the provincial policing standards, and then I'm going to turn over to Camia in a few moments. Then on the next slide we're going to look at training, which was a key part of the inquiry's recommendations, and also the use of crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques when engaging with individuals in mental distress.

This first one…. I'm sure all of you are very familiar with that recommendation in the initial inquiry report. This speaks to three….

C. Weaver: Yes. I wanted to say, first of all, that we, CMHA, really appreciated the opportunity to make submissions to the Braidwood Inquiry. We were very pleased that a majority of our recommendations to the Braidwood Inquiry were incorporated in the final recommendations of that inquiry.

Subsequent to the conclusion of that inquiry and the writing of the recommendations and the acceptance of those recommendations by the provincial government, CMHA was also invited to be a member of the Braidwood Recommendation Implementation Committee, which oversaw the development of standards and training in an oversight way in regard to both crisis intervention and de-escalation and also the standards and recommendations regarding the use of conducted energy weapons.

As well, we were invited to and did participate in the subject matter expert working group that developed the crisis intervention and de-escalation — the on-line portion of the training that was developed as mandatory training for all police officers in B.C. So we were very, very pleased to be able to be involved in that.

In terms of this particular recommendation from the Braidwood Inquiry, we were very pleased to see that there was a change in terms of how CEWs are to be used and to raise the bar a little bit higher.

CMHA's perspective and policy in regard to CEWs is that as a last lethal force, we are pleased to have them there. If the alternative is only a gun or a CEW, we do prefer the less lethal force. We do, however, appreciate that the standards require, and that there has been a change, that it be a higher level of behaviour before those conducted energy weapons can be used. There has to be an actual threat of imminent bodily harm before they're being used.

We're quite pleased that it got to that standard in that the recommendation is there and was accepted by the provincial government.

As well, our recommendations were also accepted and were included requiring the involvement of medical personnel and also the automated external defibrillators that have to be accessible to police officers when they are using a Taser — a conducted energy weapon.

Within that category of persons or subjects to whom the CEW is applied that requires the calling of medical personnel…. It includes children, older people, people with obvious physical disabilities and people in mental distress. We were very pleased to see that included in the new provincial standards.

We were also very pleased to see an implementation of a universal, mandatory crisis intervention and de-escalation training. The training prior to Braidwood — in recruit training — was very, very brief, and we were pleased to not only see that there would be a mandatory training for all front-line officers in B.C., but we were also very pleased to be part of developing those to ensure that they are appropriate and the best that can be.

There's always a balancing of interests, shall we say, and there was quite some discussion regarding what that training would look like. In the end I think a kind of compromise was made so that there was an on-line portion to the training for some preliminary matters but a real recognition, and certainly by the government, that face-
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to-face training is an absolutely necessary component of any training in crisis intervention and de-escalation. You cannot possibly get what you need without having that face-to-face training.

Some of the elements that were included in that have been recognized, certainly by police who've taken the course, as very important and instrumental, part of which is actually having that opportunity to interact face to face with people who live with mental illness when they are not in a crisis state so that they can have that conversation about what that's like. That's an incredible learning piece for the officers as well as having that practical portion to actually be practising those in scenario context.

As well, to actually have a written standard that requires crisis intervention and de-escalation when engaging with people in mental distress as a first option was a primary change that we saw and one that we very much appreciate. Not only is it something that makes practical sense, but it's something that now is a requirement in the standards.

J. Morris: At the end of this presentation we'd be happy to entertain any questions related to some of the pieces that we have seen in response to the implementation of those recommendations. As Camia has alluded to, training and the use of particular criteria around engagement and use of conducted energy weapons is of particular interest to us.

Based on our analysis of how recommendations are being implemented to date, there are definitely still key issues that we are thinking about and hope, as this accountability process moves forward, can be part of the discussion and the conversation. We frame these as questions, rather than positioning ourselves as necessarily having the complete answer for you today, and hope that this might support some dialogue after this formal part of the presentation in the next few minutes.

There are five key issues. Only three would fit on this first slide. We've raised this first issue related to universal mandatory training. Camia was just describing our satisfaction with seeing some of those recommendations related to CID training being implemented in a universal and mandatory way. But we also have some questions as to whether training is enough, or if it is the panacea to honouring the commitment that I'm sure all of us have in this room to minimizing the harmful effects, or death, by use of CEWs with individuals experiencing mental distress.

C. Weaver: Yes, I did. In terms of universal and mandatory training, now there is mandatory training that has been developed by subject-matter experts, which is wonderful. In terms of the research that we've done over a number of years and looking into a number of issues in the interaction between police and persons with mental illness, a blanket training of all officers is not the be-all and end-all. It is not going to give you everything that you need to have.

It's really important to have it, because it's important that all police officers in the position that they're in need to be able to recognize mental illness, and they need to have at least some of the basic skills in order to effectively communicate with people in that situation. But having that knowledge does not necessarily mean practice. There are some key elements that need to be looked at, in looking at the whole of the system, that still require some improvement.

Having basic knowledge for all front-line officers is important, but it is not going to effectively, and in the best possible way, address the issues that come up.

There are a couple of different…. I'm just trying to look at whether this is the right place for me to be saying this.

Our position is that best practices show over and over again that a crisis intervention team model is really the best practice. That model means that you have a select cadre of individual police officers who have been selected for their characteristics, their abilities — their ability to interact and communicate well, their level of understanding about mental illness and their willingness to respond appropriately — who then get an extensive 40-hour training.

They become the go-to officers to call when there is a mental health issue in calls coming in. They are selected. They're the ones that are sent as a first option to deal with a mental health issue, because not everybody has the natural and inherent capacity to do that job well. So you have a 24-7 complement who's available on any shift who can be the go-to person to attend to those calls. That's one part of what is really a best practice.

In terms of a whole-of-system approach, it's not just police officers that you have to look at. You also have to look at the call-takers and dispatchers. This is something we've actually been pressing for some time, because that initial information that comes in has to be assessed and analyzed and the right questions have to be asked in order to give the very best information in a dispatch of an officer to that scene.

If a call-taker and dispatcher does not understand how to recognize mental health symptoms, doesn't know what questions to ask of whoever is making the report, they're not going to be able to give the best evidence to the police officers who are attending on the scene. That's really a key component that needs to be dealt with.

As well, in terms of a whole-of-system approach, our recommendation also is with a crisis intervention team program to develop more than just a police-based system, because police are interacting constantly, and people
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with mental illness are interacting constantly, with other professionals in the community. Having an integrated approach to deal with issues is the best way to go. I will actually be talking about that a little bit in just a moment.

We can't look at it and say: "Well, now we've trained all the police officers. We're all set to go. Everything's taken care of." There are a lot more ways that we can organize a system that is going to be effective — and not only be effective in addressing mental health crises when they come but at preventing mental health crises in the first place.

J. Morris: : I think the only point I'll make before we move on to our penultimate slide with the three or so minutes that we have remaining is this piece related to organizational culture or police culture. I know the Ministry of Justice is in the process of consulting and developing their strategic policing plan for the province — actually, I think, next week.

We definitely have some thoughts and recommendations related to shifts in support for police to invest in, in the use of communication and de-escalation skills at the forefront of their practice as police officers or law enforcement officials in contrast with solely relying on control and contain.

How do we support police, who have a very difficult job to do, who are working in very difficult operational contexts? How do we support some of that system shift within law enforcement organizational culture and practice to support this doubled reliance of being able to rely on, being able communicate and de-escalate?

Many police officers do this very well in conjunction with what many police are trained up to do in basic training, which is to control, make safe and contain. So that was just one additional point before I move on to these two pieces.

C. Weaver: One of the really important things is that we now have the CEW training. We have the requirements for all CEW operators to take the crisis intervention and de-escalation training before they are approved as CEW officers.

Really, what we would like to see is to ensure that there is an appropriate assessment of what those trainings look like, whether they are appropriate, that they are appropriately evaluated and regularly evaluated, both in terms of how appropriate they are, whether they're effective in terms of the police officers that are taking the course, but also in terms of looking at more recent research and seeing what ways it can be improved and also ensuring that the standards that are contained in the provincial policing standards and the policy directives are followed by the police agencies involved as well.

Part of that is in terms of public access to information about use-of-force reports, enabling the public to see how that's going — to actually see that efforts are being made and to see how well the efforts that have been made are impacting the actual relationship and the practice on the street.

J. Morris: In conclusion, this is our final slide before we can take some questions from you. It's leaving you with three recommendations based on all of the material and the ideas that we have presented so far. These will form the underpinning of a written submission before your committee's deadline in a couple of weeks.

As Camia has mentioned several times, the implementation of universal mental health training within the law enforcement context is absolutely necessary. I think what we're encouraging and what we're suggesting is to build on that existing capacity — to really build upon what's been done so far and what's been operationalized in the provincial policing standards document that Camia has with her here.

How might we think about a broader approach to that support — a whole-of-system or whole-of-policing approach to supporting police in engaging with individuals with limited experience of mental illness, where training isn't just, as Camia was saying, the catch-all solution. How can we also train people to have particular skills that would benefit them in some of those very difficult situations, and how might we be nuanced and selective in that approach?

This point related to community-based interdisciplinary training — so some of the gold standards regarding training and support of police, especially when it might come to the point of using a conducted energy weapon — is looking at integrated and interdisciplinary approaches. How might you recruit psych nurses, paramedics, police, dispatchers, other parts of that judicial or law enforcement system into a process that's supportive of interacting with people in distress?

This final recommendation, which hopefully will build on the good work that is moving forward currently, is how might we look at assessment and also revision, that the standards of practice and the evidence changes with regard to what's included in basic mandatory crisis intervention and de-escalation training. We do need to ensure that the implementation meets the standard of quality and effectiveness. What I think we're advancing here is a reflective, evaluative frame to support the ongoing work in this area.

C. Weaver: I did. In terms of the second bullet there regarding the community-based interdisciplinary training and team development — sorry it's so long-winded — there was a period of time when Canadian Mental Health and RCMP collaborated on the delivery of an integrated interdisciplinary training that included ambulance at-
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tendants, police, corrections officers, psych nurses who are intake nurses at the hospital emergency, a number of other health officials plus community workers in how to respond effectively to mental health crisis.

The purpose of it was…. The interdisciplinary part was not just that they all got training but that they all learned from each other and learned how they could work together more effectively. They learned an awful lot about each other and learned about what restrictions the various agencies have in terms of what they can do and what they can't do and found ways to get around and resolve those issues. It's an ongoing program within a community.

You have a number of people who are trained together, get to know each other and then continue, in the community, to have case conferences to deal with any issues they're having, either in working together as agencies or in relation to specific individuals that are coming, commonly, into the scope of both police action and mental health action.

What can we do to help this person stabilize to a point where our resources are not being sucked and these people are not being apprehended again and again. Some of those communities are still operating with this program, and it's been very effective in terms of not only addressing crises as they come up but preventing crises from happening in the community. It's a wonderful collaborative effort that is extremely effective.

M. Coell (Chair): Thank you both very much. Are there any questions of our presenters?

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much. We're always learning in this committee. To hear the focus on those with mental health issues is really important, and the statistics are quite stunning. It certainly is well reflected in my community. I live in Burnaby, and in my community, as in others, we are finding that the numbers of times that the police calls are related to mental health issues are even higher than I think was reflected. That's anecdotal, I suppose, but I've heard even as high as a third, or somewhere along that line.

So it is a huge problem, and I think we've had a general lack of success in terms of addressing mental health issues. Really, it is true that the police are then the fallback. I think it's two-pronged: we have to improve mental health resources, and we have to improve support for people with mental illness in our communities.

I think in the long run that's probably the investment that would be worthwhile, because frankly, police officers are expensive. And you know, if they're spending a great deal of their time doing that, which they were not primarily trained for, then maybe there are better ways that we could be doing things. But you're not really talking about that. You're talking about having a team.

My question to you is: have you experienced, in the places that do have integrated crisis intervention teams, problems with jurisdictional issues? You have policing, which is primarily paid for by local government. Some of the other resources that you're talking about would primarily be paid for at the provincial level. I'm wondering if you have any sort of practical response to that.

C. Weaver: There are challenges in the training piece, the interdisciplinary training piece, mainly because of backfill, and it's a matter of resources for freeing up somebody to do it. There's a distinction, depending on where you are. Some health authorities are very much on board and very dedicated to this — they've seen the success of it — and with others, it's more problematic. In terms of that jurisdictional issue, there hasn't really been a problem.

Probably the major problem that we ran into in terms of developing that program — and unfortunately, we didn't get to complete it — was on issues about information-sharing, which can be very helpful in a crisis situation. But in terms of the policies on information-sharing between eight different agencies, it can be very problematic and can be a real barrier to successful conclusion of an incident, because people don't have the right information.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): A follow-up. And then when you're talking about the barriers of lack of sharing of information, I know that recently I attended a meeting in my community of a committee to combat the sexual exploitation of youth. One of the real issues that they dealt with was the inability to share even names anymore, which meant you couldn't have that integrated approach. I'm wondering: is that one of the barriers that you're talking about, or is it more just the information? Is it because of privacy issues, or is more to do with just silos?

C. Weaver: Privacy issues. It really is, I think, about privacy issues. You know, we're very much in a place of balancing, because we certainly want to protect the privacy of people with mental illness. I mean, it's still very stigmatizing. So it's not a matter of sharing information with everyone, but sharing necessary information that would help to de-escalate a crisis is a safety issue. In terms of sharing that information from people in Health that know about it to police who are dealing specifically with an individual in a crisis situation, that can be life-saving information-sharing.

I think that the sorts of barriers in doing that are more technical than they need to be. I'm sure that there is a way that it can be got around, but the time and the effort to do that has not been happening, as far as I know.

G. Hogg: I think in one of your earlier slides you said
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41 percent of conducted energy weapon incidents or usage were with mental health.

G. Hogg: Who makes that judgment — that 41 percent of them have mental illnesses?

J. Morris: That's a great question. That statistic was drawn from an RCMP report. I think it would be interesting. It's a secondary source from that Mental Health Commission report that came forward in citing that data. The question you're asking is important. Who makes that deduction?

Often it's hard. When police interface with someone in distress, they're not applying a diagnostic criteria as to whether this person is experiencing psychosis, the effects of schizophrenia, depression or bipolar illness. We would have to go away and actually figure out…. These statistics are very contingent statistics. Arriving at what a mental illness diagnosis or definition is, is a tricky business, especially in the heat or the context of a difficult situation.

G. Hogg: Let me tell you where I'm going with the question. With that, of course we've had many witnesses saying, much as you have, that we need to engage, as Justice Braidwood said, in further education, further training so that front-line police officers and collaborative teams are able to make good judgments, able to have, hopefully, non-violent crisis intervention strategies and be able to build on that.

When we're building some of our policy statements, building our direction and/or our recommendations on data…. We're being told the police can't do that now, with some sense of accuracy, yet we're using that data to build some policies down the road so that they have a better connection.

There just is a bit of a disconnect when we say 41 percent of the usage, and we're assuming that's a judgment made by police, and then further down we're saying the police need to be better trained because they can't make those judgments or are not making those judgments. So there's a disconnect with that.

I'm just wondering how we ameliorate that disconnect or whether it's just that this is the best we're going to get, so we should operate on that set of assumptions and build from that. I just need a little bit of help to understand how that flows.

C. Weaver: I feel a bit of quandary because I do believe that training is important. But I also know that training isn't everything, and I'm going to give you an example of one of the concerns I have and one of the reasons that I really endorse the crisis intervention team program model.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the situation with Paul Boyd, who was shot on Granville Street in 2007 — shot eight times — by a police officer. Something that hasn't been really highlighted in the press or in discussions of that case is the fact that the police officer who shot Paul Boyd eight times had taken the Vancouver police department 40-hour training in crisis intervention.

My point is that you can't just train and say: "There. We're done." It's why I strongly believe that you do have to select individuals within a police force that have the capacity, that have the characteristics, in order to successfully use those skills and who would be using them on an ongoing basis and learning through that process. It's not going to fix the problem just to train everybody.

G. Hogg: I think it answers something I've thought about, but not that question. My question was…. We're building on data that we say is provided to us by police officers. We're saying the police officers need more training because they can't make those judgments.

So there's a disconnect between the data that you're giving us, which you say is coming from a source that needs more training to understand what they're doing. Yet you're saying we should make decisions based on that.

Let me say that my interpretation of that is that that's the best data we have at this point, and therefore we should operate on the assumption that that's correct, and that through transparency, accountability, some of the other recommendations you're making, that you're suggesting we look at continuous improvement and continuous reflection upon the practices that are in place, that we build on that.

So is that a fair interpretation of how you've built that data and where we go with that?

J. Morris: And I think there's an impreciseness. I think probably, from the work I've done in suicide prevention and also these post-incident debriefs or pieces, a lot of that information related to deducing or arriving at a conclusion about someone's mental health status often occurs after the fact, where there's a bit of an audit or in some cases, an autopsy, to trace what was the mental status of that person. So there is a greyness to the deduction of that piece.

So there are two pieces there of arriving at a conclusion about mental status after the fact, which can be deduced by collateral data and information, arriving in the context of a very difficult situation and gauging.

I think, probably, the piece I would add to what Camia
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was saying is training police up, yes, to be better able to have a better literacy about what they're seeing and maybe arriving at some conclusions that mental health might be a concern. But I think the argument that police can rely more heavily on communication, de-escalation techniques irrespective of whether a mental health problem is at play would be another recommendation.

It's not expecting police officers to be mental health professionals in the moment, of being able to deduce symptoms, but to have some lens of analysis, especially given that use of conducted energy weapons can be quite contraindicated if someone's experiencing that. I hope that's kind of better responded to.

G. Hogg: Mr. Chair, I know that we are virtually out of time. If I could get one more question, because it is the Canadian Mental Health Association.

We have been hearing this generic phrase "crisis intervention." We've heard that from a number of witnesses, and there are a number of strategies of crisis intervention. There are a number of techniques. There are copyrighted systems, non-violent crisis intervention. We have, I think, blithely accepted that there is this notion of crisis intervention, which is that somehow we're going to be better able to understand. We're going to be able to train around that.

Within that great, broad, generic rubric of crisis intervention, are there some elements, or are there some training systems? The one I guess I'm most familiar with is the non-violent crisis intervention strategies. Is there something within that framework that you would see from your experience with the Canadian Mental Health Association, or some strategies in that, or some elements or principles or values that should be reflected in that, that would give us a little more substance to this notion of crisis intervention that we broadly throw?

C. Weaver: There are a lot of different models of crisis intervention and de-escalation. There are some basic elements that I think are probably common to all of them. I think some are more appropriate and some are less appropriate when you're dealing with somebody who is suffering not only an emotional crisis but who is suffering from mental illness, because there are things that you have to look at specifically in regard to that.

In a general sense, crisis intervention — the real, solid elements of it — is your approach, in terms of how you're approaching somebody, which is really diametrically opposed to a typical police approach, which is to be authoritative and to be commanding. Those are things that police officers need to learn don't work when somebody is in an emotional crisis or is suffering from hallucinations or delusions or whatever is affecting how they're interacting.

You have to come at it softly, and you have to take time, which is also quite contrary to the traditional police training. You want it get it done. You want to get them controlled. You want to get them contained, and you want to get on with things.

Something that we hear a lot from police is: "We don’t have the time to do that." But the only way you're going to do it is to take the time. A calm approach, an understanding approach, not buying into things but actually communicating with the person and taking the time to do that on an equal level, with respect — I think those are common in any crisis intervention program.

It seems to me that this question underlies all three of your recommendations. I would find it helpful if you could actually perhaps write to the committee and just say that here are the values or the principles which you would see as underlying the crisis intervention and de-escalation training elements within that.

We're probably going to get an array of opinions, an array of strategies that may come from a number of different police forces and training. I suppose if we're going to have some consistency of training, then we need to have a grasp of that. If you could provide us with that, that would be helpful to me, at least.

J. Morris: I want to appreciate your question, Minister, that there isn't a one-size-fits-all. There's quite a nuanced analysis required. I mean, we're dealing with a very mercurial, amorphous blob — what is a critical incident of de-escalation? — and just to hear your discernment that there are some core principles that need to be activated…. Often we can run with a program that has more evidence than another.

I appreciate the invitation to distil down, building on one last point that Camia was saying, not only the approach but a fundamental recognition from law enforcement that someone who is experiencing what was called an emotional disturbance or mental distress is going to process information in a fundamentally different way — very different from the way we're processing information right now. A "cease and desist" or "get down on the ground" or "put down your weapon" is not going to be even comprehended.

That would probably be the fourth piece of really recognizing that there's a different way to communicate with someone in that particular space and time. So I appreciate your question. Thanks, Minister.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): One of the things I've asked about to a couple of different witnesses is whether or not they believe that the report filed after there has been a use-of-force incident including Tasers is suffi-
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cient. One of the deficiencies I saw was that…. It doesn't talk about de-escalation or crisis intervention. It's a tick box. "Did you communicate with this individual?" It's just a small example, and there are other areas. You can write a paragraph. It's a small example of a bigger question, I guess, that we seem to be grappling with a bit on the committee.

How do you make the reporting practical, not completely overwhelming to the officers, but at the same time ensure that we have enough information to be able to do the evaluation that you quickly talked about? I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

C. Weaver: It is one of the issues that I've come up against certainly in terms of, for example, the use-of-force models. Communication is an integral part of that, but communication is different things to different people. To have something more specific than just "Did you communicate…?" Well, if I say, "Get down on the ground," that's communicating, but it's not the kind of communication that we're talking about in terms of crisis intervention and de-escalation.

I think there could be more detail in there, even in a check box form, that wouldn't require a long monologue about "What did you say, and what did they say?" and that whole sort of thing. Something that's going to show that either genuine attempts to use crisis intervention and de-escalation were used and were not successful…. Show whether they were used at all, what indications there were that it was not going to be successful — not just a matter of "We didn't have time anymore," but what happened that made you believe it was not going to work.

Those kinds of things, I think, are really important to have there to do an adequate assessment of whether the response was appropriate and certainly whether it lived up to the standards that are in place now.

Communication in itself is not an adequate indicator. There needs to be something more, and it can be done relatively easily, I think, without having to have a long monologue about he said, she said.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): If you have any specific thoughts about what type of information would be useful in order that we could then have information later to evaluate the effectiveness of the crisis intervention or de-escalation, that would be really helpful to us.

M. Coell (Chair): On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank you, the Canadian Mental Health Association — Jonathan and Camia — for your testimony today. It's greatly appreciated.

Our next presenters are Brent Merchant, the assistant deputy minister of corrections branch, Ministry of Justice, and Peter Coulson, provincial director of the adult custody division, Ministry of Justice.

Nice to see you both, and thank you for being here. We've had a number of witnesses today. We have committed to completing our report by the end of the year and having it to the Legislature in the new year, so we very much appreciate your input today.

I know that both Gordie and I have worked with Brent Merchant in the past. Some 30 years ago, I guess, or more I worked with Brent when he was with the heroin treatment program, as I was. I know, Gordie, that you worked with him as well.

B. Merchant: Thank you for having us here today. I wanted to give you some background on the corrections branch before we address the recommendations made in the Braidwood report. With the corrections branch, it's very often that we get mixed up with the Correctional Service of Canada. People don't understand the differences between the two agencies.

For the corrections branch, we're composed of four divisions. Two of them are primarily operational. On the one side, the community side, we have 55 community officers serving 428 communities throughout British Columbia. On any given day we provide community supervision to just under 24,000 people. Either they're serving a conditional sentence order, they're on bail, or they've been sentenced and are on a probation order. That's on the community side of our business, and it's one of the largest parts for us.

For the custodial side, we have nine correctional centres throughout the province. Yesterday our daily count was 2,500 inmates. Half of those would be on remand, and half of them would be sentenced.

Throughout the course of the year we'll have close to 80,000 admissions to our organization. Because we have Tasers, conducted energy weapons, within our correctional centres, you have to have an understanding of what a correctional centre is. The easiest way for me to describe it is that it's very similar to a small town. If you think of a small community, it has a police force. It has a hospital. It has restaurants. It has school. It has just a number of services.

That's exactly what a correctional centre is. We have correctional staff. We have a full array of health care services. We have nurses, doctors, LPNs, administrative staff. We have psychologists and dentists. We have arrangements with school boards for school teachers to come in. We have alcohol and drug programs. We have a whole array of services for those inmates.

When somebody comes into our environment, when they're admitted, amongst details of taking their social
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history and their criminal history, we have a nurse, a health care person and within 24 hours provide a health care assessment of the individual. We have mental health screeners that use an assessment tool to determine medical fitness of the individual. They're seen by what's called a classification officer, and then they're seen by a unit placement officer.

So if we distinguish ourselves quite a bit differently from police, it's because our environment is a much more controlled environment. We know who's in there. We have some history with them. We can isolate individuals and groups much easier than what happens in the community.

Pete Coulson is the provincial director, so he looks after all of the correctional centres in the province. Pete has been with the branch for over 25 years. He has served in every position within our organization. He was a member of the tactical team. He's been heavily involved in federal-provincial-territorial meetings regarding use of force and the development of our force options across Canada, and he's been leading that in conjunction with instructors at the Justice Institute of British Columbia.

In that regard, I was going to turn it over to Pete. How we are going to address it, subject to your questions, was just to go through each one of the recommendations. You do have a binder there. As we walk through those recommendations, you'll see what our policy is, what our training is, our use of the CEWs in our history, how we report them and how we deal with each of those incidents.

P. Coulson: Just to put some context on what our current status is with the use of CEW and how we got to the point we are now. We implemented the CEW in April of 2003. Since that point in time we've authorized the use of the device 442 times, but it was only fired a total of 34 occasions — about 8 percent of the reported use. In the majority of those cases the inmates complied with the direction of the officers before the device was even unholstered, based on the warning that it could and would be used.

I'd like to walk through each of the 19 recommendations and just give a brief summary on what we've done to address the recommendations of the Braidwood Commission.

In recommendation 1, "Seriousness of the matter threshold," we have updated our policy to reflect the language that was provided in the recommendation, that being that we would not authorize it unless the inmate's behaviour met the following thresholds: the subject causing bodily harm to him- or herself or others; or the officer satisfied, on reasonable grounds, that the inmate's behaviour will imminently cause bodily harm to himself or herself or others.

All of our policy is captured in tab 1 — tab 2 as well. It includes some of the training post the Braidwood recommendations, so all of the users that were qualified at that time were given a briefing on each of those recommendations. That's included in tab 2.

Recommendation No. 2: "Subject behaviour threshold." Again, we updated our policy and our training information to reflect all of that information. Sorry, for recommendations Nos. 2 and 3 we updated our policy to reflect both of those issues around subject behaviour threshold.

Recommendation No. 4: "Emotionally disturbed people." A significant number of the inmates in our custody suffer from some form of a mental illness or behavioural issue, and we address those issues through our practices and our policy. The recommendation that was given by Braidwood — again, we implemented that language in our training and our policy to reflect when we would consider using the device.

Like Brent mentioned earlier, we do have that profile on all of our offenders. When they come through the door, they're screened for mental illnesses or issues of mental health, so we're aware of that at the time we do consider using the device or force against them. We have that knowledge.

The training around emotionally disturbed people. We do offer training at the basic security officer level. When people start their corrections career, they go through a six-week training regime. Included in there is a host of communications skills training, including de-escalation, crisis intervention, and then finally a significant section on use-of-force theory and policy.

B. Merchant: If I could just say…. With the emotionally disturbed people, within that recommendation, part of our health care contract also has what we call mental health liaison workers. They're in each of the correctional centres, and they're designed…. The purpose of their positions…. They're usually either nurses or psychiatric social workers or a psychiatric nurse. They'll deal directly with those individuals with mental health issues.

We also have correctional officers who are specifically trained to deal with those individuals. They're assigned to the units where those individuals reside. We try to deal with it proactively rather than reactively, so we do have those special positions within our environment.

We also sit on what's called a federal-provincial-territorial committee. We co-chaired that, and we just unveiled our mental health strategy for corrections in Canada, so it was a pan-Canadian document that was just recently released.

P. Coulson: "Subject self-harm" — recommendation No. 6. The Braidwood recommendation talks about when the subject is causing bodily harm to himself or when
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the officer is satisfied, on reasonable grounds, that the subject's behaviour will imminently cause bodily harm to themselves. We have updated our policy to clarify when officers are prohibited from deploying the device in those cases.

"Multiple deployments" — recommendation No. 7. Again, we've updated our policy to clarify that the conducted energy weapons in fire or contact-stun mode are only used when there is a risk of bodily harm as identified in the adult custody policy. Further discharge of the device would be effective in eliminating that risk. Just clarifying language around the use of the device in those circumstances.

Recommendation No. 8: "Requesting paramedic assistance." As Brent mentioned earlier, we do have a full suite of medical staff and services at each of our facilities with the exception of Ford Mountain, which is a medium-security institution up in the Chilliwack Valley. But we do have nurses on site at the secure facilities — some for 24 hours a day; some for 16 hours a day. It's unlikely that we would use a Taser when inmates are locked down in the evenings, but in the event that we would use the device or authorize the device in those circumstances, it's in our policies that we would endeavour to have paramedics called in that case, if we knew there were medical issues.

Our policy requires that health care personnel attend and stabilize the inmate after every use or exposure to the CEW. It further directs that in every situation, we transport the inmate to the hospital emergency ward for monitoring after the fact. We don't have heart-monitoring equipment at the centres, and our medical staff have advised that because they don't have that monitoring equipment at the centre, it would require us taking the person to the hospital for that monitoring and check.

Recommendation No. 9: "Automated external defibrillators." Since the recommendation, we have implemented AEDs at all of our facilities. All of the nursing staff and many of our managers and supervisors have been trained to use the AED. All of our staff receive CPR training every three years, and included in that training will be AED training. At some point in time, all of the employees that work for the corrections branch will be trained to be able use the AED.

"Provincial regulation" — recommendation No. 10. The corrections branch does comply with the standards set out by the province regarding the use of the CEW. Our adult custody policy outlines the circumstances in which the weapon may or may not be used in accordance with the recommendations.

We don't have master trainers in our facilities or within our organization. We rely upon the police master trainer at the Justice Institute of B.C. That master trainer does train our correctional officers who are trainers, and their certification is for a two-year period. Currently we have 99 qualified users in the province. They are trained and recertified annually.

The police services division has developed a CEW users training course. The corrections branch has been given permission to use that material, and we will tailor it to our particular environment. We anticipate that the training will be completed and that the package will be ready for review in early 2013.

The adult custody division requires that correctional centres complete reports and submit them to the warden or their designate when a device is used. The reports include the provincial use-of-force report, an electronic incident report, inmate injury reports, and we also insist that video recordings are taken in any planned use of the CEW.

"Training and retraining" — recommendation No. 11. We require the certification, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, based on our understanding of the manufacturer's recommendations. The police services division has developed a CEW training course. As I mentioned earlier, we do have permission to use that material and have it customized for our environment.

Recommendation No. 12 talks about during the course of training that employees are not to be exposed to the device. We are in compliance with that, and that policy has been updated to include our trainers as well.

No. 13: "Certification of conducted energy weapons." On May 13, 2010, the Deputy Solicitor General, David Morhart, wrote to the federal government to seek an exemption in response to CEWs not being considered for consumer products within the scope of the Hazardous Products Act. As this matter falls within federal jurisdiction, the province has fulfilled its recommendation No. 13 by bringing the issue to the attention of the federal government.

"Periodic testing of CEWs." The corrections branch policy is very specific and has been updated to include a section on the testing of these weapons. All of the weapons are tested and annualized on a regular basis, and the results of those tests are reported. We test based on the following schedule: upon delivery and prior to the operation of the new device, after the first two years of operation and every year thereafter, and after an incident of serious injury or death following a deployment of the CEW. Our policy reflects that it would be removed from service and tested.

Recommendation No. 15: "Testing after a serious death or injury." Our policy has been updated to include a section on testing of CEWs and the fact that they would be withdrawn from service following any injury or death proximate to the use of the weapon.

"Reporting on conducted energy weapon use," in recommendation No. 16. As I mentioned earlier, every time the weapon is authorized and used, an incident report is completed; a use-of-force report is completed. The
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corrections branch has a business intelligence system that we can draw information from, which captures all of the incident data.

The reports are submitted to the warden prior to being submitted to the corrections branch headquarters. Headquarter analysts take and culminate all the information and provide it in a report to me and to the assistant deputy minister of the branch. Every incident is reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The adult custody division will comply with the use of the CEW incident report and electronic reporting requirements and the analysis, as developed by the province.

We've taken extra steps in order to address the recommendations of the Braidwood committee. We have an inventory sign-out form that is in every correctional centre and managed by a supervisor at that site. After it's authorized, it's recorded on that form. Regular spark tests are completed, and that is captured on that form.

The information… Post-use or as a result of that, regular testing is conducted on every device at least once a month, and there's a requirement that they report any discrepancies to the warden or the designate. Any discrepancies are forwarded to the adult custody division — to my position.

We review the forms that come in from the centres on a quarterly basis to ensure that all of the devices that are in service meet the requirements. Annual reviews will be conducted according to provincial standards to account for the use of all of our CEWs. I can confirm that we have had annual reports, and our quarterly reports are up to date.

Recommendation 17: "Further research." Since 2008, B.C. has co-chaired a Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on CEWs. The group has worked with Public Safety Canada to set research priorities regarding CEW research. We have a position that was implemented to not only oversee CEW use but all of our use of force. That position works out of the Justice Institute of B.C., and he's our provincial use-of-force coordinator.

With respect to the further research, the corrections branch will comply with any of the recommendations of that working group.

Recommendation 18, the further review. The Police Act was amended in June of 2010 to address the recommendation. The corrections branch actions will be guided by the outcome of work being led by the police services. We've worked very closely with the police services division over the course of the review and the implementation of the Braidwood recommendations.

Finally, recommendation 19, the RCMP compliance. This recommendation is outside of the corrections branch scope of authority.

B. Merchant: There are just a couple of points I wanted to reinforce. One of them is our scale of issue within a correctional centre. What kind of weapons do we have? We don't have lethal force in any provincial correctional centre.

Our best weapon is the verbal behaviour of our officers. That's our first and our best weapon. But we also have batons. We have handcuffs, shackles. We have ASPs, OC spray — or what most people call pepper spray — and we have the CEWs.

We keep a very close eye on the use of the OC spray and the CEWs. When it's authorized, the CEW…. Only a manager can authorize it. They have to get permission to take it. We record every time when it's authorized, whether it's been taken out and left in the holster, whether it's taken out of the holster, whether the laser light has been activated or if it's been actually discharged. We break it down into a series of monitoring.

These are all kept on…. One thing we do have a lot of in jails is cameras. We videotape this. It'll be reviewed within the correctional centre. Once they're done with it, any use of OC spray or the CEWs, that information, the incident report, is sent to Victoria where one of Pete's analysts will review it.

They'll look at the video and make sure that it complies with policy. It's then given to Pete as the provincial director, who will also review it and make sure everything was done appropriately. Then it's turned over to me, and I do the same thing.

There's a whole hierarchy of oversight with those two types of weapons. I think it keeps the system honest, if you will, in its deployment and their use.

Our business intelligence system — and I don't mind sometimes banging our own drum — is head and shoulders above anywhere else in Canada. It's electronic.

So an officer will fill out their incident report electronically, and it gets passed along to appropriate sign-off people, supervisors, who will electronically enter their comments within that. At any time during that process Pete from Victoria can log into the system and look at those incident reports anywhere along. We can also extract the business intelligence information from the use of any of our weapons to have aggregate data about that.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for that presentation and for the report.

I have several questions. My first one is…. I wanted to ask about the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on CEWs just to get more clarification on that. So that is a group that doesn't include just Corrections. It includes Corrections and policing. Is that correct? Are there any other representatives on that group? Or have
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I got it wrong?

B. Merchant: That group doesn't just look at CEWs. I sit on an FPT committee called the Heads of Corrections. The ADMs from each of the provincial and territorial jurisdictions sit on that. Right now I'm co-chairing that with Don Head, who's the commissioner of corrections for the Correctional Service of Canada.

From that committee, we have a variety of subcommittees. One of those subcommittees is the one that Pete sits on, and that's the adult institutional subcommittee. One of their tasks right now — has been for some time — is to look at force options and to see if we can standardize some of those training and recertification issues across Canada. That's the committee that Pete sits on.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): The initiatives that are referenced here include…. The Canadian Police Research Centre has allocated $1.8 million in funding over three fiscal years to advance research, essentially. Is that funding still stable? I thought I'd heard that there has been a scaling back at the federal level. Is that money still in place for the research as far as you know?

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): You haven't heard anything. It may have been different funding. One of our presenters, just in an offhand remark that I don't think any of us followed up on, talked about how funding at the federal level had dried up. I'm not sure if this was what they were referring to or not. Maybe not, because it's a separate centre.

I have another question. Do you have in this binder a copy of the form that is used for incident reports? Is it in there?

P. Coulson: No, sorry. We can certainly provide it, but we don't have the report included in here, no.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): The form itself — I'd be interested in seeing it, partly just to see it but also to perhaps compare with the form that is used by the policing community.

One of the things that I had commented on in previous presentations was a bit of a concern or perhaps a potential suggestion for improvement of the form, because we're talking about de-escalation and crisis intervention. The form itself has essentially only a tick box when you ask about whether or not there was any conversation between the person who ended up getting tasered and the officer who did the tasering.

I thought that if we are going to be focusing on crisis intervention and de-escalation, it's important to have a reporting mechanism that adequately reflects what happened and what types of techniques were used so that we can do analysis later and keep track of the effectiveness of it and so we can learn from it.

That's why I'm interested in seeing what kind of form it is. It sounds to me, from you've said, that it's actually a little more detailed than the one that the police use.

B. Merchant: I'm not sure necessarily if the form would assist you in your question. The reason I say that is that the form we have, as I said, is electronic. There are a number of tick boxes, whether it has to do with contraband or violence or CEWs. Then there are areas for narratives from the officers.

We train the officers in how to write those documents — you know, what's to be said. They can have, within the write-up, what steps were taken pre-, post-, depending on who's writing. It starts off with the correctional officer who responded, those correctional staff that were involved with it. Then it would go to another supervisor, who would sign off certain things and add a narrative section, and then to another supervisor, who would do the same thing.

So the narrative would capture some of the questions that you're asking. Then what goes hand in glove with that is our training — you know, with our training package and how we try to de-escalate things.

M. Coell (Chair): I think, Brent, it would be useful for us to have a copy of that.

G. Hogg: With recommendation 4 you make reference to your training system and at the corrections branch, adult custody, training of correctional officers, crisis intervention training. Your test for that seems to be the training has been reviewed and is considered equivalent to the police services division.

Is the police services division training deemed to be best practice? Has it been externally peer-reviewed, or does it have any reference to…? I'm just concerned about comparing it. We've had a lot of comments and testimony before this committee with respect to the training the police have. That was a bit of a red light for me, using that as a reference point.

I don't need an answer now, but if that could be reviewed and answered at some point.

G. Hogg: Secondly, on recommendation 1 you talk
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about "enforcement of federal criminal law…inmate's behaviour meets the following thresholds…." Then at other points you talk about training.

We've also had a number of testimonies suggesting that the subjectivity training necessary to be able to make those kinds of judgments is challenging. Again, I don't need the answer now, with respect to the training that does take place on that — so that you're satisfied to some degree that in fact people can make those judgments.

There aren't lethal-force weapons in the custody facilities, and part of the rationale that Justice Braidwood provided for the use of conducted energy weapons was that it was better than having lethal force. When you're in a circumstance where there isn't any lethal force, I think the threshold may become a little more challenging. Again, the biggest argument that we've heard for the use of them, and certainly the one that Justice Braidwood provided, was that it was a step down.

I don't want us to get into circumstance now. We have to step down with yours as well. But I think in custody facilities there's a dramatically different culture, as you've pointed out. Perhaps the test for the usage of them needs to be even stronger, or even higher, as the police officers are having — those who have lethal force are required to have a stronger test with them. Again, if those are some things that you could comment on.

Part of Justice Braidwood's recommendation was talking analyses. You've made reference to reviewing the data both provincially and nationally. What type of analyses takes place, and how is that provided? Is that provided in a context or format that allows us to inform future policy perspectives?

Do you want me to just keep listing my questions, or have you already had enough of me, Brent?

B. Merchant: Well, some of them are difficult to answer because when those recommendations were made, they were made primarily to police departments.

B. Merchant: For us, to say how we stack up against other correctional jurisdictions across Canada…. Not all the correctional jurisdictions across Canada have CEWs. To compare us across Canada…. Have we done that within the correctional jurisdictions? No, we haven't.

G. Hogg: I guess our responsibility, again going back to Justice Braidwood's original tenet, which was that when the state delegates this type of authority and responsibility for being able to take the type of action that we take, whether it's lethal force or CEWs, there has to be accountabilities that are accepted and that the state has to put in place standards which utilize those….

I'd be interested to know if the state has authorized the use of CEWs — I assume they have — through some formal process in custody facilities. I guess the question then becomes: if other jurisdictions do not use them, what is our rationale for using them within custody centres? I'm sure there's been a lot of work done on it and that I'm just not familiar with it. That may be useful for us as well.

I haven't had a chance to go through your references to the policy, but we've had some discussion about what policy is. I think one of our witnesses, when I asked the question, and I may have been leading, said that policy is a guideline to be applied in most circumstances but that there has to be some judgment around it. If you choose to go outside of the policy to do something else, then you have to have good rationale, and you're held accountable for that rationale.

There are policy standards, directives, regulations, laws. All of this is in policy. In the corrections branch, is that definition of policy an appropriate definition, or is there something else that we should be aware of?

B. Merchant: No, it's an appropriate definition, and it's contained in our training as well.

G. Hogg: When I look at these and it says that the policy is to do this, then a trained corrections officer has the authority to go outside of that, as long as they can provide the rationale for as to why they did not follow the policy. Is that correct?

B. Merchant: No, the idea is that they would follow the policy. That's what it's there for, to provide direction.

G. Hogg: As opposed to guidance. So a policy is a direction. This is what you must do. The policy we've heard from other jurisdictions is that policy is a guideline meant to be applied in most circumstances. If you go outside of that, then you have to be able to justify why you've gone outside that, so there's some latitude with respect to that.

B. Merchant: It's somewhat…. For me, it's a bit splitting hairs. I understand what you're saying. If somebody did go outside of the policy, we would review that closely.

G. Hogg: My last question is: with respect to the addition of the workload associated with the recommendations, how much has that workload added already to custodial staff in our institutions, who I know have all kinds of demands? Has this added much to the workload? I'll leave it at that.

B. Merchant: I'm not sure it added that much to it, because we had most of this in place before the inquiry.

To go back to CEWs, our staff don't have them on their
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belt. They're kept in an armoury. We don't walk around with them on, and they have to be authorized.

When you think about that, and it's an emerging issue, somebody has to get permission to use it. They have to get that permission first, they have to go to the armoury, they have to take it out, and then they have to go to where the incident is taking place. There's a period of time that expires, so to speak, for most of this. It's not done in the heat of battle, so to speak.

G. Hogg: Combined with that, you have a clientele, inmates, who you know something about, so it's dramatically different than a police force going out….

J. Trasolini: In regards to recommendations 14 and 15, which deal with testing of the CEWs, you state that in fact there's a certain procedure for testing and that it is reviewed by a professional engineer. Who actually does the testing? I would be interested about the results that you've gathered over the years, to see how they comply and, in fact, what the picture is that you would paint for us on the performance.

P. Coulson: Certainly, before we put them into use, when we receive a new CEW, we package them up and send them to, I believe, a company in Ontario, outside of Ottawa. It's an electrical engineering testing place, and I'm pretty sure that the police services use the same company. I don't have that off the top of my head. I don't have it front of me.

We send it to them. They run the tests, and then we get a report back from that. That report is kept with our use-of-force coordinator at the Justice Institute. They have to meet the police standards. They have to be within the required standards for CEW. If it varies at all from that, then it's either…. If it's a brand-new one, we send it back to the manufacturer and get a new one and continue on with the testing.

That same level of testing occurs for devices that are in service. They go back after two years of operation and then every year thereafter. We do get the results of those tests, and as I mentioned, they are kept centrally by our provincial use-of-force coordinator.

If they don't meet the test, then certainly we take them out of service, and we purchase replacement devices.

P. Coulson: Once they are tested, I get a report from the provincial use-of-force coordinator just to say that of the devices that are currently operational, they in fact meet the test.

J. Trasolini: How often have they not met the test? I'm looking for a number, an idea of….

P. Coulson: This is the form that the spark testing is captured on at the correctional centre and sent in to headquarters with the specifications of the on-site testing, the testing that occurs when we send them back to Ontario for the more technical testing, to make sure that it meets the essential output of voltage and so forth. The details of those reports are kept centrally with the use-of-force coordinator.

J. Trasolini: You couldn't tell me how many weapons were returned or, in fact, taken out of service over a period of time?

P. Coulson: I do have a record of destroyed CEWs, and I can provide a copy of that.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Noting the time, I'll maybe just ask one more question, reserving the right for a follow-up, perhaps. I wanted to ask about analysis of the information.

First of all, I hadn't realized, even though I've done some tours of correctional facilities, that there are no lethal force weapons on the corrections officers. They must be in the facility there as a backup.

B. Merchant: The only provincial institution in Canada that has lethal force is Quebec, and the only time they're authorized to use it is when they do an escort outside of the building. That was because of a murder of two of their correctional officers by the Hell's Angels years ago.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): It certainly speaks well to the idea of de-escalating and crisis intervention. When you think of the people that are in our correctional facilities, it's almost counter-intuitive when you think of police officers having lethal force weapons.

I think it does go back to the fact that your officers know the people very well that are in the facility, and it's pretty regulated in many ways — know the routines and so on. But there have been times when you've had to use
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Tasers. Just confirming: that's 34 times? It's 440 times they've been authorized. I wrote down 34 times, but I might have had that number wrong.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): When the device was actually fired. It sounds like you have a fairly rigorous and comprehensive review of those incidents.

I'm wondering if you have done any analysis or tried to track, over time, increased usage. I mean, it's a low number, so it may not happen. Apart from the actual reporting of the incidents, are you trying to evaluate their usefulness, what kinds of situations they're used in — just tracking data, I guess, generally? Is that kind of work going on?

P. Coulson: Yes, absolutely. Under tab 5 there is a summary of the usage; a table that talks about "by year," when it was used, and based on the category — the column on the left; the numbers of times, once it was authorized, where warnings were issued; and then where the safety was on, it was drawn, and the laser sight was turned on; and then, finally, the actual number of times it was discharged.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Just one more follow-up. Just so the people who are watching this…. They know that it's not that we haven't read our materials. We're thrilled to get this binder, but we got it today, so this is our first look at some of this information.

This is helpful, but I'm talking more about the thought of trying to use crisis intervention and de-escalation and evaluating the effectiveness. Now, I guess corrections officers do that all the time anyway, but it's one of the things that I've asked of some of the presentations with regard to police.

Where is the tracking? Where is it that we can see, through documentation and analysis, how we're doing with this stuff — so in terms of if we are being effective and talking things down, and so on? I'm just wondering if that kind of work is being done, or maybe it's done all the time in the corrections facilities.

P. Coulson: Clearly, we know that communication is our best tool in a correctional environment. Brent mentioned, certainly, that officers don't wear weapons when they're supervising inmates on the unit or when they're in segregation. Quite often it's in response to a sudden onset of violence.

The majority of the cases where a CEW was deployed was in a segregation unit, where you've got a known entity of people. They have a history of violence, or for them to get to segregation they were engaged in self-harm or violent outbursts. So it is very much localized, and specific, in most cases, to that area.

We do analyze. We look at every year. We look at the statistics and how force — not just CEW, but OC use — is either increased or decreased by centre. We look at particular units. We look at the levels of supervision on unit. So we do that analysis. We have reviewed the use of CEW over the last several years. We know that it has declined. We have only authorized it three times this year, to date, and it was only fired once.

We do know, as a result of the Braidwood recommendations, that officers or managers may be scrutinizing more the requirements to use the Taser. We're not shy of using it, but it's more making sure that we're meeting all of the tests that have been laid out by Braidwood. But in most cases we use communication as our tool. We use OC spray to a lesser degree. Certainly, the record would show that our use is very limited.

M. Coell (Chair): Just one more, but noting the hour. We're keeping people waiting.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Okay. Interesting that in 2008 it was stunningly different numbers. Maybe you could just…. That was just after the Dziekanski tragedy in 2007. So what happened in 2008 that the numbers went up so much — also recognizing that they came right back down again?

P. Coulson: I'm not surprised that somebody would notice that number. In that particular case — and it mentions it in the narrative — it was primarily the remand centres at North Fraser Pretrial and Surrey Pretrial.

We had an increase in the number of people that we applied special handling protocols to in our segregation units. They had a high propensity to violence towards staff members, and as a precaution we put in special handling protocols.

Of 198 of those authorizations, eight inmates were responsible for that at the North Fraser Pretrial Centre. Four inmates at Surrey were responsible for 52 of the cases where they were authorized. Twelve inmates for that entire year took up most of those authorizations. It's not that it was fired, necessarily. It was used for every time they came out for their exercise.

M. Coell (Chair): Thank you both, Brent and Peter. Very much appreciated, and thanks for taking the time.

Our next presenter is Kevin Jardine, assistant deputy minister of court services, Ministry of Justice.

For your information, Kevin — and you may know this — our role is to have a report to the Legislature by
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the end of this year. We're on track to do that and very much appreciate you and your staff being here to brief us this afternoon. I'll turn it over to you. You may want to introduce your staff as well.

K. Jardine: Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting us to the committee today. I have some prepared remarks to start off, which will hopefully answer some of your questions. I believe you have a package, as well, with some material that we provided.

K. Jardine: Or perhaps not, in which case we'll make sure that is made available to you. I believe it was submitted earlier this week, which would be yesterday.

We'll ensure we have that information available. I suspect that we have everything here, and certainly, the people here will be able to answer many of your questions which might be precipitated by my initial comments.

Perhaps I'll start with the introductions. Then I'll go through my prepared statement.

K. Jardine: I'm Kevin Jardine, the assistant deputy minister of court services in the Ministry of Justice. I have with me today Dave Maedel, the executive director and chief sheriff for the province; Peter Robinson, who is the manager of sheriff policy and programs; and Greg Ducharme. Greg is the provincial training officer for the Interior region, out of Kamloops.

You've already heard from Clayton Pecknold last Tuesday, and you have his summation, his detailed comments. I'll try not to repeat anything that he went over and focus very specifically on sheriffs and the sheriff service and CEW use among sheriffs.

I'll move on to maybe a quick overview of sheriff services in B.C. Sheriff services is a division of court services branch in the Ministry of Justice. Court services branch is responsible for the administration of court services and sheriff services across the province in support of the Provincial, Supreme and Appeal courts. It comprises more than 1,300 staff in 45 permanent locations across the province and 44 circuit courts, which we attend at various intervals throughout the year.

My position as ADM of court services has the statutory authority of both the chief administrator of court services in all three court acts and the provincial director of sheriff services.

The sheriff service division of CSB was formed in 1974, and there are approximately 525 sheriffs and deputy sheriffs serving throughout the province today. Their responsibilities include transporting prisoners to and from court appearances, correctional centres and police lockups, providing courtroom security, assembling and supervising jurors, serving family court documents and providing lockup supervision in courthouse day cells. We don't have anyone who overnights in courthouses.

There is a broader regulatory responsibility that sheriffs also have, and that extends to protecting the safety of the employees of provincial government and protecting buildings or parts of buildings owned, leased and administered by the provincial government as well.

With respect to CEWs in the B.C. sheriff service, the first M26 model was acquired by sheriffs in 2001. These models were replaced over a period of about 12 months, about a year, starting in January 2009 and were replaced with the Taser model X26. We currently have 78 CEW units available for use by qualified staff throughout the province. We have two M26, as well, still in service, although we anticipate removing them from service shortly.

The decision to require a deputy sheriff to wear a CEW while on shift is made by the local supervisor based on assessment of risk and the availability of a CEW. With respect to use-of-force response or forced response options, the sheriff's standard duty belt includes oleoresin, or pepper spray; an extensible baton; and a sidearm, which is currently a Smith and Wesson nine-millimetre pistol. Given the limited number of CEWs, most staff do not carry one, and neither does our branch have any plans to increase the current inventory of 78 CEWs.

Since 2001 they've been employed to control subjects on 148 occasions in total, but that doesn't suggest that they were discharged on all occasions. Only on 28 of the occasions was the CEW actually fired or used in contact stun mode. Of those 28, about 17 were with it actually being fired or the probes being extended, and in 11 cases it was used in contact stun mode. I have more detail with respect to how that breaks down over the last many years.

Of the remaining 120 occasions, compliance was achieved 11 times through verbal warnings, 21 times as the CEW was drawn, and on 88 occasions compliance was achieved as soon as the laser light was turned on in the CEW.

Since 2007 the number of occasions in which CEWs were employed in all categories, whether it was fired or not by sheriffs, has fallen substantially from 23 total uses in 2007 to three last year in 2011. The number of actual discharges or contact stuns has also decreased during this period from three in 2007 to one last year.

Just to provide you some context in numbers, we have approximately 600,000 appearances each year in provincial adult and youth court only. That's setting aside family court, civil court and Supreme criminal. There's a very large number. We do about 100,000 escorts of in-custodies each year in B.C. as well.
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We think that the reduction in the usage and in the discharges is likely attributable to three broad factors. The first is the higher threshold for CEW use after the Braidwood. The second is the replacement of all but two of the 117 M26s with the 78 or fewer X26 models, which means there are fewer available. And of course, the public attention that has been placed on the use of CEWs, and perhaps a propensity or an unwillingness for sheriffs or a greater likelihood that they'll begin to look at other use-of-force options before choosing the Taser.

With respect to the policies and standards in the Braidwood recommendations and the sheriff services, we utilize the CEWs to assist in prisoner management in courthouse cells, in prisoner transport and for courthouse security responsibilities. It's driven by our policy, which is approved by me as the provincial director of sheriffs.

We also participated in the Braidwood Recommendation Implementation Committee that was finalized in January 2012. Although the provisions in the Police Act do not directly apply to sheriffs, we have adopted the recommendations where appropriate, which is in almost all cases, and that's part of the submission or the material that we will make available as well.

In January 2012 we made changes to sheriff policy, and based on the 2009 directive of the Solicitor General, we made changes in addition to those times on our own at various times. For instance, in November 2008 we at that time made a change to ensure that B.C. Ambulance Service was requested prior to a CEW deployment, whenever possible.

We also monitor, of course, changes that are made with respect to CEW policy, whether in police or elsewhere in the peace officer or law enforcement community. It's certainly our intent to ensure that we have the highest level of policy use, again where appropriate, and we've been making changes in that regard as well.

With respect to training around CEWs for new recruits, the B.C. sheriff services force response option training is initially set at 13 days at the Justice Institute of B.C. It covers physical skills; tactical decision-making; force response options, which incorporates all levels of use of force; and the national use-of-force model, which is the framework which guides the actions of sheriffs with respect to subject behaviour and officer response.

After each component is taught at the Justice Institute, there's both a practical as well as a written exam, and throughout the course each recruit is placed into site-specific scenarios to test their decision-making skills, apply the use-of-force principles and their use of communication, and their force response option tools. All of this has to be applied within a timely manner and in a reasonable fashion.

In addition to that, they're required to articulate the underlying rationale with respect to their use-of-force decisions. This is an important piece, because as they move into the field and as real-life situations occur around the use of force, sheriffs are required to submit a critical incident form after each use-of-force event, whether or not it's a CEW or physical force.

The use of CEWs is taught as part of the FRO, or the force response option, curriculum. The introduction to the CEW is about four hours of training, and this is orientation training only. This doesn't certify them for CEW use. The actual use-of-force application in situational training is also incorporated into the context of other use-of-force tools in the broad FRO. This is really part of a continuum of use of force, again guided by the national use-of-force framework.

With regard to crisis intervention and de-escalation training, as of September 2012 the training has been incorporated into sheriff recruit training. This is a nine-week course at the Justice Institute of B.C.

I should say, though, that even prior to the formalization of critical incident and de-escalation training, in the national use-of-force framework, communication is actually one of the force options. Officer presence and communication has always been a part of the training, and it has always been part of the discussion with respect to how to control subjects and gain compliance.

With respect to existing officers, in the past the sheriffs were trained in the use of CEWs and could deploy them where and when required, but commencing in January 2013 only designated staff at each courthouse will be authorized as CEW operators. Prior to the designation, the CEW operators will be required to have successfully completed additional training as required by sheriff policy and consistent with police standards.

The training consists of four components. The first is an on-line CEW training through the Canadian Police Knowledge Network, CPKN, which is approximately four to six hours. The second component is, again, on-line CID training through the Canadian Police Knowledge Network, which is about four to six hours. The third is in-person crisis intervention and de-escalation training by a trained sheriff instructor. This is approximately a one-day course. That's an in-person piece. Then the last is another in-person CEW training by a trained sheriff instructor, a provincial training officer, which is another day.

That will qualify them as CEW-qualified sheriffs, and they would be the ones, then, that would be able to use the CEWs within each of the courthouses or otherwise on circuit.

Currently the sheriff service is in the process of identifying staff to be CEW operators at each court location. It's estimated that of the approximately 525 sheriffs, 175 will eventually be identified and trained as CEW operators.

In addition and consistent with police standards, all sheriff staff, regardless of whether or not they're designated as CEW operators, will need to successfully com-
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plete the on-line and in-person crisis intervention and de-escalation training by January 2015.

I'd like to make some final comments now with regard to the CEW as a force option tool. Since 2001 the sheriff services CEW statistics indicate that only in 19 percent of the occasions where the CEW was used was it necessary for the sheriff to actually discharge the probes or to perform a contact stun. However, in the vast majority of these encounters — the other 81 percent — verbal warnings in the presence of the CEW alleviated the need for a physical altercation and the need to discharge the CEW.

Over the years the use of CEW, we think, has likely mitigated physical injuries to both staff and the assaultive subjects. Without the CEWs, we think that these encounters may have resulted in the need for elevated physical force, which in these cases — these are assaultive subjects — would have likely included the use of the baton in cases or physical force in a variety of different techniques.

Given that, I think our view is that the CEW does, for us, present a useful use-of-force tool on the continuum of use of force, particularly for the maintenance of courthouse security and in cell management. In addition, the sheriff service is of the view that the findings and recommendations that flowed from the Braidwood Commission report have significantly improved the use, training and reporting aspects of CE as a use-of-force tool.

G. Hogg: Justice Braidwood said to us that the ultimate question that was asked with respect to his inquiry was: is it better to shoot someone or to taser them? In the instance we had just prior to this, corrections branch, where they don't have lethal weapons, then perhaps the question would be phrased: is it better to use the Taser than to use a baton or elevated physical force?

You do have lethal weapons, so how many times can you…? Can you compare the use of lethal weapons to CEWs?

K. Jardine: Certainly. The national use-of-force model is, I think, an important training component for us. In the national use-of-force model — and I'll perhaps ask Greg or Dave to respond as well — the threshold for the use of a lethal tool like the pistol is grievous bodily harm or death. So that would have to be the threat level that the sheriff would be perceiving in order to use the pistol.

In almost all of the cases, if not all of the cases, that would not have been the threat level that would have precipitated the use of the CEW. I don't think in any of the cases the CEW would have been an alternative to the use of a sidearm or pistol.

G. Hogg: Do we have data with respect to the use of a pistol prior to CEW and post-CEW? Is there any comparison there that would be informative?

D. Maedel: The incidence of pistols being used is zero in British Columbia by sheriffs since 1974. I believe it's only been drawn from the holster once.

G. Hogg: So I guess part of the usage, then, of CEWs would complement that. And we've only had CEWs for the last how many years?

K. Jardine: The other piece, as well, is that with respect to the sidearm, sheriffs by policy don't have the sidearm when they're in cells. So it wouldn't be an alternative there to using the firearm. And neither when they're in court, when they're with an in-custody, do they have their sidearm. So again, it's not an alternative in either of those situations.

G. Hogg: Just another comment that Justice Braidwood made, and he was making reference to police forces. He said that police forces are ultimately responsible to the state through a set of standards put in place by the state.

When it is the state doing it — and it's more directly the state in this instance than in a municipal police force or the RCMP — I would suspect that the burden is a little more onerous in terms of our accountability, transparency and practices around that. Part of his comment was that this is about restoring public confidence.

I'm not aware of there being any erosion of public confidence within corrections or court services. Perhaps you could pass judgment on whether or not you have any sense of that. But it seems to me that with the elevated attention to CEWs, it's important that we be as transparent, proactive and accountable as we can to ensure that that doesn't happen.

I'd be interested in your professional opinion and whether or not you feel there's anything more we could do in terms of accountability and transparency, given the extra burden that is placed upon the state in these matters.

G. Hogg: Yes. I think, publicly, it's about restoring confidence. Firstly, my question is: do you have any sense of there being some confidence lost because of perhaps a ripple effect from what's happened with the police with respect to the high-profile events?
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K. Jardine: Perhaps I'll leave that question. Greg may have some comments in that regard, given that he works more closely on the line — as may Dave, given that he has responsibility for the operations of sheriffs.

D. Maedel: If I understand your question correctly around confidence, I believe that the confidence level in sheriffs in British Columbia has been increasing over the past few years as a direct result of vastly improved hiring and training standards.

I think that any kind of erosion we may have felt as a ripple from the police would be vastly overtaken by that level of confidence. The direct answer: I haven't seen any kind of confidence erosion based on that.

G. Hogg: I see our responsibility as elected representatives and representing the state to ensure that we are able to, with confidence, provide support and confidence to what Justice Braidwood said, because he said, in policing, we didn't have those standards that put us in place so that the state was not in fact carrying out its responsibility in this matter.

I have some confidence, I believe, that both in sheriffs and in corrections, that does not apply. However, we still have to ensure that we are able to apply the same standards across that. Again, it's particularly difficult and challenging when it is part of government that is doing it and we have direct authority with respect to that.

The accountability, transparency — do we have a public process for being transparent about these usages in a way that allows us to compare to policing as police improve their strategies and methods around these standards? I suspect there will be some comparisons that will be drawn. Our gaining public confidence will come, again, out of how accountable we can be, how we respond to issues and how transparent we can be.

K. Jardine: There are two components, from my perspective. One is internal, and one is external.

With respect to the external piece, we have been in discussions with respect to what data and information we may want to make available to the public on a regular basis. That may include statistics around use of force in British Columbia by sheriffs in the course of their duty. That would be the number of CEW deployments, etc., as well as other types of use of force.

The internal part is also important from our perspective, which is ensuring that we have an accountability structure within B.C. sheriffs that helps to support public confidence and confidence in the sheriff services more broadly.

We've recently made a couple of changes to try and facilitate that. One has been the delegation of the day-to-day operation of sheriffs to a chief sheriff so that we have separated the responsibility for training, training curriculum, policy, etc., such that I retain, as the director of sheriffs, responsibility for all of those things including the audit function with the direct and separate reporting function from a professional standards office that sits outside of the chain of command.

So we've separated the framework within which sheriffs work, the rules within which they work, from the day-to-day operations as well — and the reporting. For instance, when we have use of force occurring in the province, I would initiate an investigation, and then that gets reported up, separate from the chain of command, to me as well.

G. Hogg: Just one more, if I may. I know the Ministry of Justice has been looking at open government models and how we can put that. I think they've compared a model in England, Great Britain's model, which I think is seen internationally as perhaps the best, most revealing, most open information.

Is there some room for us to look at maintaining public confidence and transparency through that type of model that would collect the information, perhaps even be comparative in that sense?

K. Jardine: Certainly in British Columbia. I mean, broadly, within the Ministry of Justice that is something that we've been both looking at and pursuing. In fact, on the JusticeBC website you can go there today and get statistics with respect to court, court services, corrections. Soon other data will be there, as well, as part of the data dashboard that's been made available. We anticipate that we'll be continuing to move, as part of justice reform initiatives, in that way to enhance transparency in the system. This is one of those areas in which we would be doing that.

I should say, as well, that with respect to public confidence, certainly the judiciary, I believe, sees sheriffs quite differently than they may see other peace officers and law enforcement officers in the province, as independent officers of the court who are not there supporting prosecutions or there supporting the defence but instead are there supporting the state and the independent judiciary in the exercise of their duty.

G. Hogg: I think that the notion of putting this out through the dashboard and the whole process was to not interpret data, largely, but to put data out there so that people around the world, and particularly British Columbians, could take that data. They can massage it, and they can come up with their interpretations of it. I think the more we can get there, the more quickly we can do that, the more effectively we address those primary principles — those two issues that Justice Braidwood said were paramount in his concerns, which sort of drove the other recommendations.
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K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): You spoke quite generally about where the sheriff services are, and we now have the materials, which we appreciate. I'll just ask the general question. Do the policies…? Are they consistent with and meet the recommendations that Mr. Justice Braidwood…? The 18, I guess, would be relevant.

P. Robinson: Yes. The recommendations that came out of Braidwood…. Police services and the BRIC committee — that was the British Columbia implementation committee — put together…. So police, corrections and sheriffs develop policing standards for the province. From the policing standards that were developed, sheriff services took those and put them into our policy, which are directives and must-do rather than guidelines. So yes, we're compliant with what the police have done in terms of the policing standards that were developed.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): We've looked at those quite closely. We've looked at the standards. Because you're involved with the implementation committee, those have been basically just taken, and they are the same policies. But you used the word "policy" as opposed to "standards." What is the legislative authority for creation of the policy? And also, why do you use the word "policy" instead of "standards"? We've had a great deal of discussion about standards, regulation versus policy. Are they interchangeable from your perspective or not?

K. Jardine: Maybe I'll start with the legislative piece. The Sheriff Act provides the statutory authority for the director of sheriffs around the definition of policies — policies and standards, I believe, actually. I would say that we generally use them interchangeably.

Standards we often think of in terms of duty for care around standards that we might have around, for instance, how in-custody is maybe treated, standards with respect to cells or jails or physical standards. Policies — we generally use those terms in those areas where there is some amount of human discretion required. And policy is, on the continuum, stronger than a guideline but not quite a standard. It really does depend on what each situation presents.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): So if there is a contravention of either the standards or policies, what is the process wherein that would be identified — that there had been a contravention? Then what is the accountability mechanism that's in place?

K. Jardine: In policy there is a reporting requirement by sheriffs. I'm happy to go into detail about what might trigger that reporting and what specific incidents might trigger that reporting. But there's a requirement to report incidents.

The severity of those incidents will determine — I'm talking about force-response options, force-response incidents now very specifically — whether or not there may be a recommendation or I may begin an investigation. The investigations that we do in use-of-force options generally aren't punitive in nature. The reason we investigate is to ensure that the policy that was employed was adequate, and whether or not there's any quality improvement or anything we can learn from each of those incidents that might then be reflected in improved training.

There are occasions, too, where we do investigations and find that there may have been some alternate interpretation of the situation that may have better been employed. Again, we may address that with some additional training for the particular officers involved, etc. But in general, we do probably…. I'm sorry. I don't have the numbers here. But I would say even in the last two months we've probably done four or five direct force-response option investigations or investigations specifically related to incidents that required the use of force.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Is there any reporting on that? Are there any stats that are kept? Are they public?

K. Jardine: There are stats that are kept. They are not currently public, but harkening back to the previous answer as well, that is one of the things we were looking at with respect to, potentially, public reporting.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Just confirmation, as well, that the new independent investigations office does not apply to sheriffs. Is that correct?

K. Jardine: We are still in the midst of discussions with respect to the application of the IIO for sheriff services. We are inclined to want to be under the umbrella of the IIO as it pertains to their mandate, but that is not something that we have yet, I think, fully confirmed.

P. Robinson: I think that's accurate, for sure. I guess the only thing I would add is that we're looking at a process for special cases, the special provincial constable authority, and getting designation under the Police Act for some of our sheriffs when they're faced with the very exigent situation that's outside of their normal authorities when they're performing sheriff duties in the courthouse. So they might be outside of the courthouse on a break, and they're confronted with an emergency situation.

If we have appointments under the Police Act, then for sure they would be IIO — under the rule of them.
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D. Maedel: We've been having active discussions with the IIO. Their position at this point is that they need to consolidate what they're doing, and then they're going to continue the discussions.

K. Corrigan (Deputy Chair): Just one more. It's interesting that with regard to sheriffs — and then we also had a presentation from corrections previously — in situations where the general public might most generally feel that a lethal weapon would be present, those are the very situations that they're not. You talk about when sheriffs are in cells, they do not have side arms.

Can you explain? Is that a safety issue for the officers, or is it believed that it's actually safer for everybody to not have firearms there, as opposed to the court where most people would feel like it's actually more safe? What's the thinking?

G. Ducharme: When we have our in-custodies in holding cells, prior to them coming into the cellblock all of our prisoners are searched. We search them for contraband, for weapons. So when we're working in a secure facility, in a secure area, it's our belief that there isn't a requirement for a lethal-force instrument in that area because the inmates have been searched.

The predominant threat — or potential threat, if you will — at the time would probably only be an assault of person. We would only, for the most part, require the use of a CEW or a baton or OC spray or physical force.

M. Coell (Chair): Thank you, Kevin, and to your staff. We greatly appreciate your being here.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
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Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

Chair:	* Murray Coell (Saanich North and the Islands BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	* Kathy Corrigan (Burnaby–Deer Lake NDP)
Members:	Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	* Gordon Hogg (Surrey–White Rock BC Liberal)
	Leonard Krog (Nanaimo NDP)
	John Slater (Boundary-Similkameen BC Liberal)
	* Joe Trasolini (Port Moody–Coquitlam NDP)
	* denotes member present
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
Committee Staff:	Matthew Cleeves (Committee Research Analyst)

Witnesses:	Justice Thomas R. Braidwood, QC
	Peter Coulson (Ministry of Justice)
	Greg Ducharme (Ministry of Justice)
	Kevin Jardine (Ministry of Justice)
	Dave Maedel (Ministry of Justice)
	Brent Merchant (Ministry of Justice)
	Jonathan Morris (Canadian Mental Health Association, B.C. Division)
	Peter Robinson (Ministry of Justice)
	Camia Weaver (Canadian Mental Health Association, B.C. Division)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO THE USE OF CONDUCTED ENERGY WEAPONS AND TO AUDIT SELECTED POLICE COMPLAINTS

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO
INQUIRE INTO THE USE OF CONDUCTED ENERGY WEAPONS AND TO AUDIT SELECTED POLICE COMPLAINTS