'BY ITS VERY NATURE, IT'S VERY SECRETIVE'

There has never been an independent public study of the Canadian
witness protection program, reports Chris Cobb.

The RCMP's witness protection program is shrouded in such thick
secrecy that it is impossible for anyone but a few police insiders to
know whether it is effective or a dangerous waste of public money, experts say.

"By its very nature, it's very secretive," said David McAlister, a
criminologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "It's
not the type of thing that gets evaluated by anyone external to the
RCMP and police officers I know who are in any way involved are very
reluctant to talk about it."

A Citizen story published yesterday under severe reporting
restrictions revealed that a person formerly known as Richard Young
tricked the RCMP into believing he had legitimate information into a
B.C. Asian drug gang. The force paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
in taxpayer money for the worthless information, only to see its case
against alleged gang members fall apart. In the process, officers
ignored warnings from their own polygraph expert that Mr. Young was
likely lying.

If the value of each witness protection case is audited, it is done
internally by the Mounties, but there is no firm indication whether
it is done at all.

"I presume the RCMP internally must maintain some assessment of how
effective the program is," added Mr. McAlister, "but I don't know if
they do that. If there isn't some mechanism of reviewing every
individual case and assessing whether they are dealing with
legitimate people, there probably should be. The RCMP has a long
history of taking care of itself internally and being resistant to
any external oversight."

When a police informant is taken into the witness protection program,
he or she is typically relocated and provided with money, a new
identity and a new job. There are about 80 to 100 people in the RCMP
program at any given time and at least half have testified against
organized crime syndicates.

It's particularly troubling, added Mr. McAlister, that in the Young
case, Mounties ignored the advice of their own polygraph expert, Rick Konarski.

"Rick Konarski's report seems to have fallen on deaf ears," he said.
"You would like to think that if the RCMP sees some kind of problem
like this, and goes to such lengths to see if the guy is legitimate,
that they would at least take their own assessments seriously."

Informers of any sort always present a risk, said University of
Ottawa criminology professor Ronald Melchers.

"It's very difficult because often you don't know what sort of
information you are getting," he said, "but you don't want to limit
the police ability to take risks. Information of any kind is never
useful on its own and always has to be crosschecked with other
sources to establish its reliability. Paid informants have been
around as long as police have been around, but it has always been a
risky business."

There has never been an independent public study of the Canadian
witness protection program. The closest in Canada was a section of a
2003 report into the effectiveness of anti-organized crime measures
that referenced mostly U.S. data. According to that data, the recent
programs have been almost 100-per-cent effective in protecting the
lives of informants.

It's very difficult for police to get witnesses in some of the
"nastiest cases," said Irvin Waller, director of the University of
Ottawa-based Institute for the Prevention of Crime.

"You need someone who was right there with blood on his or her hands
to testify against the more important person," he said. "In order to
get them to testify, you need to move them into some sort of protection system.

"So the dilemma," he added, "is you either don't convict the kingpin,
or you take the kingpin's assistant and get him to testify against
the kingpin. So it's not nice, but police agencies across the world
have programs like this. Unfortunately, it is a necessary part of the
system, but you want to use it in cases where they are getting
witnesses who can convict kingpins."

Mr. Waller said he wasn't surprised by revelations in yesterday's
Citizen story.

"For a whole range of reasons, it's done in secret," he said, "so I'm
not surprised there isn't a court system for overseeing it. But I
agree that the facts in the Citizen suggest that there needs to be
some form of review."

Experts agree that hardened criminals and other unsavory characters
are an inevitable part of the informant-witness protection system
because only they know -- often literally -- where bodies are buried.

"It is the rule rather than the exception that most of the people who
make their way into this program will have some connection with
organized crime or drug gangs and the like," said Simon Fraser
criminologist McAlister. "Otherwise they would not be the kind of
people who need protecting or who would have the kind of information
the police would want out of them.

"But," he added, "you do wonder how many other cases like this we
don't know about."

[Sidebar]

Witness protection program:

By The Numbers

2005-2006 Figures

Total number of people in program: 700 (est.)

Total number of new cases: 53

Total cost of program: $1,932,761.16

Voluntary terminations: 21

Involuntary terminations: seven

Witnesses who refused protection: 15

Instance of failure to protect a witness caused by RCMP: 0

Lawsuits filed in court or complaints with the Commission for Public
Complaints against the RCMP in relation to the program: 3

Relocation outside province of origin: 22

Relocation within province of origin: 9

Source: Witness Protection Program Act annual report; RCMP