POLICE CLEARED OF BEATING, TORTURE, KIDNAP ALLEGATIONS

56 Complainants Can't All Be Lying, Society Responds

An RCMP investigation has cleared Vancouver police of 56 complaints
including alleged torture, kidnapping and assault, Police Chief Jamie
Graham said Thursday as he slammed the group that demanded the
examination.

An angry Graham said the Pivot Legal Society pressured the RCMP to
investigate alleged Vancouver police misconduct between May 2001 and
May 2003 by using slick tactics to draw media attention.

"They managed to leverage this coverage by putting pressure on the
Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner to force an investigation
that would eventually span 18 months and cost more than a million
dollars," Graham said.

On top of that, the Vancouver police department spent an estimated
$200,000 and three to four months doing its own probe of the
"libellous and slanderous charges," he said.

Pivot, an activist group for drug addicts, prostitutes and the
homeless in the Downtown Eastside, produced 56 sworn affidavits from
people who said they were illegally searched, arrested on insufficient
grounds and mishandled by police.

"The evidence simply does not exist to substantiate these alarming and
irresponsible allegations," Graham told a news conference.

"Both the RCMP and the Vancouver police investigators concluded there
was not a single case of criminal activity by a Vancouver police
officer, not one," he said. "I find it very disturbing that this
protest group purposely chose to make these far-fetched accusations
with little or no evidence to substantiate them."

John Conroy, a Pivot director, said there's an obvious bias when the
police department is investigating its own officers.

"We know there was substantial non-cooperation with the RCMP
investigation," Conroy said, adding documents provided to Pivot by the
Mounties suggest 60 police officers out of 100 didn't co-operate
during the probe.

Conroy said not everyone who complained could have been lying about
being mistreated by police.

"It's hard to believe that they're all making up a
story."

The findings of the two investigations means disadvantaged people
won't report police misconduct, he said.

"They're going to once again say, 'What's the point of complaining --
we're just the people down on the street, nobody believes us and
there's no remedy when police beat us up.'"

Graham acknowledged that the two investigations revealed the
department had some problems with administrative procedures. The
department is taking immediate steps to deal with the issues, he said,
citing the example of two officers searching a drug suspect's knapsack
without sufficient grounds.

The Vancouver police have been under fire for police misconduct
before.

Last year, six officers pleaded guilty in Provincial Court to assault
for the January 2003 beating of three suspected drug dealers they'd
driven to Stanley Park.