In 2021, the Washington Post reported on a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of Albuquerque police. Federal officials reported that excessive use of force showed a continuing pattern, and a civilian oversight office had been too forgiving of the department’s use of deadly force. Albuquerque’s police union and senior police officials fought back against independent scrutiny, preventing completion of reviews when officers were involved in fatal shootings.

The struggle in New Mexico’s largest city illustrates the challenge of asking civilians to check police powers. Police nationwide have frequently defied efforts to impose civilian oversight and, in turn, undermined the ability of communities to hold law enforcement accountable, according to a Washington Post review of audits, misconduct complaints,emails, lawsuits and interviews with dozens of current and former officials.

When communities try to hold police accountable, law enforcement fights back

An important point of this journalism is that the experience in Albuquerque is common in the USA.

Washington Post has been reporting on deadly police violence for years. The newspaper calculates American law enforcement killed 1,096 in 2022, the highest number on record. The daily rate of fatal police shootings in year-to-date 2023 is 28 percent higher than in 2022 and 40 percent higher than the average in the years 2017-2021.

Canadian complacency on this issue is unwarranted. Toronto Star reported Canadian police used deadly force at record rates in 2022. The Globe and Mail found that oversight bodies hindered by silence of accused police officers:

Seven people know what was done to Myles Gray the day the 33-year-old business owner died in suburban Burnaby. All of them were officers with the Vancouver Police Department. And 7½ years on, it is still not clear to anyone but them.

B.C.’s police oversight agency, the Independent Investigations Office, believed there were grounds to charge some of the officers with manslaughter, aggravated assault and assault causing bodily harm. Prosecutors declined to lay even one.

The rate of police involved deaths is far lower in Canada than in the USA but may not be accurately known because tracking relies on a volunteer organization. The group Tracking (In)Justice says:

While vital grassroots efforts have been made to keep track of police and carceral violence, there is no national government or civil society body tracking police-involved deaths or deaths in custody in Canada.

Joanne MacIsaac, the sister of a man shot and killed by Ontario police during a mental health crisis, said that failure to track fatalities at the hands of police makes it easier to dismiss the magnitude of the problem.

When government can tell you how many moose there are on the island of Newfoundland but they can’t tell you how many people have lost their lives at the hands of police — yeah, I think that it’s an intentional omission.

Researchers fill data gap on police-involved killings

Tracking (In)Justice provides a data explainer. Here are a few key points:

• Canada has a long history of slavery and colonialism, and colonialist and discriminatory structures persist in contemporary Canadian laws and institutions.
• Discrimination – systemic and otherwise – runs through Canada’s justice system, with increasing rates of police intervention, questioning, arrest, use of force, surveillance towards Indigenous people, African, Caribbean and Black people, and members of other racialized communities.
• Discriminatory acts and systems in Canadian society more broadly also result in these groups experiencing disproportionate rates of job insecurity and poverty – other factors that often coincide with increased police contact.

The following chart uses numbers reported by Tracking (In)Justice to September 13, 2023, along with population estimates from Statistics Canada. This shows disturbingly high numbers in Canada’s northern region and indicates that police-involved deaths in four western provinces (2.69 per 100,000) are much higher than in the six provinces to the east (1.44 per 100,000).

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