The Independent Investigation Office of BC (IIO) is so short staffed and resourced that it is taking longer than it should to resolve important cases.
“We should have had 30 front-line investigators dealing with the caseload around 2017, 2018. We only have 19 front-line investigators now and our caseload has almost doubled,” Ron McDonald, Chief Civilian Director IIO told Global News.
The IIO investigates police-related incidents that result in death or serious harm to determine whether an officer may have committed a crime.
It recently faced criticism for being one of the agencies that took six years Recommend charges against five BC RCMP officers Following the 2017 death of Indigenous man Dale Culver in Prince George, B.C.
McDonald said, “If I had my way, I’d prefer to have about 36 front-line investigators plus some additional staff.” “So really, we are in that sense at about half the strength, dealing with twice as many cases.
And our people are running. They are tired. Some breakouts are on the point of burnout. I am really concerned about his welfare. And the effect is that our cases are taking at least 50 per cent longer to complete. None of this is as it should be.
“So right now, I consider the situation quite dire because I am concerned that we may lose more investigators because of the current situation.”
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MacDonald said he knows how much long wait times hurt people’s families and friends.
He said he has proposed a solution to the government but no final response has been received so far.
B.C.’s Attorney General, Niki Sharma, said Monday that the staffing challenges at the IIO are issues the government is taking “very seriously.”
“Six years is too long to complete an investigation, so we need to come up with solutions for this,” she said.
Currently, no former police officer can be hired in the IIO until five years have passed since they left policing.
Sharma said flexibility is one of the issues they are examining.
She said that she would meet McDonald soon.
“Obviously this is a serious issue and you can see how important the Office of Investigation is when it comes to tragic issues,” Sharma said.
McDonald said one of the biggest issues at the moment is the compensation structure.
“Currently, our base pay is at least 15 percent less than competing positions and we do not pay overtime. And I need to emphasize that we do not pay overtime to people who These cases are called out at all hours of the day and night to respond. That’s why their overall compensation rates are very low compared to competing positions.”
He said that with so much workload, he would like to be able to hire former police officers with less than five years, but he can’t.
“So the compensation structure, the limits on the types of people I can hire, are the major problems,” Macdonald said. “And we need to fix them.”
McDonald said that if the IIO is not able to respond to cases in a timely manner, he knows the public will lose faith in what it is doing.
“My biggest fear is that we won’t be able to do our job at all,” he said. “I fear we may reach a position where we cannot respond to a new case. Right now, since I came here in 2017, our goal has always been to conduct a thorough, objective and timely investigation.
“We’re not checking in a timely manner at this point in time. And that’s an important, important part of the inspection.”
— With files from Rumina Daya
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