All complaints against police dismissed or withdrawn
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/05/2020 (2131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Fewer public complaints against municipal police forces in Manitoba were filed with the Law Enforcement Review Agency two years ago, and all of them were either dismissed or withdrawn.
Manitoba’s Law Enforcement Review Agency (LERA) released its 2018 annual report Tuesday, showing most of the complaints it received that year involved allegations of excessive use of force — 39 per cent — or discourteous behaviour by police. Three complaints alleged improper use of handcuffs and two complaints alleged misuse of Tasers by Winnipeg police. The agency doesn’t investigate criminal complaints, but 15 criminal complaints against police arose from incidents that were also reported to LERA in 2018.
None of the complaints led to a public hearing: 70 per cent were dismissed by the LERA commissioner as lacking sufficient evidence or being outside the agency’s scope to investigate. The other 30 per cent of complaints were considered abandoned by the complainants.
Most of the complaints were submitted by men who alleged incidents happened either in private homes or on the street, and most of the complaints were filed against the largest municipal police force in the province, the Winnipeg Police Service.
There were 166 files opened in 2018, and 98 formal complaints received — down from 2017, when there were 190 files opened and 109 formal complaints. While there was a decrease from the previous year, the number of files opened in 2018 is still higher than the four-year average of 117, which includes a period of time before Manitoba’s Independent Investigation Unit got up and running. Starting in 2015, the IIU began investigating serious incidents involving all police officers in Manitoba, including criminal complaints.
On average, investigations LERA finished in 2018 took six months to complete.