THE PUBLIC SHOULD EXPECT BETTER FROM THE POLICE

Police Chief Vince Bevan's recent comments ("Bevan defends police in
'gang boss' probe: Chief says judge who threw out case didn't have
full story," Nov. 2) about Judge Hugh Fraser excluding evidence
gathered by police using an improperly obtained wiretap are far more
troubling than the result of the ruling.

Chief Bevan claims the judge did not have the full story, despite the
obvious fact that the trial judge heard every minute of the court testimony.

It was the chief who was not present for a single moment of the
evidence being presented.

If he had been present, Chief Bevan would have realized that the
alleged good faith of his officers was debated and then rejected by
the trial judge.

It is almost a quarter of a century since the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms became law. The purported good faith of police
officers as a justification for rights violations is an argument that
is happily beginning to wear thin.

How long must the public wait for the remaining few police officers
to learn that misleading judges, using excess force, investigating
without reasonable and probable grounds and other improper police
practices are not going to be excused as either ignorance or
malevolence disguised as good faith.

The wiretap-approval process, like that used for search warrants, has
always been an anathema to our judicial system. The applications take
place behind closed doors. The police are sometimes understandably
but unfortunately overly zealous in their attempts to get their
requests approved. There is no one in attendance to present the other
side of the story, as is the case throughout the rest of our
adversarial justice system.

Search warrants and wiretaps allow such invasive surveillance that
they have to be pre-authorized by the court. This protection of our
freedoms and privacy is a good thing. The court can only grant these
extraordinary powers to search, tap, and monitor on the basis of
sworn police affidavits. Judges have to be able to count on the
police making honest and full disclosure of their investigations
before granting a search warrant or a wiretap.

In the same breath as he claimed there is an information gap, Chief
Bevan said he is going to follow through and determine that the
federal Crown had full information. Perhaps the chief would have been
wiser to do that before criticizing any supposed gap between the
federal and provincial Crowns. Maybe the follow-through should have
taken place before, when questioned by the Citizen editorial board,
he made a knee-jerk attempt to support his officers.

The claim of lack of communication between two different
jurisdictional agencies is a favourite old Ottawa game that does not
succeed in this case.

By speaking out without having heard the evidence and without knowing
whether there was any gap, the chief has done a great disservice to
the court and the Crown, by undermining, in the public's eyes, the
integrity of both.

The chief should have responded to the judicious ruling by providing
for better officer training, as was suggested by the defence counsel,
Susan Mulligan. This additional training would emphasize the
importance of candid disclosure in requests for wiretaps or search warrants.

Instead, Chief Bevan says he is satisfied that his members acted in
good faith and that the evidence before Justice Lynn Ratushny
"indicated quite clearly that at that point in time, this gentleman
was no longer a suspect in the murder investigation."

Gang violence is a serious problem in Ottawa and if the Nnanyere
Obiorah case is an example of why certain individuals are not
successfully prosecuted as the community should expect, perhaps the
chief should look in a mirror for the explanation.