We are often stunned by the disclosure we obtain from Freedom of Information requests. We find horrible things like police concocting evidence to substantiate IRPs, Government employees doing things absolutely contrary to the law and almost every day we see evidence of incompetency across the board. Lawyers like ourselves who are in court practically every day become accustomed to police incompetence. We’re not intolerant. We expect imperfect police officers because nobody is perfect. We’re humans too.
There are some really wonderful police officers in BC. Unfortunately, there are also some really imperfect police officers out there and every day there are police officers in BC making mistakes that will cause some innocent person a world of grief. The Government denies this. They say that the police are perfect. If the Government admits imperfections in the police, it brings embarrassment and may undermine the rather bizarre deference we have to the police in this country. And the entire IRP scheme is based on the stupid assumption that the police are perfect. How else could you justify punishing people so harshly without a hearing?
The IRP scheme rests on the naive assumption that the police are perfect. We’re sorry to report that each and every police officer in BC is, in fact, imperfect. A handful are compulsive liars. But all of them make mistakes.
When we have trials on criminal matters, lawyers like ourselves are effective at identifying the mistakes, figuring out if they’re substantive and emphasizing them to the court. This happens by way of two mechanisms: disclosure of evidence and cross examination.
With respect to IRPs in this respect we are handicapped in two ways. First, we only get the disclosure that the Government wants to give us. Even if there is exculpatory evidence that we can identify, despite the cautions in Spencer, the OSMV will not disclose it.
Evidence of innocence? Sorry. Them’s the secret internal rules.
And secondly, we can never get to the truth in IRP cases. The IRP scheme is a stripped-down process in which we don’t get to question the police officers. So we never know what really happened. And so the simply incompetent or imperfect police officers are never exposed, and worse still the handful of compulsive liars are given a blank cheque.
As an example of an imperfect police officer, from one of our many FOIs, we give this not unusual excerpt from an ASD Accuracy Check Log. We’ve got hundreds of these things revealing police mistakes, breathalyzer malfunctions and police incompetence.
The freaky thing here is what the police in this case were doing. It’s what we we in our office call “active incompetence.” The police in this detachment took it upon themselves to adopt a new ridiculous procedure to address a perceived problem.
In this case the police officers noticed that a number of the devices were indicating temperatures much lower than the ambient air. The records shows that the particular device displayed 0° Celsius at room temperature.
Interesting is what they did about it. The first step this police officer took to address this obvious fault was to heat it. Rather than recognizing that this is a problem that called for the breathalyzer to be serviced, they took it on themselves to heat it up.
Yes. You read that correctly. Instead of recognizing that the device had a problem (usually a catastrophic problem when the temperature is out of whack), the police in this detachment thought that they should just get their breathalyzers extra hot so they could be calibrated.
We’re serious. The person who was responsible for calibrating the devices thought it was smart to simply cook each breathalyzer that was displaying abnormally low temperature readings.
And how did they do it? A hairdryer. As you would expect.
“Wow,” you say.
Wow indeed. This officer screwed this up so badly. The repercussions for all of the people who blew into the breathalyzers from this detachment are so severe. And because of the stripped-down process in an IRP DUI review, where there is only the Government-approved disclosure and no cross examination, this type of evidence, that would exonerate perhaps hundreds of people, has never been used at an IRP hearing.
At this point what you should be asking yourself is how the heck did we ever get to a process as flawed as this? Who was so naïve as to think that the police are perfect?
Zealots.
A handful of zealots pushed this on the BC Liberals and somehow the members of the Legislature decided not to speak out against it.
Which brings us back to a common theme here on our blog. We’re real believers in freedom of speech. And the main purpose of our blog is to inform our readers of some of the horrible things we’ve encountered in our day to day battle with the Government as we deal with Immediate Roadside Prohibition DUI cases and our ongoing challenge to these bad laws. But it can’t only be the lawyers of our office who stand up to the Government. We need courageous people to get out there and explain all about the IRP scheme to anyone who will listen.
The main purpose of our blog is to inform you of what’s going on and why you should oppose the IRP scheme. One of the important reasons you should oppose the IRP DUI laws is because police officers are imperfect. In fact, imperfect police are everywhere. Sadly, with the IRP law, imperfect police have been deemed perfect. And that’s bad for our society.