Say hello to your big friend.
After a few years of preparations and negotiations, St. Albert now has a public complaint director ready and available to assist members of the public in understanding the complaint process regarding service or conduct of the St. Albert Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
As the new director, longtime city resident Al Bohachyk brings decades of policing experience and advocacy to the volunteer position, which will operate independently from the RCMP.
“I have quite an extensive background in dealing with police complaints, how they're managed and how they're investigated,” he began.
“I even did some similar work for a different organization in my retirement for a few years on a contract basis, so I have a fair amount of experience with respect to that whole professional standards, or police conduct management.”
Bohachyk is a retired Edmonton Police Service member who worked everything from human resources to tactical team to media relations, ending up as a duty officer positions, managing all high priority calls and resources, and taking command of high risk incidents.
After he retired 13 years ago, he did contract work as a manager for professional standards, ostensibly the manager of complaints against police.
In this new role, he won’t manage or investigate those complaints but rather maintain an oversight capacity and be available to help citizens negotiate and navigate the complaint process for any RCMP concerns they have, whether it's a complaint of service or a complaint of conduct.
“The hope is – and certainly the objective is – to just provide a safe, comfortable opportunity to assist community members if they have concerns about police conduct or police service,” he continued, noting it should be a fairly quiet workload.
“The experience in many other jurisdictions of similar sizes is that there are few complaints. If you get half a dozen a year, that might be sort of normal. Less is often the case. We're not anticipating a big rush on police complaints.”
The process
For all police agencies that are municipally managed and paid for, the Police Act requires that they have both a police commission and a public complaint director. According to the Government of Alberta’s website on policing complaints, anyone can make a complaint who is not satisfied with the services or policies of a municipal or Indigenous police service, or the conduct of a police officer. The Police Act gives you the right to complain about it, the site states.
Those complaints can be filed within one year from the date of the incident. The police will then review the complaint, possibly offering an informal resolution and/or investigating as they deem necessary.
You can file a complaint about the RCMP member directly with the local RCMP detachment, through the Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General's Provincial Public Complaint Director (at [email protected]), or through the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP.
When a citizen makes a complaint against the St. Albert RCMP, Bohachyk will be advised so he can monitor it at "a very, very high level" to observe that it is fully investigated and that the complainants have been notified of the outcomes of the investigations.
"We have an obligation to report the status of any complaints back to our policing committee so that the committee knows what's going on and by extension, of course, city council then would know what's going on."
All of the information that the public complaint director sees would be totally unidentifiable in terms of the people involved, as well.
"There would be no names attached to this stuff. There would be a great deal of care taken not to share too much of the circumstances because that would lead to the opportunity to identify an officer and that's not what we're after. We're certainly not looking at individual circumstances. We're more looking at a global situation where, ‘We have this many complaints in the community, this many have been solved, this many are still outstanding.’"
Forward action
St. Albert is one of the first Alberta communities to establish a public complaint director position.
“We've been leading the way in some respects, in terms of putting policies and practices to paper so that we have a really definitive set of rules to follow. We've shared this with the rest of the province so other policing committees may very well adopt some of these policies and practices. I would say there is interest throughout the province to create a little bit more oversight for RCMP contract jurisdictions, but so far it's not huge,” Bohachyk noted.
Bohachyk also ran in the 2017 municipal election, coming up 175 votes shy of serving on city council.
People can reach the public complaint director by phone at 587-926-2519 or email at [email protected]. In his role, Bohachyk will also serve as a public member of the St. Albert Policing Committee.
