Hearing denial for man held for tweet shows complaints system favours police: experts

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — People in Newfoundland and Labrador who feel they’ve been a victim of police misconduct have just six months to file a complaint. Experts say the time limit is “grossly inadequate” and part of a complaints system set up to protect officers.

“Newfoundland and Labrador is by far and away behind its peers when it comes to oversight of the police, in Canada and across the world,” said Temitope Oriola, a criminologist at the University of Alberta.

“Six months, just to be clear … is grossly inadequate,” said Oriola, who was a special adviser to the government of Alberta during a review of policing legislation. “For a lot of complainants, who are more often than not vulnerable members of our society, they may not even have come to terms with what has hit them at that point.”

The six-month time limit is at the centre of a decision last week from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s independent police complaints commission that quashed a hearing that had been ordered into a Labrador man’s detainment by police over a 2015 social media post.

Andrew Abbass was held in a psychiatric ward by police at a western Newfoundland hospital for six days after he tweeted about a fatal public shooting earlier that month. The man who had been killed had also sent tweets that alarmed authorities.

“How about this Premier of N.L. I’m going to bring down Confederation and have politicians executed,” one of Abbass’s tweets said. “Ready to have me shot, coward?”

Despite his six-day detention, Abbass was never charged because of his post, nor was he diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

In a decision dated Thursday, an adjudicator with the force’s independent police complaints commission said it would be in the interest of the public for a hearing about Abbass’s detention to proceed. However, John Whalen ruled that Abbass had not filed a complaint against the officer who detained him within the six-month period set out in the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary Act.

Abbass said he didn’t file his complaint until more information emerged about his detention. Those details came out during a public inquiry that began in 2017 into the fatal shooting he had tweeted about.

Oriola pointed to Wales and England, where time limits on police complaints no longer exist. Some Canadian provinces still have time limits, though Newfoundland and Labrador’s six-month cap is among the shortest, he said. In Alberta, citizens have one year to file a complaint. In Ontario they have just six months, but complaints of significant public interest will be considered if they fall beyond the deadline, Oriola said. Abbass’s case, for example, may have gone ahead in Ontario, given Whalen’s comments about its importance, Oriola noted.

The professor said every province should be looking to mimic England and Wales, and do away with the time limits altogether.

Overall, he said, the limits add another level of murkiness to a public complaints system for the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary that is already “incredibly opaque and outdated.” The convoluted system will only dissuade people with legitimate complaints from coming forward, and thus promotes impunity for officers who deserve scrutiny, he said.

“It is simply not with the rudiments of effective policing in the 21st century,” Oriola said. “Even by Canadian standards, which are not great when it comes to oversight of the police, Newfoundland and Labrador’s processes with complaints are significantly behind the times.”

St. John’s lawyer Lynn Moore agrees with Oriola, adding that limitation defences act as get-out-of-jail-free cards. She said the six-month window for police complaints is especially egregious, considering the imbalance of power between a citizen and an officer, and the “Byzantine” nature of the process to file complaints against Constabulary members.

“We’ve had a very serious instance of someone’s liberty being taken away from them for an improper purpose, and that person is not able to complain about the officers who effected this arrest or the senior officers who may have ordered it,” Moore said about Abbass in an interview Monday.

“There is no redress through this process, which is set up specifically for allowing members of the public to have redress. So, it seems to be a failure.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 5, 2024.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press