Top Mountie says fewer officers dedicated to organized crime cases

About 500 Mounties who were working on organized crime investigations have been moved to national security and terrorism cases, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said Thursday.

That means some major investigations targeting the highest echelons of organized crime are on hold, the top RCMP leader told The Vancouver Sun’s editorial board.

“That number of trained and experienced officers absent from the organized crime fight impacts our efforts on organized crime,” Paulson said.

“It is a significant percentage because we are taking the people with the experience in terms of evidence collection, wiretaps, search warrants and interrogations, high-value investigative techniques, that we bring to organized crime and we are putting them on terrorism cases.”

Paulson said a major organized crime investigation could involve dozens of officers over years.

“It takes between 40 and 100 people to run a full-sized project and that’s a multi-year, wiretap, agent, undercover operation. That’s a big enterprise,” he said.

“So you are looking at, in effect, probably four or five project-style targeting initiatives that aren’t being deployed.”

While federal policing resources are down, the RCMP also has “provincial resources in B.C. that are dedicated to organized crime,” he said, referring to successes of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit.

And he said there is still a national strategy in place to prioritize major targets involved in criminal organizations.

“We are hitting the highest priority targets, going after the highest priority targets, with the view to impacting the organized crime groups the most,” he said.

He said the RCMP is currently doing “a very comprehensive review of our federal resourcing with a view to making the case exactly to government that this many people need to be in national security, this many people need to be in organized crime.”

The reallocation of resources began after Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack in Ottawa in October 2014.

At first about 300 organized crime officers were re-assigned. That number later doubled to 600, but is now at the 500-mark, Paulson said.

Paulson was in B.C., where he started his policing career in 1986, to address the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade.

He told them that Canada’s terror threat has not changed despite the recent bombing attacks in Brussels by men linked to the Islamic State.

“It is at a medium level,” Paulson said. “There is no evidence of an imminent attack on Canada right now at all.”

He said efforts continue to identify Canadians vulnerable to recruitment and try to prevent that from happening.

Paulson also laid out his efforts to improve the culture in the RCMP after a series of high-profile sexual harassment cases over the last few years.

“My philosophy has been that you can’t change the organization by having it understood differently. In other words, this is not a public relations exercise,” he said.

The change “has got to be at the guts of the organization. It has got to be structurally different. So that’s what we set out to do.”

He said the changes already implemented “are paying dividends” though he cited disturbing allegations of unwanted sexual touching and nudity at the Canadian Police College as a “recent set-back.”

“That is shocking and it was a heartbreak to me,” he said.

As for rampant gang violence in Surrey – home to the largest RCMP detachment in Canada – Paulson said he is confident in the strategies police have implemented there.

“Their strategies to combat that violence have been pretty sound, have been fairly well thought through and they’re deploying them rigorously, requiring some prevention efforts,” he said. “We need the cooperation of the Crown, the police, the community and it seems to me all those elements are properly represented in their plan.”

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