In 2020, at the height of the pipeline fight on Wet’suwet’en territory, Ricochet journalist Jerome Turner was detained by the RCMP in two separate locations for a total of eight hours as he sought to do his job and cover the story. It was one of the first instances in a troubling pattern of police interference with journalists that continues to this day.
Yesterday, after a five year fight for accountability, the RCMP formally apologized to Turner and his editor, Ethan Cox, for “unreasonable interference with Mr. Turner’s work as a reporter as he was turned away from the checkpoint, threatened with arrest for being within an exclusion zone, detained and had his movements controlled.”
The formal apology, ordered by the commissioner of the RCMP, was one of a series of recommendations in a scathing 70-page report issued by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, the RCMP’s civilian oversight body.
RCMP are thug bullies, they won’t change a thing unless actual restrictions are placed upon them. The officers involved should be prosecuted and their unit(s) forbidden to operate without liability insurance to cover current and future lawsuits. Then do the same to the remaining departments/divisions/units/whatever.