Attorney General and Minister of Justice Barbara Adams issued a new directive on Sept. 17 to all police agencies to comply with 39 standards to ensure consistent service delivery. The provincial government said as a result of the new standards that Nova Scotians will have more effective and accountable policing as it modernizes standards and implements an audit system for policing agencies.
“These new standards represent a significant step forward in our commitment to safer communities,” said Adams. “Nova Scotians deserve to feel safe in their homes and know that their communities are protected by transparent and accountable police services.”
The new standards represent five technical areas of policing that affect public safety, including critical incident response, police investigations, police service including organization and records management, and use of force. A public safety audit unit is also being created to measure all police agencies against the standards. The unit will conduct audits, with results sent to the policing agency leader, the respective board of police commissioners or police advisory board and the respective department.
The RCMP in Nova Scotia and all municipal police agencies will be required to comply with all standards. An ongoing comprehensive review of policing may lead to the development of additional standards.
Assistant Commissioner Dennis Daley, commanding officer of the Nova Scotia RCMP, said the standards “will support our collective work to create stronger, safer communities.”
“I commend the Department of Justice, and the Public Safety and Security Division more specifically, for their leadership to establish these standards,” he said. “We, alongside our municipal policing partners and others, provided input and feedback throughout the collaborative development process to help shape the final standards and auditing function.”
The standards are part of a response to some of the recommendations outlined in the mass casualty commission set up to investigate an April 2020 shooting rampage in Nova Scotia when a man impersonated a uniformed RCMP officer and killed 22 people and injured three others.
Chris Giacomantonio, a criminologist and social policy researcher at Dalhousie University, said the move is a good step for the province and brings Nova Scotia in line with other provinces, representing a “kind of minimum practice for the regulation of policing.”
“There’s nothing groundbreaking here as far as I can tell, except for the requirement that these police services share policies and agreements with the [Nova Scotia] Department of Justice. So this increases the transparency of local policing,” he said. “Establishing these minimum standards is great — the lack of it was a demonstrable problem in the province.”
Giacomantonio said there is going to be some near-term pain for some police services in Nova Scotia as they scramble to align themselves with the new standards. But he also said there were some “notable omissions” in them.
“We don’t see, for example, a mention of standards towards things like sexual assault case review or race-based data, which have been, obviously, issues that have faced policing in the province recently,” he said. “But there are many good things, like the requirement for certain policies for each police service to be made public. So that’s a nice step in the right direction in terms of transparency.”
The final report of the mass casualty commission can be found here.
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