October 27, 2010
Study finds British Columbia has greatest number of police-related deaths in CanadaFrançais
The Globe and Mail
IAN BAILEY
British Columbia had twice as many jail and police-related deaths as much more populous Ontario in a recent 15-year period that was the focus of a study on the issue for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The study, released Wednesday and calling for reforms in the investigation and prevention of such incidents, also finds that B.C. had the highest number of deaths a year of any of six provinces and territories for which numbers were available.
“We have what looks like people dying at a higher rate in British Columbia than in any other jurisdiction in the country that provided data,” said David MacAlister, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University and author of the report.
The study covered 1992 to 2007 – the period for which statistics were available. It crunched data from B.C., New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, the Yukon and Ontario. Statistics were not available elsewhere.
In that period, 267 people died in police custody in B.C. – 53 per cent of them accidentally – though the numbers declined from 24 in 1992 to 11 in 2007. That compares with 113 people in Ontario, which provided data only from 1992 to 2006 and has three times the population of B.C.
B.C had the greatest number of deaths per capita, with one per 254,550 people a year, compared with one for every 1.63 million people in Ontario.
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