Law-enforcement agencies are reviewing more than 37,000 case files as part of a nationwide effort to improve how police handle sexual-assault investigations – an unprecedented overhaul of oversight, training and investigative practices designed to address substantial flaws in the way sexual violence is policed in Canada.

Unfounded: The Globe investigates how police handle sexual assault cases in Canada

An investigation by The Globe and Mail in February revealed that a disproportionate amount of sexual-assault cases were being dismissed as “unfounded,” meaning the investigating officer did not believe a crime occurred or was attempted.

Reaction at both the levels of law enforcement and government was swift. Many forces across the country pledged to improve their handling of these cases.

Now, a Globe survey of 177 services across the country shows that, when forces have begun auditing closed cases, the results have been startling.

Roughly half of the 37,272 files under review had previously been dismissed as unfounded accusations, but police now say that about one-third of those cases were miscoded.

To date, review teams have found that 6,348 files once cleared as unfounded were misclassified. Further, police reopened 402 unfounded files as a result of these reviews, the survey showed. The Globe has also learned that at least half-a-dozen allegations that had been closed as baseless should have resulted in a criminal charge.

“It’s unbelievable all that’s happened in the past year. It feels like coming forward was worth it,” said Ava Williams, who in 2010 told the London Police Service she had been raped at a keg party, only to have the case dropped as unfounded and the suspect let off with a warning. Ms. Williams’ story appeared in the initial Unfounded investigation. (At the time, she was not comfortable revealing her full identity).

Since the Unfounded series, police have begun to adopt a wide-range of new training and oversight measures designed to prevent further botched investigations and to provide greater police accountability.

More than half of Canadians now live in a jurisdiction whose law-enforcement agency has either already implemented or will soon launch training measures that incorporate new scientific findings about trauma and how its effect on brain functioning can impact a victim’s behaviour during an attack, as well as their ability to recount the events later on.

Further, at least 28 police services, jointly responsible for policing 51 per cent of the country’s population, have adopted or are considering some form of the Philadelphia Model, a review process in which civilian advocates working in the area of violence against women [VAW] are given full access to sexual assault files to look for signs of bias and investigative missteps. Among those services planning to go this route is the country’s largest force, the RCMP.

“It’s staggering,” said Carol Tracy, the executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, who was involved in the creation of that city’s oversight program. “It just seems to be that Canadian police have responded to the challenge and frankly, once again, Canada is ahead of America.”

However, it’s not all good news: the survey results suggest that for every police service that has committed to making reforms, it appears an equal number plan to do nothing differently.

The Globe’s recent survey of police forces provides a snapshot of how policy and practices have shifted in just under a year.

In February, The Globe released findings from a 20-month investigation that showed that, on average, one out of every five sexual-assault allegations reported to police in this country was cleared with the unfounded code. This was based on data obtained from 873 police jurisdictions through hundreds of freedom of information requests.

And while the national unfounded rate for sexual assault cases was shown to be 19.39 per cent – nearly double the rate of unfounded physical assault cases – the data fluctuated dramatically between jurisdictions, even among neighbouring police services with comparable staffing levels and population demographics.

Population Groups Unfounded Sexual Assault Rate 1,000,000+ -10 -5 +5 +10 500,000-999,999 National Rate 19% 250,000-499,999 100,000-249,999 50,000-99,999 30,000-49,999 10,000-29,999 5,000-9,999 5-4,999 Whitehorse 29% Yellowknife 36% Iqaluit 37% St. John’s 8% Vancouver 13% Halifax 13% Calgary 12% Edmonton 10% Toronto 7% Montréal 18% Winnipeg 2% Ottawa 28% Population Groups Unfounded Sexual Assault Rate 1,000,000+ -10 -5 +5 +10 500,000-999,999 National Rate 19% 250,000-499,999 100,000-249,999 50,000-99,999 30,000-49,999 10,000-29,999 5,000-9,999 5-4,999 Whitehorse 29% Yellowknife 36% Iqaluit 37% St. John’s 8% Vancouver 13% Halifax 13% Calgary 12% Edmonton 10% Toronto 7% Montréal 18% Winnipeg 2% Ottawa 28% Unfounded Sexual Assault Rate -10 -5 +5 +10 National Rate 19% Population Groups 1,000,000+ 500,000-999,999 250,000-499,999 Whitehorse 29% Yellowknife 36% Iqaluit 37% 100,000-249,999 50,000-99,999 30,000-49,999 10,000-29,999 5,000-9,999 5-4,999 St. John’s 8% Vancouver 13% Halifax 13% Calgary 12% Winnipeg 2% Edmonton 10% Montréal 18% Saint John 51% Toronto 7% Ottawa 28% Population Groups 1,000,000+ 500,000-999,999 250,000-499,999 100,000-249,999 50,000-99,999 30,000-49,999 Whitehorse 29% Yellowknife 36% Iqaluit 37% 10,000-29,999 5,000-9,999 5-4,999 Unfounded Sexual Assault Rate -10 -5 +5 +10 National Rate 19% St. John’s 8% Vancouver 13% Halifax 13% Calgary 12% Winnipeg 2% Edmonton 10% Montréal 18% Saint John 51% Toronto 7% Ottawa 28% Population Groups 1,000,000+ 500,000-999,999 250,000-499,999 100,000-249,999 50,000-99,999 30,000-49,999 Whitehorse 29% Yellowknife 36% Iqaluit 37% 10,000-29,999 5,000-9,999 5-4,999 Unfounded Sexual Assault Rate -10 -5 +5 +10 National Rate 19% St. John’s 8% Vancouver 13% Charlottetown 29% Calgary 12% Winnipeg 2% Edmonton 10% Montréal 18% Halifax 12% Toronto 7% Ottawa 18%

This raised serious public policy concerns, because, prior to the Unfounded series, once a case was dropped as unfounded, it was not reported to Statistics Canada and therefore not included in the annual police-reported crime figures. Lawmakers rely on these figures to make fact-based decisions about law-enforcement policy and resources, as well as victim-services funding.

After the Unfounded series ran, dozens of police forces from around the country pledged to go back and audit sexual-assault files as well as their policies and practices. But the scope, mandate and goals of those reviews has proven to be as divergent as the unfounded rates themselves.

In order to capture a better picture of how Canadians law enforcement is responding to a call for reform, The Globe sent an 18-question survey to all 177 police forces, including municipal, provincial and Indigenous services, as well as the RCMP, which acts as the provincial and municipal agency for vast swaths of the country.

Read the methodology behind The Globe’s survey of Canadian police services.

In total, 89 police services participated in the survey. In a dozen instances, some information was obtained through either local media coverage or the respective civilian-led police oversight board. Together, The Globe determined that at least 100 Canadian police services are conducting some type of sexual-assault-case review, including most of the largest forces, meaning 79 per cent of the population’s police services audited their files. Of those, 42 police services only involved their own “sworn” uniformed officers in the case audits. Going forward, 58 services said they will continue to regularly audit case files, 26 indicated they have added a new layer of supervisor involvement for unfounded cases and 53 specified some type of training and/or policy changes as a result of their work.

Over the past 10 months, Dr. Lori Haskell, a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto and Canada’s leading expert on the neurobiology of trauma, has conducted more than 20 police training sessions everywhere from Nunavut and the Yukon, to British Columbia and Ontario, as well as the Maritimes. She already has another 20 or so booked for 2018.

“It’s been the busiest year of my life,” she said.

Dr. Lori Haskell, a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto, is conducting police training sessions across the country. Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail

Dr. Haskell says what is particularly heartening is not just the volume of police services requesting the training, but the attitudes of the investigators who attend.

“They’re not just listening to this, they’re actually thinking about it in terms of their own work, what they’ve done and things they didn’t understand and things they missed,” she said. “One [senior] officer told me ‘I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight. I’m just going through files.’”

Dr. Haskell said there are still those who react to her presentation defensively, but for the most part, she said there seems to have been a fundamental shift among law enforcement.

“I’ve met police who are doing profound work, who are wanting to do this much better.,” she said. “If we really want to make a system change, I think we need to change not only how police are doing the work, but start promoting the perception that there’s police here who are very well trained who are wanting to make a difference.”

In a tucked-away room on the third floor of RCMP headquarters on the outskirts of Ottawa, two officers and a civilian staffer sit silently at their double-screened computers, moving row by row through their Excel spreadsheets.

Sgt. Wendy Smith, centre, is leading an audit of the RCMP’s sexual assault files. Blair Gable/The Globe and Mail

If a case winds up in this room, it’s already been flagged as a problem. Along with each file, staffers are given a short synopsis of the case and warning about the potential issue.

“I still read the full case again. It’s hard to get a sense of the issues unless you read the whole thing,” says one of the reviewers.

This is the RCMP’s Unfounded war room. When it opened in April, it housed just four employees. But as the service became more invested in the case-review process, the team outgrew its tiny headquarters, which is barely big enough to accommodate four desks and a short bookshelf.

On this day, a recent Tuesday afternoon, three more RCMP members – one in uniform and two civilian staff members – are auditing cases from cubicles outside of the review office. Outside of the building, eight retired investigators working on contract are going through files from home. That night, another half-dozen RCMP staffers will be going through cases as overtime. Together, the RCMP presently has more than 30 people actively working on sexual assault case review – a core team of eight, plus eight contract staffers and 16 others on a part-time basis.

This is the first phase of Canada’s largest police service’s sexual assault audit. In the future, the organization hopes to launch a version of the Philadelphia Model that makes sense for a service of its immense size and scope – both in geographic coverage and number of uniformed officers, of which there are more than 18,000.

The internal review team is currently working their way through 16,884 cases. To date, 1,260 unfounded files have been identified as miscoded and 258 have been reopened. Sergeant Wendy Smith, who is leading the audit, said it’s still too early to tell for sure whether any of those cases could result in criminal charges – but it’s possible.

In the wake of the Unfounded series, dozens of police services announced that they would review their unfounded cases – particularly for the years covered in The Globe investigation, 2010-14. But not all reviews are created equal.

In some jurisdictions, police leadership told local media outlets covering the series that high unfounded rates were due to coding errors alone, not faulty police work. In other instances, police services with above-average unfounded rates stood by both their coding practices and investigative work.

“There was no problem with the actual investigation, it was how they were cleared in the end,” Sgt. Ron MacLean of Prince Edward Island’s Summerside police service, whose unfounded rate was 24 per cent, told the CBC in June. In the same article, Gary McGuigan, Charlottetown’s deputy police chief, is quoted as saying: “Any sexual-assault file that was labelled unfounded, we looked at it, we reviewed it and we’re quite confident that the integrity of the file will stand up."

The Charlottetown Police Service did not respond to The Globe’s original freedom of information request for unfounded statistics, but – according to the CBC – the department reviewed 107 sexual-assault files 2014-2016 and half of those allegations — a total of 54 cases — were closed as unfounded. (PEI was one of several provinces, including Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in which the government either outright ordered or urged its police services to conduct a review.)

According to The Globe’s survey, six police services with an unfounded rate above Canada’s national average did not reclassify a single case following a review.

Blair Crew, a lawyer and part-time University of Ottawa law professor who is one of the few researchers in Canada to have studied unfounded rates, said he is concerned that some police services that are pledging reform are doing so purely as a public relations exercise.

Blair Crew, a lawyer and part-time University of Ottawa law professor, is concerned that some forces may be ‘saying they’re doing something but really aren’t.’ Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail

“I think a spotlight needs to be put on the ones that are saying they’re doing something but really aren’t,” he said. “The ones that really are owning the issues and taking ownership for it – I think they deserve lavish praise.”

At the RCMP, Assistant Commissioner Byron Boucher said identifying investigative problems, so that current cases are being handled properly, is top priority. In fact, while the agency has plans to launch a comprehensive new training strategy that, among other things, incorporates the neurobiology of trauma, command decided to fast-track a version in order to address some of the deficiencies they were seeing in files.

The foundation of the trauma-informed approach is the science behind the brain’s response to overwhelming fear. For example, it’s been discovered that a person in crisis may freeze, giving rise to the myth that a complainant who didn’t fight back was less believable. It also dismantles the notion that someone who has been through a traumatic event will necessarily be able to recount the episode in exacting and chronological detail.

“For the files we’ve reviewed, there’s some that are really, really well done,” said Sgt. Smith. But they’ve also found evidence that some officers misunderstand consent law, are falling prey to rape mythology and are ill-informed about how trauma can alter someone’s ability to recount an offence.

Sgt. Smith said there have been files where an officer noted that there were “authenticity” concerns about a victim’s statement, because they could not provide a chronological statement.

“[The complainant will say] ‘I think it took 20 minutes’ – or whatever – and in that 20 minutes, they weren’t able to put in step by step what happened,” Sgt. Smith said.

Sometimes a file noted a complainant was giggling or showing no emotion while recounting events, which some officers took as an indicator that the allegation was false, when in fact experts have shown these are normal victim responses.

Sgt. Smith said these deficiencies aren’t necessarily common, but they’ve come up enough that the RCMP recognizes it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Through the review process, they’ve put together a 20-page “Best Practices” guide for officers investigating sexual assault, which includes a breakdown of consent laws and how they apply to specific situations; clarifications on the age of consent; information about what trauma can look like; and a checklist for supervisors to ensure a thorough investigation was completed.

In its survey, increased supervisor involvement was a specific item that The Globe wanted to track, as this was an item that multiple experts – including Philadelphia’s Ms. Tracy – said was crucial to better investigations.

On this front, 26 police services indicated they had instituted a policy that, going forward, supervisors must be involved in a decision to classify a sexual-assault allegation as unfounded.

Among the other policy changes that police services instituted: In Medicine Hat sexual-assault investigations will now only be handled by “senior investigators”; The Ontario Provincial Police will add five detective staff sergeants – one for each region – to directly oversee ongoing sexual assault investigations; and the Sûreté du Québec will now be formally submitting all sexual assault complaints to the Crown for review.

The RCMP will be making changes to their electronic database system to ensure only someone with the “proper knowledge” will have the ability to close out a sexual-assault file.

“Ultimately, the purpose [of the RCMP’s reforms] is that, no matter where you live, you should be able to get the same level of service,” Deputy Commissioner Kevin Brosseau told The Globe.

“As Canada’s national police service, I think we obviously do have an obligation to show leadership.”

The RCMP was one of the first major police services to commit to a sexual-assault case review. Dozens of other services followed over the ensuing weeks.

Government reacted just as quickly. Within days of the Unfounded series’ launch in February, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale called on police investigators and Crown prosecutors “to re-examine all of their approaches, all of their procedures, all of the ways that cases are managed, that investigations are conducted.”

Statistics Canada announced that it was working with the Police Information and Statistics Committee – a subcommittee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) – to begin collecting unfounded statistics. (The first results are expected as early as the summer of 2018.) Canada’s Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould and Ontario’s Minister of Community Safety Marie-France Lalonde publicly praised the values of the Philadelphia Model. And soon, more and more police services began to announce their support for VAW review as well.

Even departments with unfounded rates that fell well below the national average were on board.

In May, the Calgary Police Service, where the unfounded rate was just 10 per cent, became the first department in the country to commit to ongoing, future case reviews involving VAW advocates.

Staff Sgt Bruce Walker is head of Calgary’s Police Services sex crimes unit. ‘I really believe it’s the era of the advocate groups…’ he says, ‘working with police.’ Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail

“I really believe it’s the era of the advocate groups coming forward and working with the police and actually helping us to provide better service to the community as a whole,” Staff Sgt. Bruce Walker, head of the Calgary Police Service's sex-crimes unit, told The Globe in a recent interview.

On December 5, 2017, it was announced that seven Canadian police services – including Calgary – would be taking part in a true Philadelphia Model pilot project for the next three years, to be funded by Status of Women Canada. The other services are in Ontario: Ottawa, Kingston, Stratford, Timmins, Peterborough, and London.

The woman behind the project is Sunny Marriner, the executive director of the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre and a long-time advocate of the Philadelphia Model.

Sunny Marriner, executive director of the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre, is leading a pilot project that will bring violence-against-women advocates into police departments’ case review processes in seven cities and towns in Canada. Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail

“For the last year there hasn’t been a single day where I haven’t spoken to stakeholders about case review, whether that’s police services, advocates in communities, provincial associations, survivors, politicians and policy makers or media. It’s everybody. Everybody is having this conversation,” she said.

The majority of the interest has been in Ontario, she said. For now, the plan with the pilot project is to look at all unfounded cases and at least a random sample of others, but that may need to change, given the scrutiny that unfounded files are facing.

“Next year we’re going to have to change it up because there aren’t going to be unfounded cases. It’s going to be a ‘choose your own adventure’ – where are these cases being put? We already know that cases are being classified differently now,” she said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean [police have] changed [their] practices. And the case review model focuses on practices – not on closure codes.”

Criminologist Holly Johnson said now that Statistics Canada will be making unfounded statistics available, it will be interesting to see if the criminal charge rates also increase. If arrests don’t go up, it could be an indicator that allegations that previously may have ended up unfounded are simply being hidden somewhere else.

Criminologist Holly Johnson. Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail

“It’s very easy to change statistics without changing anything meaningful. So it’s going to be important to understand exactly how police are examining those cases… and what they’re doing to change,” she said.

This is why Ms. Marriner has been working hard to push true VAW case review, in which advocates are given full access to unredacted police files. If a review team doesn’t have access to the exact same information that the officer was working off of when they concluded that there weren’t “reasonable and probable grounds” to lay a charge, then the advocate can’t properly audit a case, she argues.

For years, Ms. Marriner has been having these discussions with anyone who will listen. Today, police services, advocates and political leaders in 43 regions have tapped her expertise.

However, The Globe’s survey found that of the 177 Canadian police services included in our survey, 13 indicated they were not doing any review and for 63 services, The Globe was unable to determine if the service had taken any action as they either did not complete the survey or there was no public information available. The Globe made at least three attempts to reach officials at every Canadian service.

Ms. Marriner said she hopes the pilot projects will inspire other services to get on board.

“In the communities we’re working in, my experience has been that the realization is really quick – just how powerful and effective a model this is,” she said. “So, in this moment I’m meeting people with open arms if they want to have the conversation. And for those that don’t, well we’ll get there. We’re going to get there with them. We have to.”

Robyn Doolittle is a reporter with The Globe and Mail’s investigative team robyndoolittle@globeandmail.com.

With data research and analysis by Laura Blenkinsop, Michael Pereira, Jeremy Agius and Shengqing Wu

If you notice an error, please send an email to datafeedback@globeandmail.com.