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This is somewhat ironic given that when Mr. Oppal was B.C. Attorney General from 2005 to 2009, he did not act on calls for a regional police force.

Mr. Oppal also recommends in his report “measures to prevent violence against aboriginal and rural women,” more “police accountability to communities,” “improved missing person policies and practices.”

In his Summary of Findings of Facts and Conclusions, Mr. Oppal writes that the Vancouver Police and the RCMP both contributed to a series of critical failures with respect to their missing women investigations and to Pickton’s crimes. He says that police failed “to fully investigate Pickton” and failed “to provide sufficient resources to the investigations in line with the potential threat posed by a serial killer.”

Mr. Oppal also writes that “poor report taking and follow up of the missing women amount to critical police failures…. The lack of urgency in the face of mounting numbers of missing women from a small neighbourhood was unreasonable.”

“I make two further overall findings of fact,” his report reads. “First, the missing women investigations were shaped, in large part, by the police failure to get to know the women — an essential step in any investigation of this type is to learn as much as possible about the victim or potential victim. This failure to get to know the victim group meant that inaccurate information about the women, and in particular the belief in the likelihood that they would ‘turn up,’ infiltrated all aspects of the missing and murdered women investigations.