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A quarter century and nearly 6,000 investigations after the SIU’s founding — that includes at least 879 police-involved deaths — Justice Tulloch found broad agreement among stakeholders on several “less contentious issues.” These are things everyone thought should change but that, golly gee, just somehow hadn’t gotten changed before. Here are some of the things: making it an actual offence for police officers to refuse to cooperate with the SIU; compelling officers who are the subject of an investigation to turn over any notes taken before the SIU steps in; and not requiring officers’ permission to record their interviews.

These omissions do not smack of a commitment to very rigorous police oversight. So the noticeable air of scepticism among black and aboriginal Ontarians in attendance at Thursday’s unveiling of Tulloch’s report was understandable. Attorney-General Yasir Naqvi said the government would immediately get to work on some of Tulloch’s 129 recommendations, including those mentioned above. And critically, he said, henceforth all SIU decisions in cases where charges are not laid against the officer will be made public — with as much information as possible without raising privacy concerns. Naqvi even committed to posting all previous SIU decisions by June 2018.

Assuming he follows through, much depends on what “as much as possible” looks like. What Tulloch is describing would be a near-infinite improvement over the news releases we get now. “The current style of reporting tells the public that a pellet gun looked like a real gun, rather than showing them a picture of it. The current style reports what the (SIU) director saw in a video of the incident, rather than sharing the video,” the report notes. Nor do we get any witness statements. We’ll get all those things now, as Tulloch envisions it. But Canadian governments are not in the habit of so swiftly increasing public access to sensitive information, let alone when powerful police interests are involved.