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Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to your committee.
In my statement I really want to make three general points: first, about my own background and involvement in witness protection issues; second, I was going to say a little bit about the U.K. experience and how it compares to witness protection in other parts of Europe; and third, to raise a couple of general issues about the effectiveness of witness protection and issues of legitimacy.
To take the first point in terms of my own background, my first involvement with witness protection issues was through a piece of research done for the Scottish government. This was an in-depth evaluation of the Strathclyde Police Witness Protection Programme, which operates in Scotland and involved entities with police officers, with protected witnesses, and with members of the judiciary.
Then a second project I undertook for the U.K. Home Office was really looking at ways of facilitating witness cooperation in organized crime cases, and part of that investigation meant comparing how witness protection in the U.K. operated with respect to witness protection in other parts of Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. That's my background.
I would say a little bit about the U.K. experience. Witness protection in the U.K. really began in the 1970s, pioneered by the Metropolitan Police Service in London and by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Most of the people they were dealing with were involved in organized crime and terrorist cases.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of police forces in the U.K. established their own witness protection programs, largely in response to organized crime, particularly drug-related cases that involved the murder or attempted murder of witnesses. Basically, a very ad hoc arrangement emerged across the U.K., with individual police forces running their own witness protection programs.
I guess the next most significant development from the U.K. perspective was in 2005 when the government passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which included a section on the protection of witnesses and other persons. That defined the eligibility for protection, the powers of the police to make arrangements with other police forces for protecting witnesses, and the duties of other agencies to assist the police in relocating witnesses.
The arrangements in the U.K. are very much modelled on the United States Federal Witness Security Program, which I'm sure you're familiar with, or Mr. Shur will speak about in more detail.
I want to make four points about the comparison between witness protection in the U.K. and what happens elsewhere in the world.
The first point relates to the eligibility criteria, who is allowed into witness protection programs. What we found when we looked at witness protection from an international perspective was that all jurisdictions share a common emphasis on the risk to the witness, the nature of the proceedings in which the witness is giving evidence, the importance of their testimony, and their ability to adjust to being on a witness protection program.
There are significant differences between jurisdictions in relation to the role that the police, the judiciary, and the government play in decisions about inclusion in protection programs. The U.K. is similar to Canada and Australia in allowing such decisions to be taken by chief police officers, but if you look at a country like Belgium, decisions about who is included are taken by a witness protection board comprising public prosecutors, the police, and members of the justice and interior ministries. If you look at Italy, there's a central commission chaired by the undersecretary of state, comprising judges and experts on organized crime.
So there are quite significant differences in who takes those decisions about who is included.
There are also significant differences between countries in terms of the specification in law of the types of protection and support available to witnesses. If you look at the U.K. case, in none of the legislation does it specify what protection is available. By contrast--obviously it is your experience in Canada and elsewhere in places like Australia--there's much more detail about what kind of support and protection is available.
One final point is that there are very significant differences between jurisdictions in terms of the kind of institutional architecture of witness protection programs. In the U.K., witness protection is very much a local matter for individual chief police officers, whereas other countries operate national or federal protection programs. If you look at France and Italy, you find that witness protection is organized on a regional level. But there are some attempts within Europe, through the European police organization Europol, to kind of coordinate good practice between the different European states.
My final couple of points relate to two wider issues relating to witness protection. One concerns how we evaluate its effectiveness and the other concerns issues of perceived legitimacy. In terms of measures of effectiveness, certainly the work that I have carried out demonstrates that witness protection in the U.K. has been highly effective in terms of securing the physical safety of witnesses and increasing the efficiency of investigations by taking the responsibility for protecting witnesses away from an investigating team and giving those witnesses to a specialist unit.
One of the areas where I think in the U.K. witness protection has perhaps been less effective is in terms of meeting some of the welfare needs of witnesses. One of the big challenges for witness protection programs is how you deal with the social well-being of witnesses in the long term in terms of giving them support and helping them to cope with some of the psychological challenges of living in new communities.
I think one of the other issues around effectiveness that some people have commented on is whether witness protection might lead to the displacement of the focus of those who would seek to harm witnesses onto other groups, particularly members of juries. Is there a danger that by investing all our resources in protecting witnesses that we displace the problem of witness intimidation onto other groups? I think that in essence is a matter for debate and discussion.
The final point I would make—and again there has been some speculation about this in the research—is on the perceived legitimacy of witness protection programs. Some people have raised questions about the perceived morality and fairness to the public of programs that relocate people who generally have a very long history of criminal activity and who are placed in communities where often members of those communities are unaware of these people's past and so on. I think there are some concerns about how the public would perceive witness protection arrangements, and particularly about their own safety if they're living in communities where relocated witnesses have been placed.
That concludes my opening statement.
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What I like about instantaneous interpretation is that, when I make a joke, people laugh twice.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Serge Ménard: I believe it is working. Thank you.
I am a member of the Bloc québécois, which has certain affinities with the Scottish National Party. We are talking about a subject in which, beyond political considerations, we are pursuing the same objective: to secure the cooperation of important witnesses.
There are two types of witnesses that we want to protect. There are those who are innocent and who, if they testified, would run the risk of being intimidated or even killed by members of organized crime. There are also witnesses who have taken part in criminal activities and who one day decide to cooperate with police in exchange for lesser sentences. The Italians have a special name for them. They call them “turncoats”. That moreover is the expression that we tried to use in Quebec, but the press didn't always understand it.
I very much appreciated the document you sent us and the comparisons it contains. They are very enlightening about the various ways in which the witness protection system is used. I don't think Austria's would inspire us a great deal.
Apart from the experiences you've shared with us and that will no doubt be very useful, I would like to know whether your experience is the same as ours in one respect. A number of witnesses to whom we have offered this protection and a new identity, and who have been able to go and live in other parts of Canada have returned to their homes. Generally they return within approximately two years.
Have you noticed the same trend among “turncoats”?
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Yes, our experience I think would be somewhat different. Our program began back in the late 1960s. It started about 1966-67, and it was formally adopted in 1970.
In answer to that specific question, we have relocated approximately 8,000 witnesses since that time, probably 14,000 or 15,000 family members, so you have about 22,000 to 23,000 people who have been relocated. And 95% of the witnesses have been involved with crime in some way--some in a major way, some in a peripheral way.
Very few of our relocated witnesses have returned home. I would say less than 100, and I'm inclined to say less than 50 have returned home. We did have an instance where one witness returned to his home after being advised not to. He went to his home, he turned a doorknob, and it blew up. But that is a rare event.
First, of the 8,000 witnesses who have been relocated—and these are federal witnesses, as opposed to state and city witnesses—there was a recidivism rate of less than 18%. I can't be more precise, because each person I called to check on the recidivism rate told me a different number. The highest was 18%. The lowest number—from the happiest person I talked to—was 11%. So there's recidivism of somewhere between 11% and 18% among the 8,000 people.
That may come about in part because of the procedure we follow in entering the witnesses into the program. First, we have a separate office in the United States Department of Justice called the Office of Enforcement Operations, which has a witness security unit that determines who shall or shall not enter into the federal witness protection program.
The judgment is based upon a significant amount of information they receive from a variety of people, one of whom is a psychologist, who examines each potential witness recommended by the federal investigative agency, and every member of the family over the age of 18, to determine whether or not the witness is likely to commit a violent act, how well they would fit within the program, whether they'd be able to follow the rules given to them, what sort of employment they would need, and what their skills are and such. So a thorough psychological examination is given.
There is some difficulty as to whether or not you can truly predict violence in an individual through psychological testing. On occasion, I felt that my own gut reaction was as good as the test.
Also, we receive the previous arrest record of the individual. We also receive a report from the United States attorney. The United States has 93 United States attorneys, who are the chief federal law enforcement officers in their districts. So we get a report from them about the case and the witness and his or her background.
Then we have the United States Marshals Service do the actual relocating of the witness. Because of their role, they have the opportunity to interview the witness and his family beforehand, in what we call a preliminary interview, and they give us their opinion as to whether or not this witness will function properly after relocation. So we also have the benefit of that.
We have the benefit of resident experience, the people in the Office of Enforcement Operations who have worked so often in this that they have reactions to it and such.
Of those factors, I think the screening factor is a very important factor in determining what happens afterwards.
Finally, we notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation of every witness we relocate, so there is a record. And if any local law enforcement agency were to make an inquiry about a person under a new name, they would immediately know from the FBI that the person is someone else. I think that is a deterrent for the witness.
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I can tell you that about 150 to 165 witnesses enter the program each year. Of those, the largest percentage by far are entering the program by going into prison. We have protective custody units, which are prisons within prisons, buildings within prisons, where we have only witnesses--approximately 70 cooperating prisoner witnesses in each unit--so they're not circulating out in our society.
As far as the rejection number goes, that's a difficult one to give because there are two ways of rejecting. One is informal, which is the most popular way, where the investigator or the U.S. attorney calls on the phone and says, “I have a case I'd like to present to you formally, but before I do that, would you accept this type of case?” and you say “No”. That's not counted anywhere, so we don't have that. Then we have the formal applications. I would say the formal applications probably run at about 10% rejection.
Again, the total number each year is 150 to 165, with a substantial percentage of them going to prison and their families being relocated. So when I say 150 or 160 people are going to prison, that doesn't mean there's no other job. The marshalls relocate them.
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Well, I'm going to ask you about it anyway.
As I think you both know, the inquiry we're conducting right now was prompted by two individuals who were in the program, one most recently having subsequently committed murder while in our witness protection program. In one case, the family very much wants to know about the individual who perpetrated the murder on their family member.
Mr. Shur, you indicated again in the news articles that in the U.S., in a situation like that there would be more information shared with the family, or perhaps with the public generally.
Can you explain how that process works in the United States?
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That would not be a breach of the legislation.
Also, we might notify local law enforcement of the person's old name when we relocate them, so that they know who they have in their area.
In the specific case, I'm not entirely familiar with the case, but with the assumption that the person commits a crime and the relatives of the victim wish to know who that person was, under our statute we have a victims compensation requirement—that is, we must offer to the family of any victim who is killed up to $25,000, I think, to cover medical expenses or funeral expenses, and so on. They certainly would have a right to know who that person really was who had killed their relative.
The one complicated area is that if disclosing that information would compromise an ongoing investigation, we might delay it for a bit. But that would happen so rarely. I can't recall it happening, as a matter of fact; it's just a potential.
By disclosing the name to the family, you give them some peace. The cost to the United States government to do that simply means relocating again the family of the witness who had committed the murder, so that the family of the victim has the peace of closure and the family of the witness has the safety of being relocated again, and the loss comes in a money sense to the United States government.
My name is Sue Barnes. I am MP for London, Ontario--London West, specifically--and I am the public safety critic for the official opposition, which is currently the Liberal Party of Canada.
Thank you very much. Again, I apologize for being late. Thank you for providing these charts and the material. We certainly appreciate it.
I'm going to follow up on some of the appeal questions. Do either of your jurisdictions or, to your knowledge, do other jurisdictions have an appeal from a decision that puts somebody out of the program? I'm not necessarily talking about another criminal act while in the program, but some other condition that may have been part of the agreement with the person placed into the program. Are either of you aware of having appeals from the decision? If so, what is the length of the time period and the process? Again, is it the same party who receives the appeal?
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Unfortunately, when you go back through 8,000 witnesses, everything has happened.
For one witness, we relocated his wife and his mistress, and his mistress went to live with his mother in the same community where we relocated the mother. We will relocate anyone who may be in danger as a result of the witness's testimony, so it might well be grandparents, or whatever. I think the largest number of people we relocated was somewhere between 20 and 25 people in one family.
As far as the marriage goes, where we have the great dispute is over child visitation, and that is a major problem. How do you arrange for visitation when it is properly court ordered, the remaining spouse is a law-abiding citizen, and the spouse who left has remarried and has custody of the children by a local court order?
What we do is arrange for visitation. The children would be accompanied by the United States marshals, and we call them neutral site visitations. The children are taken to Disneyland, and the mother who wants to visit with them goes to Disneyland. She does not know where the ex-husband lives, and she gets to visit with her children.
We follow the court-ordered process. Whatever the Domestic Relations Court orders, we do.
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It's the same situation in the U.K. as well; there would be no immunity.
Just quickly going back to the previous point, again, in relation to the U.K. system, which as I've described is a fairly ad hoc system or witness protection program, in my interviews with police officers who are running the program in Strathclyde the thing they were probably most concerned about was making sure witnesses didn't materially benefit as a result of relocation, because they were very concerned that their evidence would then be seen to have been tainted or bought by the police and prosecution authorities.
In terms of setting people up in new communities and giving them support, it was an absolute rule that they were never given any financial payments to assist them, that there was no giving of cash payments to witnesses, because they were concerned that these could be used by the defence in any criminal trial to suggest that their evidence had been bought.
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Sure. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Professor Fyfe and Mr. Shur. My name is Roy Cullen. I'm a member of Parliament from the Toronto area, and I'm vice-chair of this committee. This will sound strange to Professor Fyfe, but Oxford, London, and Windsor are bedroom communities of Toronto. So you can see our British roots.
We've been talking about the traditional witness protection programs. Typically a criminal person is relocated, with identity changed, etc. But let me tell you a bit about my part of Toronto, where we've had a lot of gun-related crime and gangs and drugs. In fact, in my area they arrested 120-odd people in a big swoop a year or so ago, so there's been less of it, but we're still very concerned.
We've had in my area drive-by shootings, shootings in daylight, and no witnesses coming forward. The police are struggling with this constantly. You might have upright, honest citizens who have witnessed these events. They're not criminals. They probably don't want to move to Florida, notwithstanding the lovely climate there, sir, but the way the justice system works in Canada, though I'm not a lawyer myself, you cannot really do anonymous testimony, because at a discovery it becomes a public matter.
So I'm wondering whether there are other models that have been looked at, or whether you've had any experience with working on witness protection programs that are dealing with, let's say, normally honest citizens who have witnessed crimes but are absolutely petrified to come forward because of possible retribution.
Are there ways to deal with that, or are we stuck with the kind of model you've described and that is the traditional witness protection program?
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Unfortunately, we've had that experience too, and we are going through it right now, as a matter of fact. There's a rise in shootings.
We have two other types of programs. One is called the short-term relocation program, and this is one that started in Washington, D.C., where we had drive-by shootings and shootings where people who live on one block shoot somebody on the second block. They're not farther away than that. We remove them for a short term so that the witnesses who come forward know they can be kept safe for a short term, and in our judgment they would be safe going home again.
So that was one program. They would be gone typically 90 days, 120 days, perhaps till after the trial was over, and when that defendant went to jail, the threat was gone.
Then there is a third program in which the United States attorney can determine that his or her witness simply needs up to $4,000 to move to a hotel someplace three blocks away or 30 blocks away, and I'll supply some money to get that person out of town for a short period of time. In other words, the person doesn't need a new identity, doesn't need job help, doesn't need help with doctors, that sort of thing, and that would be the third way.
The witness program that we're talking about is meant for organizations that have the capability of chasing after witnesses and finding them, and in drive-by shootings, those typically are not the types of people who have that strength.
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Yes, I'd be interested in more information about that.
We have in Canada these Crime Stoppers, anonymous tip lines, but they're rarely used, often not used as well, which sometimes baffles me. People must feel so intimidated or be so mistrusting that they wouldn't phone even an anonymous tip line. Do you have any thoughts on that? Have you ever looked at the psychology of that or how it works?
Secondly, Mr. Shur, your point about those programs....as Professor Fyfe indicated, they'd have to be very targeted and focused because people leaving the community, in small communities.... There are a couple of areas in my riding where there is a lot of criminal activity, and I think they know pretty much when someone is out of town for four months that there's something fishy. Could you comment on that, because my time is just about up?
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Thank you. I see that I did not introduce myself otherwise than by pointing out to you that I was a member of a sister party of the Scottish National Party. I am a member of the Bloc québécois in the House of Commons. Before entering politics, I spent my entire career practising criminal law. When I started out in politics, I was minister of the Quebec government for nine years, mainly in public security and as Attorney General. I saw these programs come into the world. They did not exist in 1966, when I started practising law. These programs were created to meet needs, and now there is an act that provides a framework for these programs.
Is the physical protection of witnesses effective? Have witnesses been attacked or killed while they were under protection? I also wanted to ask Professor Fyfe whether he was able to compare the quite different systems that exist in Europe. What, in his view, is the best system, the one we should base ours on?
I said that the lives of innocent witnesses, that is to say people who have witnessed a serious crime or a murder committed by organized crime, might be in danger if they testified. Receiving this kind of protection is definitely a considerable weight for witnesses who have not carried on criminal activities. What is the percentage of innocent witnesses?
Lastly, I would like to know whether, in your jurisdictions, jury members know all the benefits that have been given to the people who come and testify before them?
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I wish I had paid more attention to my high school French. Yes, all the benefits are explained to him.
As to physical protection and whether it is effective, our belief is that protection is best done through what we call “protection by anonymity”. That is, witnesses are relocated to a new area. Nobody knows where they're going, where they will live, and they do not need physical protection around them. The only time they would need physical protection is when they're brought back to the danger area, which is where they're going to testify. And that has been totally effective.
I should point out that since this program began in the late 1960s, not a single witness who has followed our rules has been killed. We've been very fortunate in that respect.
Let's see...protecting innocent witnesses. The number of witnesses who have entered this program who I would say are totally innocent--standing on a street corner, seeing the crime--would not be 5%. So it's not a major issue in the sense of the total program, but it is a major problem with those 3% or 4%--a major problem whereby they have to give up their entire careers and their lives.
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Yes, let me deal with those questions as well.
As Mr. Shur said, certainly jury members would know about the protection arrangements that witnesses have been put under.
In terms of innocent witnesses, my experience from looking at these programs in the U.K. is that they form a relatively small proportion of the total number of witnesses who go into the programs. But clearly they create particular challenges for witness protection programs, particularly if these are people in various forms of employment who, if they're going to be relocated, may have to find new employment in areas to which they're moving.
In terms of physical protection, my experience is very similar to what Mr. Shur has said: that witnesses who have followed the instructions and regulations of the protection programs they're on have remained safe.
One issue around this is that, certainly from my experience of interviewing witnesses on protection programs, it's not just their physical security that is important; it is their sense of social well-being, their sense of identity, their mental state, which is in some cases almost as important.
I think one of the ironies of witness protection is that in some cases where witnesses have been harmed, it's because they're harming themselves; they've committed suicide. Certainly, the evidence I've seen is that the suicide rate among protected witnesses is higher than it is more generally among the population. This is a reflection of the mental and psychological challenges these people face in trying to develop new lives in new communities.
I suppose in a way that links to the last point you raised, about what might be the best system. I don't think one could point to any one country and say it had the ideal system, but if you were to look at different protection programs, you could ask what the elements of good practice are that we could learn from and perhaps build on to form a good protection program.
That's partly connected with the issues of welfare and support for witnesses, both in the short term and long term. It goes back, again, to points Mr. Shur made earlier on in his evidence about screening witnesses effectively at the outset to make sure they are people who can cope with some of the pressures they will be subject to.
It's also about having a very robust legal framework within which witness protection takes place. One of the difficulties in the U.K. is that we have very little information about witness protection, because it doesn't occur within a clearly defined statutory framework. And this should cover things such as the appeals process that we discussed earlier.
I suppose the one other area where I think there is different practice is in who takes those decisions about who is included and who is excluded from programs. The tradition, in Canada, as in the U.K., is that it is a chief police officer who makes that decision. But there's clearly a very different practice in other parts of Europe, where those decisions are taken away from the police and are given to another body, which might involve representatives of the judiciary, experts on organized crime, and other individuals.
It may be that having that kind of group taking those decisions, one that is slightly removed from the police, may offer a more independent and perhaps more dispassionate view of whom it is appropriate to protect and who would be included and who should be excluded from those programs.
As to the suicide rate, I think it's a very interesting point.
In the seventies, we did a study. I was concerned about suicides happening. The study reflected a different result than the one Mr. Fyfe found. Probably, we are doomed to do another study. Our results showed no increase in the witness population over the regular population. But I think now, with a much larger database, we should do that study again.
When witnesses are relocated, to help relieve the stress they undergo, whether they're innocent witnesses or not, or family members of prisoners who are witnesses themselves, we arrange for all of them, if they wish, to go to psychologists and psychiatrists. It's just part of the routine that they do that.
My name is Rick Norlock. I'm the member of Parliament for Northumberland—Quinte West. In a previous life I was a police officer for 30 years, with the equivalent of the state police.
I'd just like to carry on a little bit further and make a comment with regard to Crime Stoppers, which actually is used very often by police forces, specifically in Ontario. It is highly successful. Just to let you know, it was founded or conceived by a Canadian who was resident in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I would like to explore best practices a little further vis-à-vis whether the decision-making program should be resident with police forces or someone other than police forces. I guess I'll put my little comment in and then leave it up to you two gentlemen to explore this further.
What we're looking for here are best practices. What we've heard from the RCMP in particular and some other police professionals and members of the bureaucracy who deal with the program is that it's relatively successful in Canada. As a matter of fact, I would have to say, based on the negative comments, it's highly successful. But we shouldn't rely on our laurels, as perhaps there's something better. That's where my question goes: is it going towards best practices?
We heard the professor indicate that in some jurisdictions the decision-making process is resident with people associated with the judiciary, or lawyers, etc. We've been discussing some of the social welfare issues surrounding this. So I guess my question would be to ask both of you gentlemen to explore further the differences you perceive, or the negatives and positives, of taking it out of the hands of the police.
I must say—not because of my prior occupation, but because of the observations I've made, both from your testimony and previous testimony from Canadians experts and those managing the system, in particular the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—that my experience is that the more links you put in, the more separations you put in, the more difficult the process becomes. But that's just my interpretation, and I leave it to you two gentlemen to respond to that.
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Right. I'll make one general observation, which is that there is so little research in this area around issues of effectiveness that what we actually know is very limited. Clearly, there are practitioners who have a lot of direct experience—and Mr. Shur has demonstrated that very clearly—but I suppose what tends to be missing is any independent evaluation and research into witness protection programs. I think that's why we're working with relatively little in terms of a secure, independent evidence base. I just make that as an initial statement.
The issue about who is best placed to make those decisions about inclusion and exclusion I think is a very difficult one. There are issues partly about the speed at which these decisions need to be taken, and also about the fact that often you need to monitor the way in which the threat to witnesses may rise and fall. The risk to witnesses tends to be a dynamic phenomenon; it isn't just a one-off thing. They might be more at risk at some times than others.
Certainly from the work we did in looking across Europe, there was some surprise that in some jurisdictions it was the police who were allowed to take this decision. It was felt they were perhaps too close to the whole investigation process and that you needed some people who had some distance from that, who perhaps could take a wider view as to whether that witness was essential to the prosecution and the investigation. I think there was a feeling in some cases that perhaps the police were too ready to take witnesses into protection programs, because it would allow the investigations to proceed more quickly. But clearly that was going to involve huge disruptions in those people's lives.
Certainly the opinions we heard tended to be of the view that it was perhaps better to take that decision out of the hands of the police and to allow a more independent assessment, perhaps, of the evidence the witness could provide, within a broader context.
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Mr. Fyfe is correct I think in his statements with regard to having a separate group making a determination as to who should enter the witness program, rather than the arresting officer or his particular precinct or department and such.
Of course, my experience goes to federal investigative agencies, so I was confronted with the problem of the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and 26 federal investigative agencies that might have witnesses. I didn't like the idea of agents handing money to potential witnesses. I think it would look bad in court, and I thought if we had an independent group, such as the U.S. Marshals Service, that was not competitive, it would work much better.
I also could not see the DEA turning its witnesses over to the FBI for protection, or the FBI turning its witnesses over to the DEA or the Secret Service or whatever, again because of the competition. So I looked for a neutral agency that would do that. Nobody has a problem with the Marshal Service because they are not competing with them in any way, so that would be useful.
In our country, I think there are four people in the federal system who can determine who shall enter the witness protection program. It is the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the assistant attorney general, criminal division, and one other person designated by the attorney general. I was the one other person.
It allows a standard to be established as to what types of cases you will put into the program. And you are more efficient with respect to money, you're more efficient with respect to investigations, and you're more efficient with respect to prosecutions when you have the judgment made centrally, where that group reflects the views of the highest law enforcement officer--the attorney general, in our case--as far as what cases you will go on.
So if we were to have someone from the Fish and Wildlife Service call us up and say that someone had shot three rabbits and they wanted to put the witness in the witness protection program, it might be a truly important case to that particular agent but not one that I would find deserving of a $100,000 expenditure and the movement of 24 people. So there is a standard that can be applied by having an independent judgment made from the investigators.
Now, you don't have to have a separate office, as I did with the U.S. Marshal Service. And if I may, without knowledge, dip into your area, if you had a separate group within the RCMP and their sole function was witness protection and making judgment, and there was a precise individual or individuals responsible for exercising that judgment, you could achieve the same results that I think we achieved in our program.
One other thing that Mr. Fyfe said, which has to be said by me, is that all witness protection programs need improvement. No matter how good they think they are, we need a lot of improvement.
I noted the difference in your internal analysis on the suicide, and I'm not a suicide expert, but one of the things that often occurs is isolation of individuals. My understanding, prior to your testimony, was that the isolation from relatives is a determinant over time of people returning and taking themselves out of the program.
I was really shocked, actually, when you said you had up to 25 people, because I thought our experience in Canada was that it's a very limited group of people; it would be, I think for the most part, the immediate family, so spouse, child, but certainly not grandparents.
I understood you saying, Mr. Shur, that you will take anyone in that grouping who is at risk. I only want to clarify that point so there is no misunderstanding here. The wide grouping on the family is not because you're taking all of the extended family; it's because that particular extended family had great risk to itself as a unit. Is that correct?
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Going back to an earlier point, there is very little independent research in this area. The research that we did in Scotland was commissioned by the Scottish government. So they funded it and they then negotiated access for us to the police officers on the protection program, and then those officers facilitated access for us to witnesses who were protected, so that we could actually interview those witnesses in secure settings and get their story about their experiences of being on these protection programs.
Certainly, to my knowledge, I think that was the first and still the only independent piece of research that looked at both sides of the picture. It looked at the challenges and stresses the police service was under in terms of trying to protect these witnesses—and I think it's important not to underestimate that, that the officers who are working on these programs are under huge stress and there are all sorts of issues around the training of those officers and the support for those officers—but at the same time, by interviewing relocated witnesses and their families, you get an insight into just how disruptive and how difficult it is for these people to rebuild their lives and why some of them simply cannot cope with the pressures of the program and therefore return to their home areas.
I suppose I would say this because I'm involved in research, but I think it is an area that is crying out for more independent research that can look at the whole process and all the different agencies involved.
One of the other things we looked at was the role of housing associations that were trying to find homes for these witnesses. We talked to people from benefits offices and from health authorities, because there is a whole range of other agencies that are also required to supply information and help with the relocation process. Again, it puts big pressures on those other agencies, non-law enforcement agencies, and there were concerns among people within housing authorities and health authorities about the risks they might be putting themselves at by being involved in this process.
So I really think there is a need for some kind of research that addresses that bigger context in terms of all the different individuals and agencies that are involved in the witness protection process.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just for the witnesses, I also come from a background in policing, most of which was in criminal investigations and then as chief of police.
In some of what you've said, particularly Mr. Shur, you talked about a gut feeling, and I think sometimes police officers refer to that as policing intuition.
But what we're talking about here is not necessarily what people would think of as the family down the street. The people being relocated—and I think somebody indicated they are in the area of less than 5%—are not whom you would call witnesses that were not involved. We're talking about people from inside the crime family, in the biggest sense.
I think, Professor Fyfe, you indicated that very few of these people were already working.
In our view, we need to look at 100%, but the vast majority of these people come from backgrounds where they're not professionals; they're not people from a steady employment background, and, equally, they're not coming from what a lot of us would think of as a normal family background.
Am I fair in that assessment?
This one is going to be a somewhat difficult question, because it's one I've been struggling with, and I know it's a bit nebulous. But the question is, does the program--and again I'm thinking back to the particular case that triggered this investigation here in Canada--by relocating an individual who has had a long criminal history out of their community, where they may be known by the local police forces, where they may be under some ongoing surveillance by them, either direct or indirect, into another community provide them with some shelter to commit crimes more easily than they would if they had been left in their own community?
Professor Fyfe, maybe I'll start with you, because with the research you've done you may be able to comment on that, but I'd like your comments, Mr. Shur as well.
:
We didn't specifically look at that, and I suppose one would hope not, in the sense that clearly the police in the community to which these people are being moved have been informed about their presence and would maintain some level of surveillance on their activities. So yes, one would hope not.
Can I make just one other point? It's a slightly different point, but one of the things we came across when we were discussing the relocation of witnesses was the way communities felt. The people who have agreed to give evidence are, in this country, talked about as “grasses”, people who have broken a kind of local code of having no contact with the police, and by giving evidence and becoming witnesses they have broken that local code. A couple of people said to us, by relocating those witnesses, in a way, the intimidators have won. They have led to these people being excluded from that community.
To put it in slightly more graphic terms, in a sense they've purified those communities of these people who they view as grasses, as people who are prepared to give evidence against other people within the community. That was something that we thought was quite interesting. To some groups, it might be seen that relocating witnesses was actually a victory of sorts for certain groups within the original community.
:
To the last point, that the intimidators have won, our experience is that the intimidators wind up in prison. We have an 89% conviction rate in cases in which relocated witnesses testify.
In a study that was done some years ago, I think it was in the 1990s, we found that in federal cases where relocated witnesses had testified, the sentences were longer for the defendants than in like cases against like defendants. That was a byproduct, certainly not an intent of ours. It just happened.
As far as relocating people from their community to another community is concerned, and giving them the opportunity to commit crime again, we do several things. You can look at it, in one way, that we have provided them with what I think social workers would recommend. We've removed them from an area of people they've committed crimes with, and they are now with people who are not committing crimes. We've given them a new opportunity. We're supplying them with psychologists. We have a WITSEC inspector where they are, helping them get a job, taking them to the grocery store, getting into doctors and such, and getting their children enrolled in school. They are getting to see a lifetime of non-criminal behaviour.
Some of them have to make real adjustments, in that they're not used to going to work at 8:30 in the morning, and home at 5. They're used to going to work at 8:30 at night and home at 5 in the morning. It's quite different. They're used to not telling their wife where they've been, but now they're in a community where things have changed.
Having been removed from these other influences is a plus, I think, in addition to that psychological assistance. Again, I have to restate that you have up to 18% recidivism, so we're not going to be perfect at it.
:
There were some constants. Most people said they wouldn't be there, they wouldn't be alive, if they hadn't been put under protection, and they wouldn't have been able to give the evidence they gave unless they'd been under protection. They recognized how important the protection process had been.
The other constant was a continuing sense of anxiety and of the difficulties of rebuilding their lives. One of the things that was really striking about these people is that in their day-to-day lives, if the telephone rang or a car pulled up outside their house or a letter came through their letterbox, they suffered chronic anxiety. If they walked down a street, they always felt somebody might be watching them. They found it very difficult to live what we would think of as normal lives.
One of the other real difficulties a lot of them spoke about was that it is incredibly difficult to form new social relationships when you cannot talk about your past biography. Developing any kind of social trust or intimate social relationship involves sharing aspects of your past, and when you have to create a fictional account of your past in order to exist in this new community, it puts huge psychological challenges in front of these people.
So you have this tension between these people saying that they appreciate everything these programs have done in terms of their physical safety, but in terms of their mental state and social well-being, they live with this chronic sense of anxiety. They thought it would fade, but in most of the cases we dealt with, it didn't fade; it just continued with them.
Thank you very much. On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank both of you for participating at a distance or coming from distance. I think we've all found it very informative and useful.
I have a particular interest as well in the courtroom procedural and policy aspects, Professor Fyfe, that we touched on very briefly. If there's a way you could direct us to some of that work through the clerk or the researchers, it would be useful.
Again, on behalf of all of us here today, thank you very much for your very insightful and informative presentations. Thank you.