Sault to review sexual assault complaints, says police chief

Police services across Canada are taking notice of a Globe and Mail report which states police across the country have dismissed 19 per cent of sexual assault reports over the last few years as “unfounded.”

“Unfounded” is a code used by police which states the investigating officer does not believe a sexual assault happened or was attempted.

“I think the numbers are concerning,” said Robert Keetch, Sault Ste. Marie Police Service chief, speaking to SooToday Wednesday.

Such cases don’t get reported to Statistics Canada, but freedom of information requests filed by the Globe revealed one in five sexual assault complaints are considered unfounded by police.

The unfounded numbers vary among police services.

The Globe report examined sexual assault complaints for the years 2010 through 2014.

The report shows 27 per cent of sexual assault cases in Sault Ste. Marie in 2010 (25 of 93 allegations) were cleared as unfounded.

37 per cent of  sexual assault cases in the Sault in 2014 (21 of 57 allegations) were deemed unfounded.

The Sault had a 29 per cent unfounded rate from 2010 to 2014, in comparison to other cities in the 50,000 to 99,999 population category coast to coast (South Simcoe was highest in that category at 52 per cent, Prince George the lowest at six per cent).

“I think it’s an eye opener for police services and I think you’re seeing we’re taking notice of this because of the fact there are a number of services that are committing to do a review like the one we’re going to undertake,” Keetch said.

“I would like to delve into our numbers to ensure that we did provide accurate statistics under the reporting requirements to the federal government.”

“I’ve asked that we pull our data from 2013 to 2016 and then do a review of the classification of those sexual assaults (reported to Sault Police in those years), and specifically the classification of those that are unfounded, to determine…(whether) they fall within the defined criteria required to make them unfounded incidents.”

“I’m thinking that’s probably going to be close to 500 incidents we need to manually review,” Keetch said.

“This is uniform crime reporting (UCR) that all police services use with the federal government, and the one thing I would suggest is lacking in UCR is a standardized reporting criteria or template, it’s very subjective, and that’s why I want to review the (local) data.” 

UCR is a system described by Statistics Canada as “designed to measure the incidence of crime in Canadian society and its characteristics.”

Meanwhile, the OPP announced Wednesday it will review approximately 4,000 sexual assault investigation reports that were designated as unfounded between 2010 and 2014.

London, York Regional, Saskatoon and Halton Regional Police Services are among police services that are reviewing their unfounded reports.

Bob Paulson, RCMP commissioner, has also called the Globe report a wake up call.

Interestingly, the Globe report stated “the unfounded rate among communities with a higher than average percentage of female officers was 15 per cent.”

59 per cent of B.C. communities had above average female officer rates, cited by the Globe as “another possible reason B.C. posted lower overall averages.”

In Ontario, 83 per cent of communities had fewer female officers than average.

24 of the Sault Police Service’s 138 officers are female.

“I think there’s been an acknowledgement from policing in general that our numbers of female officers within our work force, uniformed officers (apart from female civilian employees), don’t reflect the numbers associated with the demographics of our communities, hence there’s been a push to recruit more females within our sworn complement of officers,” Keetch said.