Pilot study of method to review closed organized crime files

2. Development of the Pilot Test Method (cont'd)

5. The May 30 Workshop

All workshop participants were sent a pre-workshop paper, which provided background findings and scenarios from our preliminary hardcopy file review, and a set of questions to consider before coming to the workshop. The workshop convened in Ottawa on May 30th, 2003 and was attended by representatives of FPS from the six regional offices and Headquarters, as well as officials from Criminal Law Policy, Strategic Policy and Prosecution Section (SPPS) Executive Services Office (ESO) and Information Management Branch (IMB). The Project Authorities from the Evaluation Division and the Research and Statistics Division chaired the workshop.

As noted above, the key objective of the May 30th workshop was to seek consensus on how best to define organized crime files in the context of the research and evaluation efforts planned by the Department. Specifically, this definition was to guide FPS prosecutors to consistently identify organized crime files in their caseload. Following a full day of discussion, the following definition was agreed to at the workshop. It is important to note that a first draft of this definition was presented by a senior official from the Strategic Policy and Prosecution Section (SPPS).

A file is to be identified as an organized crime file if:

it contains one or more charges under section 467.1 of the Criminal Code stemming from the 1997 organized crime legislation (C-95);

OR

it contains one or more charges under section 467.11, 467.12, 467.13 of the Criminal Code stemming from the 2001 organized crime legislation (C-24);

OR

the file or related files contain information that an offence(s) may be or was committed for the benefit, at the direction of, or in association with a "criminal organization" as defined below;

OR

one or more accused or targets of the investigation were targeted due to their known involvement in organized crime activities.

Notes:

"criminal organization" means a group, however organized, that is composed of three or more persons in or outside of Canada, one of whose main purpose or activities is the commission or facilitation of offences that if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect material benefit, including financial benefit, by the group or by any person who constitute the group. It does not include a group formed randomly for the immediate commission of a single offence.

The FPS definition of criminal organization has one significant departure from the Criminal Code definition. The offences committed as one of the main purposes or activities of the organization need not be a "serious offences" within the meaning of s. 467.1 of the Criminal Code in order to qualify the file as an organized crime file.

"information" means reliable or credible information provided to prosecution by law enforcement or otherwise within the knowledge of the prosecution. This information does NOT have to be admissible in court. However, it must go beyond bare assertion or speculation.

The determination that a file is an organized crime file is not dependent on an intention to prove the organized crime connection in court, to pursue charges under s. 467.11, 467.12, 467.13 or to rely on the sentencing provisions of s. 718.2 (iv) of the Criminal Code for the purpose of aggravating sentence.

It is important to point out that the only difference between the above definition and the definition in the Criminal Code is that the offence committed need not be a "serious offence". This is crucial in order not to exclude files that do not contain charges or charges for "serious offences. As well, the absence of "serious offence" in the definition makes it congruent with the Solicitor General definition noted above. Several other issues were also discussed at the workshop, including the potential use of CASEVIEW to limit the scope of the search for organized crime files.

Shortly after the completion of the workshop, discussion around the definition of organized crime file with the regional offices resulted in the commencement of on-going flagging of active organized crime files, and some closed organized crime files, in CASEVIEW (Montreal is using iCase, which is the new file management system). This should ensure that organized crime files are identified for future research and evaluation.

6. The Site Visits

At the conclusion of the May 30th workshop, the regional FPS representatives were informed that the consultants would be visiting their offices in the coming weeks. The expressed purpose of these visits was to:

Review a sample of 20 closed organized crime files identified by the regions based on the definition from the workshop and the following three timeframes:

The rationale for using these timeframes was to initially explore file characteristics before and after Parliament enacted the 1997 organized crime legislation (formerly referred to as C-95) and the 2001 legislation (formerly referred to as C-24).

In the weeks leading up to the site visits, lists of file numbers were received from each of the participating offices. The steps taken to complete the site visits were as follows:

Following the site visits, we entered the data captured in the instrument into an SPSS data file for review and analysis.