Fredericton police reallocate funds to hire new staff in wake of collapsed murder cases | CBC News
The Fredericton Police Force has reallocated funds so new staff can be hired this year to better manage evidence after a police error upended murder cases against five people. Fredericton council voted Monday to allow the force to spend an additional $298,846 implementing recommendations made in response to a blunder that led to the five murder charges being stayed.
The murder charges related to two Fredericton-area homicides were stayed in June, effectively ending the cases. The nature of the problem that led to the stayed charges hasn't been released. The police force hired Ian D. Scott, an Ontario lawyer, to review what happened, and in December, he issued a report outlining 19 public recommendations related to improving how the force investigates major crimes such as homicides.
Last fall, the city budgeted spending $250,000 to start implementing Scott's recommendations. But the recommendations didn't come out until after the police budget was finalized, and they're set to cost more than what had been budgeted for this year, said police Chief Gary Forward.
Forward said the reallocated funds come from salary savings arising from there being about six vacant officer positions. With the combined $548,846, Forward said, the force will be able to implement several of Scott's recommendations, including new training for officers and hiring four new staff.
Two of the new employees will be "information system specialists," responsible for data management, digital forensics, statistics analysis and records management. "It's looking after a lot of the low-level administrative functions that right now [are] being done by our detectives," Forward said.
"So this enables our detectives to spend more time on what they should be focused on, and that's investigating files." A third new position will be for a staff sergeant whom the information system specialists will report to, Forward said.
"That administrative staff sergeant is looking at the policies, procedures, making sure that there's no shortcuts being taken or that we're not having gaps in our investigations, including going through our historical files and bringing them back up to where they need to be," Forward said.
"[They will be] making sure that we're doing the appropriate followups and contacting families looking for any new evidentiary matters that might accompany those files." Forward said the fourth new hire will be a "digital evidence management system intermediate clerk," another civilian employee who will help keep track of files associated with major crime cases.
As an example of why the additional civilian staff are needed, Forward pointed to the recent adoption of body-worn cameras by every police officer. He said those cameras produce evidence that require time and effort to sort and manage. "You can well imagine that for approximately every…
one hour of body-worn camera footage, it would take digital evidence staff about three hours to properly go through, vet and prepare the file for court purposes," said.
"And that is, is obviously work that we need to have done, to make sure that we're meeting our deadlines for file submission." On June 27, Fredericton-region homicide cases came to a halt when the Crown stayed charges against Erica Lea Ann Blyth, Joshua John McIsaac, Devon Mark Hill Hood, Matthew David LeBlanc and Travis James Snowsell.