Premier Clark wants process against rioters to move quicker
Posted Jul 19, 2011 3:52 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The premier wants the people caught rioting in downtown Vancouver processed and punished more quickly. No one has been charged a month after Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot. Several dozen people turned themselves in, in the days following the riot.
Police are now sifting through hours and hours of videos and pictures sent to the VPD. That evidence then gets compiled and sent to the Crown, which approves charges.
Premier Christy Clark wants these cases to move faster than other criminal matters. “Because it touched all of us. So I don’t think it’s good enough for this to just wend its way through the court system the way that a typical case would.”
But she realizes police are doing the best they can. “We have to be cautious about trying to rush police in an investigation because we want to make sure that the cases they build are as good as they can possibly be so we can see some convictions. I want to let police do their work and I want to make sure that when police bring forward the evidence and recommend charges, that their cases are as sound as they possibly can be. The even worse thing would be to force everybody to rush [and] have the work be, perhaps, not as good as it could have been.”
An independent review of what went wrong that night is now underway, and due at the end of August.
