On January 10, 2008, consultation was led by Community, Contract and Aboriginal Policing Services with the National Incident Management Intervention Working Group. That's a group of subject matter experts within the RCMP who meet twice a year to discuss policies, training, and anything else related to use of force. Other law enforcement partners, including the B.C. use-of-force coordinator, a representative of the Calgary Police Service, and Chris Lawrence from the Ontario Police College were also involved.
These discussions resulted in recommendations that would see the alignment of the RCMP's incident management intervention module with the national use-of-force framework, which was created by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. These changes have been presented to RCMP senior management, and their final decision on the implementation will be made in April 2008.
The CEW database for the RCMP was implemented on November 25, 2005, allowing reports of individual incidents involving the use of the CEW to be captured in an electronic database. Previous usage reports were uploaded into the database from as early as 2001. The RCMP recognized that the current CEW database had limitations regarding analysis of the collected data and that only CEW usages were captured. As a result, in 2006, the RCMP began researching a method of reporting all use-of-force intervention options within the incident management intervention module that members would deploy as the result of a subject's behaviour.
The Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP's interim taser report also cited the need for the RCMP to capture all use of force within an appropriate reporting format. The RCMP began working closely with partners, such as the British Columbia use-of-force coordinator, to develop standardized use-of-force reporting, entitled “subject behaviour/officer response reporting”.
I'll now turn the floor over to my colleague, Staff Sergeant Joel Johnston, and he'll comment further on this.