Daily BrewRCMP to go after white collar criminals as if they were drug dealers
Canada's top Mountie is reiterating his determination to go after white collar criminals using tried-and-true police methods.
In an interview with Postmedia News, Commissioner Bob Paulson said he's instructed the RCMP's Integrated Market Enforcement Teams (IMET) to go all old-school on financial industry scam artists, fraudsters and market manipulators with techniques such as undercover operations, wiretaps and cultivating inside informants.
"Somehow in our strategy development, we've taken the view that in order to catch the criminals, we need to get more like them — we need to have more market knowledge, more experience in the markets — and to a certain extent that's true," Paulson said.
"But really the key for us is to use our tried-and-true strategies for catching those people. That's how we get results in the near-term and avoid lengthy and protracted court cases."
Paulson, who's been leading the RCMP for about a year, made similar statements soon after he first took the top job. He said the Mounties' white-collar crime units have "their strategy all wrong," and need to use more traditional policing methods to go after corporate criminals, according to a December 2011 article in the Globe and Mail.
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He told the IMET units, based in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, to be more aggressive and launch investigations without waiting for cases to be referred by provincial securities commissions, the Globe said at the time.
"They've got it all wrong," he told the Globe's editorial board. "We sit around waiting for people to throw us bones out of the regulatory bodies. And we're not being police officers.
"When you're a police officer, you go to the area where the crime is happening, you scan it, you see who is doing it, and you get in there. You talk to humans, you recruit sources, you do undercover operations. And you get evidence in the near term and you bring it to court."
The decade-old IMET units have been criticized for lacklustre results.
As of last week, Postmedia News said IMET had secured criminal convictions against 11 people, with 29 others facing charges before the courts.
The Mounties told Postmedia News information sharing has improved between the RCMP, securities commissions and other partners. But IMET is also developing cases based on their own intelligence-gathering and relying less on referrals from securities regulators, the force said.
A 2011 RCMP criminal intelligence briefing report on capital market fraud noted even though so-called white-collar "criminalized professionals" — some with organized-crime links — can wreak havoc on financial markets and investors' lives, they continue to fly largely "under the radar" and outside the scope of police intelligence reports, Postmedia News reported.
"According to the Criminal Code, three or more persons co-operating to commit a criminal offence are considered an organize crime group, yet members of the law enforcement community and the general public do not afford the same level of importance to criminalized professionals as they do to more commonly known organized crime groups," the briefing document said.
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Postmedia News noted a 2010 Public Safety Canada report found IMET investigations typically took two years to produce charges, but they are often hard to prosecute successfully.
Paulson seems to feel the approach he outlined a year ago is starting to bear fruit.
"We're not at the point where I can wheel out stats and claim victory, but I have observed a different mindset in the investigative team," Paulson told Postmedia News. "Certainly they're being held to a different level of account."
