RCMP conduct questioned — again — after Mountie takes woman in his custody home

One RCMP officer is accused of abusing his authority, another is accused of shirking his duties, and there are questions being raised about how the complaints were handled.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police faced disappointing headlines this week, after two shocking cases of apparent inappropriateness at the hands of RCMP officers.

CBC News reported on one of these incidents on Thursday, detailing an apparent indiscretion between a northern Manitoba officer and a drunk woman he brought into custody.

According to documents obtained by the network, Const. Kevin Theriault arrested an intoxicated aboriginal woman on Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation in 2011, taking her briefly into custody before later driving her to his home.

The report says other officers teased him about “how far he would go” with the woman.

A decision on the complaint was not reached until last year, at which time the officer was reprimanded and lost pay for seven days.

Manitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak called the incident an abuse of power and a breach of the trust between citizens and police officers.

"They have to hold one another to standards of conduct. We expect to be protected, just as every Canadian expects to be protected by a policing agency," Nepinak told the network.

The report follows an unrelated incident in which the RCMP adjudication board docked an officer three days of pay after he tried to convince an allegedly battered woman not to press charges against her boyfriend.

That incident, which occurred in 2010 and was ruled on in 2013, raises concerns about the officer’s commitment to combating sexual harassment. And in a way, it drags the entire force into disrepute.

That’s not something the RCMP wants to see happen again. After a series of complaints and concerns leveled against the national force over the course of several years, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson heralded in a new code of conduct policy last year, and with it hopes for a new era of policing.

The hopefully-bygone era of the Mounties is hard to pin down, due to the breadth and depth of the complaints once leveled.

There was the frayed relationship with aboriginal communities, specifically in northern British Columbia, and more specifically along the Highway of Tears.

There were the high-profile cases of concern, headlined by the fatal Taser incident that killed Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport. There were in-custody deaths, sexual harassment complaints by female officers, even tales of office alcohol consumption gone unpunished.

In 2014, the Mounties unveiled the updated Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act, which introduced a stronger code of conduct aimed at cleaning up the force and its reputation.

The changes gave the force more responsibility for sanctioning its officers, expanded the amount of time officers could be suspended and a requirement that officers more quickly report the contraventions of their colleagues.

It was said to be the end of an old way and the start of a new one.

“I tell you, one day, there is going to be the removal of the Stetson if we don’t get this straight,” Paulson once told the Globe and Mail. “We’ve got to get onto this. This is urgent.”

Perhaps the steps are already working. A survey conducted in May found that confidence in the RCMP improved in every province – and had nearly doubled since 2012, when perception was perhaps at its worst.

Now these old failings have come to light, and with them their seemingly light-to-non-existent punishments. Are these punishments the new normal, or some residual spillover from the darker days?

Best hope it is the latter; it’ll take more than a revised conduct policy to right the ship next time around.