An Examination of the Impact of Court Rulings on Police Investigation Time and Resources

In 2005, a report published by Malm et al. documented the rising demands for police services from the RCMP in British Columbia since the 1980s. The authors examined whether the amount of work necessary to respond to calls for police services increased or decreased over that period of time. The results demonstrated that not only had the number of police calls for service increased significantly over the past 30 years, but the complexity of the investigations increased, the amount
of police time and resources required to respond and investigate calls for service increased, and there were a growing number of steps that police investigators had to undertake in order to clear cases and to comply with disclosure and other judicial requirements that have resulted in additional resource burdens on the police. With more recent court rulings and legislation, such as R. v. Jordan, there is a question of how much more additional time RCMP officers in British Columbia
must now spend to successfully conduct investigations and complete submissions to Crown Counsel within the timeframes that were established in the R. v. Jordan decision.

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