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Juliet
O'Neil |
Steven
Williams
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Stevie Cameron
Journalist warns against
speaking to police
Canadian Press, Mar. 21
2004
HALIFAX - A journalist who
was once a confidential informant for the RCMP says she'll never
speak with police again.
And she's advising young journalists
to do the same.
"Never talk to the police,"
Stevie Cameron told a symposium on democracy and journalism at
the University of King's College in Halifax on Saturday.
"My encounter with the
RCMP has been a disaster for me and I will never talk to the
police again, and I think that would be good advice for you."
Cameron is the journalist listed
as a police informant in the ill-fated Airbus investigation which
eventually led to a lawsuit by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
She initially denied the allegations
when transcripts pointing to her informant status were made public
in November.
However, last month Cameron
admitted she had given Mounties what she considered to be public
information, but said she had never consented to the confidential
informant status.
The author and freelance journalist
said she's already been avoiding contact with police.
Cameron has been writing a
book about British Columbia's alleged serial killer, Robert William
Pickton, for the last two years and hasn't spoken to police once,
she said.
Alongside Cameron on the panel
were two journalists all too familiar with the fight for freedom
of the press.
One was Ottawa Citizen reporter
Juliet O'Neill, whose home and office were raided by RCMP officers
in January as they searched for the source of leaked police documents.
Also on the panel was Andrew
McIntosh, who won a court battle to protect the confidentiality
of sources in the Shawinigate affair in January.
Cameron said the controversy
surrounding her relationship with the RCMP has changed investigative
work in Canada forever.
"Reporters are now telling
me that stories they did where they traded any information with
the police, those stories will probably never appear now. One
person did six months of work on a story that has been killed."
Cameron, who said she has paid
$50,000 in legal costs since November, told the standing-room
only audience that journalists, especially freelancers, are shying
away from investigative reporting because of the financial and
professional risks involved in disclosure.
King's journalism student Roberto
Rocha, 24, said he isn't letting horror stories from the trio
of veteran journalists scare him off digging for a story.
"The final idea that I
got from this is, `Deal with police as little as possible, or
not at all.' That is not something that I want to take out of
this or advice that I will take to heart."
Dealing with police is a reality
of reporting, said Rocha, but the bigger question is where to
draw the line between working with and collaborating with police.
Dean Jobb, professor of journalism
and media law at the university, said his advice to students
on dealing with police is clear.
"Be very aware of police
motives if they agree to sit down with you. I think they're very
happy to get information from you. I don't think they're very
happy to give you information."
It's not the death of investigative
reporting, said Jobb, but the fallout from Cameron's experience
has made using police sources a less appealing option for many
journalists.
Many of his students were unclear
where to draw the line between their civic duty to police and
their journalistic responsibility to sources.
That line, Jobb said, has become
more clear in light of cases like that of Cameron.
"If there was any naivete
up to this fall, I think it should be gone now. What journalists
have to do is govern themselves on the assumption that anything
they say to police not only can be publicly revealed down the
road, but probably will be."
© Copyright 2004
Bell Globemedia Inc.
Newsroom confidential
Stevie Cameron talked to
the Mounties. Big deal. A journalist gathers information through
relationships, says RON HAGGART
By RON HAGGART, Mar. 22,
2004
No one, I'm quite sure, ever
gave me the grand title of "confidential informant,"
but I suppose that's what I was for several of the better detectives,
guys I liked a lot, on the Vancouver police force. And I can
be certain that no one ever gave me a file number, as the Mounties
did with Stevie Cameron.
But, as a young reporter covering
the police and the courts, I spent half my days gossiping with
detectives. Cops spend a lot of time in court, but I spent more,
so I can see now, looking back, that they probably regarded me
as a tiny spigot of information on how certain Crown attorneys
were doing, what the current defence strategies were, what kind
of evidence was favoured by certain judges, and the latest moves
by the famous heroin-wholesaling family who lived near the Granville
Street bridge.
I spent idle moments buying
beers at the Columbia Hotel for Johnny Rae, an alcoholic and
an addict and a great source of gossip from the heroin underworld.
I passed on some of his "pathetic scraps" (to borrow
Ms. Cameron's phrase) to my detective friends but without, of
course, revealing the source.
It was only after he was dead
that I learned that Johnny Rae had been a police informer (I
thought he was my informant). The police probably regarded my
little scraps as a confirming second source but, as we have so
recently and so sadly learned, that is how "intelligence"
works.
My greatest problem was getting
the Vancouver Sun to approve $2 expense accounts for buying Johnny's
beers. I gave up on trying to get the $2 back for buying him
half a cap of heroin (this will give you some idea of the ravages
of inflation). No ethical concerns ever crossed my mind. You
swapped information with the nicer criminals, the cops, and with
lawyers, and even some judges sometimes, and that is how the
system worked.
I suppose the system was mutually
self-serving, and although I was aware of this dynamic, it gave
me not a moment's pause. The cops would provide that little bit
of colour, that odd incident during the raid, that moved a routine
police story onto the front page. On the road to making sergeant,
it does a detective no harm to have his name all over the front
page (this was so long ago, they were all men). It also put my
name on the front page, in an era when bylines were an award
of merit.
I liked the detectives I dealt
with. They were sharp dressers (the clothing allowance was generous)
and they had a sophisticated view of crime, not at all like the
stilted evidence they were required to give in court. They were
fun to talk to.
Much of that talk took place
in a blind pig that operated right by the rear entrance to the
Vancouver police headquarters. It was operated by a famous criminal
recently released from a long prison sentence. He needed some
income, and the cops needed a discreet place to have a drink
after work.
It never occurred to me to
expose this flagrant breach of the law. You can call it moral
relativism, I suppose. Cops needed reporters and reporters needed
cops, and we never really paused to analyze that dependency.
I like to think, however, that the system resulted in slightly
better law enforcement and a marginal improvement in reporting.
The Mountie sergeant in charge
of the drug squad (who never went to the blind pig) believed
that heroin addicts were medical victims, not criminals. But
of course he enforced the law to its hilt, that was his duty.
I suppose I could have ruined his career by reporting what he
really believed, but the thought never crossed my mind. Because
he had such thoughtful views, because he was far more sophisticated
than the Narcotic Control Act, I believed what he told me about
the heroin underworld. This was an unspoken bond of trust and
I like to think that it improved the level of reporting on drugs
in the pages of the Vancouver Sun.
Stevie Cameron has written
that she believed some of her conversations with the police were
"off the record." In my conversations with the detectives
I liked so much, we all understood that some information was
for use, some was not for attribution, some was deep background,
and some was Not For Publication. Everyone understood the system.
In those days, there were four
"police magistrates" sitting in three courtrooms at
police headquarters, and one of them was on the take. It was
the job of the bootleg squad to load a case of Scotch into the
trunk of this man's car every Friday afternoon. It was all done
in the safety of the small quadrangle inside police headquarters.
A cop who'd done the job himself told me about it, but I never
even tried to write it. No cop would have spoken to me again.
Journalism, as Stevie Cameron
has discovered, is not an exact science. It involves a daily
round of accommodation and compromise, and not always proud moments,
with the hope that accuracy, fairness and balance perhaps may
be achieved within a range of plus or minus 3 per cent, 19 times
out of 20.
After I left Vancouver, the
police department was rocked by scandal. Many senior detectives
had been on the take from the bookies. Many cops lost their jobs.
I used to nod to one detective-sergeant who became the house
dick at the Hotel Vancouver.
It occurred to me that not
one of the detectives I had dealt with was involved in the scandal.
Those who were implicated tended to be the detectives I didn't
like so much; I never felt they were being frank with me. Trust
turned out to be quite a good barometer after all.
Journalism is an enterprise
built on trust. And that enterprise of mutual trust -- comparing
my small experience to hers -- appears to be an enterprise that
engaged Stevie Cameron as she dealt with the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, and which has now betrayed and entrapped her.
Ron Haggart, born in Vancouver,
is a former Globe and Mail columnist and former senior producer
of CBC TV's the fifth estate.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia
Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
