ASIRT on track for its 'most productive year' ever after 36% funding increase

After years of "chronic underfunding" and a backlog of hundreds of open files, the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team is on track to close more files that it took on in 2022 — a first in the police oversight agency's 14-year history.

"This will be, in my view, the most productive year ASIRT's had in terms of closing files," said Director Mike Ewenson during an interview at the organization's Calgary-based office.

Ewenson formally stepped into the director role one year ago after his predecessor Sue Hughson resigned. Three months later, the Alberta government released its budget which included a 35 per cent increase in funding for ASIRT. 

It was the break Hughson had lobbied for after sounding the alarm on what she called an overworked, under-resourced agency facing a "critical breaking point."

'A little daunting'

In 2021, Hughson described ASIRT as "beyond capacity" and "taxed to the max."

"Everything that [Hughson] had to say about ASIRT being at a critical breaking point was correct, it really was," said Ewenson.

"It was a little daunting, to be honest with you, just to look at that backlog and realize it's not just having one file on your desk that you think is on fire and you want to get closed, there were priorities all over the province that we had to deal with."

Since the budget boost, ASIRT has added five investigators and two support staff. 

It's made a noticeable difference.

For months, ASIRT has been issuing investigations and decisions authored by Ewenson or Assistant Executive Director Matthew Block, closing up to five or six cases a week.

ASIRT investigates incidents where police officers may have caused serious injury or death, as well as serious or sensitive allegations of police misconduct.

Lengthy investigative delays mean families can wait years for answers and closure. 

Reprioritizing

It also means the officer or officers being investigated can languish as they wait to be charged or cleared.

Ewenson says he's changed how ASIRT prioritizes cases – instead of being strictly chronological, the team looks at investigations which affect the community, ones that might be more simple to close and fatalities where a family is looking for answers.

"So we said, 'Okay, what are the ones that we really need to get off our plate right away that the public deserves an answer to,'" said Ewenson.

"It's not just age, it's impact on the affected parties."

Review vs. investigation files

The closest ASIRT came to closing more cases than it was assigned was in 2018 when the agency broke even, clearing 70 files.

But those statistics were skewed, says Ewenson, by the number of review files on investigators' plates that year.

Unlike an investigation file – where ASIRT employs typical techniques like interviewing witnesses, setting up wiretaps and pouring over CCTV footage – a review file is an already completed investigation conducted by a police agency and handed over for an ASIRT investigator to look over and sign off on.

ASIRT typically takes on between zero and 11 review files in a given year except in 2015 and 2016, when a total of 68 review files were taken on, bumping their closure numbers over the next couple of years.

That statistical anomaly aside – and with two weeks left in the year –  ASIRT took on 50 new files this year. To date, Ewenson says his team has closed 47 and is on track to clear more than 50 by year-end.

Ewenson hasn't said how long he plans to stay in the director role but he does have a three-year plan to cut the backlog of about 210 cases by half.

"That backlog was created over a number of years, if not half a decade of chronic underfunding, so you don't change the direction of the ship in one year."