B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma is congratulated by Premier David Eby after being sworn in during a ceremony at Government House in Victoria on Dec. 7, 2022.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
British Columbia’s attorney-general says new teams of Crown prosecutors, police and probation officers will craft better punishments to ensure repeat violent offenders pose less of a risk to strangers, while also helping these people get much-needed mental health and drug treatments.
Niki Sharma, who was sworn in to Premier David Eby’s cabinet last month, acknowledged that a recent Globe and Mail investigation had uncovered systemic gaps that allow a tiny number of people – most of them dealing with homelessness, mental-health issues, addictions or all three personal crises at once – to continue assaulting strangers on city streets.
The Globe highlighted the long criminal history of Mohammed Majidpour, who has repeatedly been convicted of shoplifting offences and random assaults, as a case study in the way B.C.’s overwhelmed justice system often releases violent offenders after brief periods of incarceration, even in cases where they don’t – or are unable to – comply with bail or probation conditions. A number of incidents over the past year have shocked the public and made the problem into a political issue in the province.
Ms. Sharma said in an interview that Mr. Majidpour appears to have needed more government intervention earlier in his life, to help him improve his mental health. “It’s tragic, not only for the victims, for his family and for himself – in terms of what he’s been through and what his family’s been through in trying to help him through his challenges,” she added.
B.C.’s Crown prosecutors have complained of being so overrun with these cases that they frequently reach plea deals with repeat offenders that result in single-day prison sentences. Ms. Sharma, a lawyer and former Vancouver park board commissioner, said 21 prosecutors are in the midst of transferring to a new provincial unit that will focus solely on this disruptive minority. The group’s creation was announced in September.
She said the dedicated unit will work with police and probation officers to better tailor punishments and court-ordered treatments for each offender, some of whom she acknowledged have extreme difficulty adhering to release conditions.
Ms. Sharma pointed to the success of a similar provincial program, which ran on a trial basis from 2008 to 2012. The creation of this new program was recommended last year in an expert report commissioned by the B.C. government. The strategy involves monitoring the offenders’ behaviour closely, including in monthly team meetings with the various public servants involved in each case.
Another of the report’s recommendations was that the province create so-called “low secure units,” where offenders who have mental health and substance-use problems, and who are at high risk of harming others, would be forced to undergo treatment. Ms. Sharma would not say whether she supported that policy. In a separate interview, Mike Farnworth, the province’s Solicitor-General and its lead on the repeat offender file, also didn’t clarify his stance.
The B.C. Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions later confirmed in a statement that the province is reviewing the possibility of creating these facilities.
Mr. Farnworth and Ms. Sharma said they and their counterparts in other provinces are speaking with the federal government about changing Canadian bail laws to ensure repeat violent offenders are not released if they still pose a danger to strangers. Mr. Farnworth said his counterpart in Ottawa is aware they need to “address some of the unintended consequences that we’re seeing on the bail side.”
Ms. Sharma said B.C. and other provinces recently formally requested that Ottawa reverse the onus in cases where a suspect is caught with a loaded prohibited or restricted weapon. If the change were to go into effect, the burden would be on these offenders to tell courts why they shouldn’t be detained.
In November, Ms. Sharma’s predecessor as attorney-general, Murray Rankin, announced a directive to Crown prosecutors requiring that they seek detention of chronic violent offenders when they are charged with additional crimes against people, or crimes committed with weapons – unless prosecutors are satisfied the risk to the public can be minimized by bail rules.
Ms. Sharma told The Globe that it is still too early to provide any meaningful data on whether this shift has changed incarceration rates.
There is no reliable tally of how many people across B.C. are responsible for repeated acts of random violence. A group of mayors that pushed the province to act on the problem last year estimated there could be 200 or more.
Mike Morris, a former Mountie who led the RCMP in the north of the province and is now the B.C. Liberal Party’s critic for public safety, said there are more than 20 repeat violent offenders active in his city, Prince George.
Mr. Morris, who served as solicitor-general under the previous B.C. Liberal government, welcomed the new team of prosecutors, but he said more Crown lawyers would be needed to make a significant difference. His city alone, he said, would need four or five.
“It’s a baby step in the right direction,” he said.
Right now, he said, prosecutors are simply too understaffed and under-resourced to deal properly with chronic offenders like Mr. Majidpour. He added that prosecutors are not bringing charges frequently enough when people breach their bail conditions.
Mr. Majidpour’s public record shows he breached his bail conditions a year after a 2014 theft charge, but the Crown applied to revoke his bail instead of charging him with the new offence. Mr. Morris said revoking bail means the person’s violation essentially disappears from the judge’s view the next time they appear in court on an unrelated charge.
“That should be made clear to the judges. Let the judges rule on that,” he said.