Saskatoon police tout training for cops investigating sexual assault complaints

The Saskatoon Police Service is reporting on the substantialtraining its members have recently undergoneto help them investigate allegations of sexual assault.

Saskatchewan's Police Act doesn't legally require such training, according to the service.

But in a report headed to the Board of Police Commissioners on Thursday, the police service outlines "relevant and meaningful" training it has already received in recent monthsand could receive in the future.

The report comes five months after a former inspector with the service reported that out of 284 reported sexual assaults between 2011 and 2016, 173 were unfounded.

The Saskatoon Sexual Assault and Information Centre complained at the time that the "Founded" category needed more subcategories to better reflect the breadth of allegations.

• Review of Saskatoon's unfounded sexual assaults released

• Saskatoon Sexual Assault Centre calls on police to adopt new way of categorizing cases

"We're really happy when all that blowback came, they've taken some really excellent, concrete steps in terms of training," said Megan Evans, a spokesperson for the centre, on Sunday.

"It looks to me like they've looked Canada-wide and that's fabulous."

Not going by appearances

One set of training mentioned in the report was delivered between November 2017 and January 2018 to patrol members by Evans herself during morning roll calls at the downtown Saskatoon headquarters.

She offered advice about not coming to conclusions about the credibility of a victim based on their appearance or behaviour.

"What we see a lot of times are people in shock, they're quite subdued, there might be crying, there might be nervous laughter, so just kind of reinforcing to the police that you can't really base their credibility on whether they look like they're upset or look like they've been violated in some way," said Evans.

Just recently officers received training on "trauma-informed investigative techniques and interviewing" from Dr. Sarah MacDonald from Calgary's Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre

Evans was there too.

"It was a really intensive day," she said. "There was a ton of great information. [MacDonald] is an expert in her field. This is all she does, all the time."

More categories needed

While praising the training efforts, Evans said they still don't address what she termed an insufficientpolicecategorization system for assaults.

"Without separating some of these conclusions out [more], you're still going to end up with a huge pool of unfounded, which makes it seem [like] most claims of sexual assault are not valid and are made up lies, but that's not the case at all," said Evans.

"By narrowing down the categories ... they'll have better data to see exactly how many are legitimately unfounded and how many were very credible but just unable to move on through the court system."

The Board of Police Commissioners is set to meet Thursday at city hall at 4 p.m. CST.