A Burnaby RCMP officer lost a small bag of pot turned in by some local residents cleaning up the Brentwood area.
Local resident Sue From organized a community cleanup for Saturday, June 16, and roughly 16 people showed up to pick up garbage in the Brentwood neighbourhood.
Besides trash, they found a bike, a broken safe and some pot, so they called the RCMP to remove the items. But when the NOW called police to confirm, RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Rick Skolrood could only find a record of the safe and the bike.
It turns out the officer who responded lost the bag of pot, according to Chief Supt. Dave Critchley, who ordered an internal investigation into the missing drugs.
"This does not meet our standard of how we process exhibits," Critchley said. "We are a professional police service. We don't lose exhibits."
Critchley defined exhibits as any found or lost property turned into police or evidence related to a crime. Usually police collect the exhibits and store them in secure rooms at Burnaby RCMP headquarters. Critchley said the RCMP serious crimes investigators looked into the missing pot. The investigation started last week and is essentially complete, he said.
"It appears he lost the marijuana. He notified his superiors immediately after it happened. They attempted to find it, and they couldn't," Critchley said.
Apparently, the officer took the small bag of pot, put it in his pocket and thinks it must have fallen out when he was loading or unloading the safe and bike from his car. According to Critchley, the officer recorded in his notes that he received the pot, but because he lost it, he couldn't turn it in to exhibits, where everything is secure and recorded.
Police retraced the officer's steps to see if they could find the drugs and looked at surveillance video from the recycling depot where he dropped off the safe and the bike. Critchley said the bike had a serial number, which did not come up as stolen when checked with in police databases. (Critchley also said the officer should have turned the bike over to the city, which holds them in case the owners come forward.)
Critchley said he had a discussion with the general duty constable in question, who has roughly three-and-a-half years of experience but is new to the Burnaby detachment. Critchley talked about expectations on processing exhibits.
"We take this very seriously," Critchley said. "This is a junior officer. My role, in a leadership role, is to ensure that we provide him adequate supervision and additional training if required and the policy understanding of how we handle exhibits."
The key is to alert the officer to how the RCMP go forward, Critchley said.
"I wanted to let him know this is serious. It's not trivial," he said.
Critchley, the Burnaby RCMP's top-ranking officer, has more than three decades of policing experience. He said handling exhibits can be a challenge, but since he joined the Burnaby detachment in August, this is the only case he knows of where drugs or exhibits have gone missing. The RCMP recently upgraded their exhibits storage rooms, which hold more than 64,000 items, and conducted an inventory of the contents.
Critchley said there is public trust involved when it comes to drugs.
"The public has a trust that we're going to handle them in a professional manner and dispose of them," he said.
From said the volunteers actually found two small bags of pot in a bag of garbage. They fished one out to give to police but left the other one.
"It was rainy and messy and gooey, and I decided to just take out one and not bother looking for the other cause it was so small," From wrote in an email to the NOW.
