Last September, a 55-year-old Ottawa woman was being arrested at home when, while handcuffed, intoxicated, and escorted by police, she fell down a flight of stairs and was sent to the hospital. If your first thought is that someone should look into that, someone did. And when Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, the civilian watchdog tasked with investigating police-involved deaths, shootings, serious injuries, and allegations of sexual assault, finished their report seven months later, the conclusion was a familiar one. Joseph Martino, the director of Ontario's SIU, issued a statement indicating that he found no reasonable grounds to believe that an Ottawa police officer committed a criminal offence in connection with the woman's broken right arm. She simply lost her footing, the report stated.
My reaction was also familiar: a foregone shrug. After all, isn't that what the SIU almost always says? I came by my skepticism honestly. A steady childhood diet of protest songs by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, coupled with news stories during my formative teen years of RCMP barn-burnings, Toronto police brutality, and Watergate, can teach you early on that power rarely surprises you by apologizing.
Numbers that seem damning
The numbers appear to back me up. I went through the SIU's own news releases from the 2025 calendar year and found that of the 255 investigations publicly closed by a Director's Report, excluding cases closed by memo or those deemed outside the SIU's jurisdiction, only six resulted in criminal charges, a rate of about 2.4 per cent. Over the five-year period ending in 2025, SIU annual reports show yearly charge rates ranging from roughly three to 4.7 per cent. At first glance, that looks damning. If an oversight body almost never lays charges, what, really, is it overseeing?
A mandate misunderstood
But then I had to ask myself: What does my inner Woody Guthrie expect, and is that reasonable? I reached out to some experts and read annual reports and academic research to try to answer that. What I found was an oversight body with a mandate that simply doesn't match many people's expectations of what it ought to do. The SIU's responsibility is much narrower than I thought: to determine whether there are reasonable grounds to believe a police officer committed a criminal offence, and whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction. That is pretty much it. And yet we keep asking it to solve other problems, problems it was never designed to solve, and then read the numbers as proof of its failure.
Greg Brown, a Carleton University professor who served with the Ottawa police from 1985 to 2018 and sat on the Police Services Board, cautions that the SIU does not have a reform function. They don't have a branch that looks into whether there are more use-of-force occurrences this year and how to fix that.
