Re-Evaluating Independence: The Emerging Problem of Crown-Police Alignment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attorney Generals and Crown prosecutors are endowed with a constitutionally protected role and the quasi-judicial responsibility of handling criminal prosecutions on behalf of the Crown. This includes deciding whether to bring the prosecution of a charge laid by the police, to enter a stay of proceedings, to accept a guilty plea to lesser charge, and to withdraw criminal proceedings in accordance with what the public interest dictates. While the vast majority of prosecutors are careful to separate their function from that of the police, occasionally police advocacy and the high level of police commitment can lead to accepting police information without appropriate confirmation and turning to the police for guidance in the exercise of prosecutorial functions. This article argues that recent examples of significant partisan advocacy by prosecutors warrant re-considering the limits of Crown independence from the police and re-evaluating the current effectiveness of institutional accountability in Ontario. Part II will highlight the separate roles of the police and prosecutors, as well as provide some background to the issue of Crown-police alignment. Part III will examine a number of recent cases where individual prosecutors, and occasionally offices, appear to be acting in the interests of the police, rather than the public interest, in discharging their prosecutorial functions. Finally, because the problem of Crown-police alignment is provincial as well as localized in nature, part IV will attempt to demonstrate the crucial role that Law Societies and other public offices have in monitoring prosecutorial conduct and ensuring that Attorney Generals are in fact seeing that the administration of public affairs is in accordance with the law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.083 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".