Police can demand Vancouver newsrooms turn over footage taken the night of the Stanley Cup riot, a B.C. judge ruled Friday, but he threw out a series of production orders because of "inadvertent" errors in documents used to obtain them.
Judge David Harris said information-to-obtain documents filed by police incorrectly described the geographical area they were concerned with and incorrectly identified the corporate names of media outlets.
But he said the orders were otherwise valid and invited police to resubmit their applications, rejecting arguments by media outlets that the production orders threatened their journalistic independence.
Police served court orders to CTV, Global TV, CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and The Vancouver Province, demanding all raw footage taken over a large swath of downtown before, during and after the destructive riot on June 15.
The media outlets launched a court challenge, arguing the production orders should be thrown out because they were too broad and didn't specifically identify individual crimes. They also said the orders interfered with their work and would turn journalists into agents of the police.
Harris rejected those arguments.
While he conceded the production orders seemed broad, he concluded the footage will be valuable evidence that would not be available from other sources.
"It is apparent that complying with these production orders is inherently less intrusive than a search, originals of all material remain with the petitioners, and nothing interferes with the media's continuing capacity to use that material to report on a continuing news story," Harris said in his written decision.
"Media footage may be the only footage from which an identification of the perpetrators can be made."
The media outlets also complained about technical problems with the production orders.
The documents referred to downtown streets to describe the area covered by the orders, but two of them don't actually intersect, creating an area that isn't clearly defined.
The orders also incorrectly identified the corporate names of the media outlets, referring to the Vancouver Sun Newspaper, for example, when the newspaper is actually a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Harris said those errors, which he described as "no doubt inadvertent," meant the production orders could not stand as written.
"I have no doubt that this deficiency in the production orders can and should be remedied," he wrote.
The Vancouver Police Department said it would review the decision and planned to submit new applications to obtain production orders.
"We recognize that this is part of the process when making judicial applications of this scope and complexity," Insp. Les Yeo, the officer who's in charge of the riot investigation, said in a news release.
"We will continue to work towards obtaining this evidence from identified media outlets; the public and victims of the riot wouldn't expect anything less."
So far, 27 people have been charged with participating in a riot, as well as other offences including break and enter, arson, assault and mischief. Crown counsel are considering charges against 33 other people, and police expect to eventually forward hundreds of more files to prosecutors.
Police have received tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of video, many from members of the public, which were taken to a lab in the United States to be analysed. Investigators want to bolster that evidence with unpublished material from journalists.
After a similar riot in Vancouver in 1994, police obtained warrants targeting two local newspapers and CBC-TV.
A judge ruled the first set of warrants were too vague and threw them out, prompting police to make revisions and return several days later.
