The B.C. government needs to make fighting domestic violence a greater priority, a Victoria police officer said Tuesday after testifying at a coroner's inquest into the murder-suicide of five members of a Victoria-area family.
Insp. Clark Russell said too many people are dying as a result of domestic violence.
Russell said Ontario has a specialized Domestic Violence Death Review Committee and Alberta has Canada's first domestic violence threat assessment team.
"The province needs to make it a priority and the challenge is the province has lots of priorities," Russell said outside the hearing.
"If I'm putting pressure on them for domestic violence, somebody else is putting pressure on them for the gang issues, and for all sorts of things," he said.
"They are getting it from every direction. That's the challenge for them is deciding what their priorities are and moving forward with the them."
Peter Lee, 38, a Canadian navy reservist with some weapons training, stabbed to death his six-year-old son, Christian, his wife Yong (Sunny) Park, and her parents Kum Lea Chun and Moon Kyu Park, before killing himself.
The inquest has heard chilling details of what police found after they were summoned to the family's house in the Victoria suburb of Oak Bay by a hysterical dying woman who called 911 on Sept. 4, 2007.
Sunny Park was stabbed 49 times and Christian Lee was also stabbed repeatedly, as were Park's parents, who were slashed several times in the chest and back.
Lee placed the bodies of his son and wife in a bedroom and then turned the weapon on himself, dying beside them.
A police officer with more than 25 years experience said it was the bloodiest crime scene he had ever seen.
Russell testified the Lee murder-suicide prompted Victoria police to speed up plans to introduce a domestic violence unit.
He said that's happening while negotiations are currently underway to develop a regional domestic violence team that includes members of the area's four municipal police departments, the RCMP, legal officials and members of anti-violence service groups.
The two-member Victoria team is scheduled to start in January and is planning to work with counsellors as it stays in touch with officials from the Crown prosecutor's office, Russell said.
He said the department is funding the unit out of its existing budget, with some of the money coming from Victoria's decision to pull out of a regional crime unit that targets habitual offenders.
The Ontario Domestic Violence Death Review Committee reports directly to the province's chief coroner and has a mandate to review the circumstances of all intimate partner and ex-partner homicides in Ontario and identify systemic issues.
It also makes recommendations and maintains a database about victims, perpetrators and identifies trends, patterns and risk factors from review cases.
Alberta's Relations Threat Assessment and Management Initiative, formed in 2007, is the first threat assessment unit in Canada.
An Alberta threat assessment report says that between 2000 and 2006, more than 500 Canadian women were shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten to death by their intimate male partners.
Those numbers are five times more than all of the Canadian soldiers and police officers killed in the line of duty during that same time period, the report said.
Crown Prosecutor Jocelyn Coupal testified she oversaw a B.C. government domestic violence pilot project that showed promising results.
She said the project, which took place in Langley, located about 45 kilometres east of Vancouver, should be formally evaluated by the government as a domestic violence model.
The project netted guilty pleas in 67 per cent of the cases that went to court, up from the guilty-plea average of 49 per cent.
Coupal said six per cent of the witnesses recanted their earlier statements of domestic abuse, while the average number of people who refuse to testify against their alleged abuser is more than 30 per cent.
The project examined 140 files involving 100 offenders during the six months.
When a juror asked what should the jury should recommend about the government's domestic abuse plans, Coupal said: "Instead of another study,' let's get on with it."'
On Monday, Robert Gillen, B.C.'s assistant deputy attorney general, testified the Oak Bay murders could spur changes in how the province deals with domestic violence.
But he said most changes require more money, and there is not a lot of extra money available.
Gillen testified he would recommend the jury call for amendments to the Criminal Code to permit the courts to ask for risk assessments of potential domestic abusers prior to their bail hearings.
Risk assessments would allow the courts to hold people for a period of time while experts assess their potential threat for domestic violence, he said.
Gillen said he would also like to see the courts move towards reverse onus findings in some domestic abuse cases, forcing the accused to convince a court he is not a risk to offend.
The ministry of the Attorney General has been reviewing changes to the way the province addresses domestic violence, but isn't convinced a single provincewide model is the correct approach, he said.
The B.C. government has said it is preparing a statement at the conclusion of the inquest, slated for Friday.
The inquest resumed this week after a 19-month adjournment that resulted when Crown officials who were part of the decision to release Lee on bail prior to his killing spree refused to testify.
The issue went to the B.C. Court of Appeal, which ruled last July in favour of the Crown's position that ordering Crown officials to testify would put undue pressure on the independence of the legal system.
When he murdered his family, Lee was on bail after being arrested five weeks earlier for trying to harm his wife in a staged car crash. He was under orders to stay away from the family's Oak Bay home where the deaths occurred.
