Derek Cooke

Derek Cooke is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer. In the winter of 2014 Cook applied and was accepted for a position as the lone RCMP representative on Operation Proteus, a Canadian Armed Forces mission that is working with the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) in Jerusalem.^[1] He is the former Superintendent in Langley, British Columbia^[2] and was the head of the RCMP detachment in the township.^[3] In 2007, he was an Inspector in Vancouver.^[4] In January 2011, after becoming a Superintendent in Langley, Cooke called Rick Green, who was Langley's mayor at the time, to inform him that there was investigation into Green's conduct being undertaken by Commercial Crime; Green later denied having received the phone call from Cooke.^[5] That September, Cooke drove an unmarked car during a patrol leading up to the annual Cruise-In auto show before which it is tradition to perform multiple burnouts in public.^[6] The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) filed a complaint against Cooke that November regarding his involvement in an investigation into the death of Alvin Wright, who had been shot to death by an RCMP officer the year before.^[7] Cooke had issued a press release a day after Vancouver Police Department had completed a review of the event, but the RCMP took the press release down from their website within a few hours and the BCCLA claimed that Cooke was wrong to have released information about the event to the public.^[8] The following month, he announced that charges of sexual interference and sexual assault had been laid against a 57-year-old female teacher in School District 35 Langley.^[9] In May 2013, he said that he was very concerned about new laws in Langley restricting cannabis cultivation to commercial areas; he said that, because the cultivation of medical cannabis in residential areas was legal before the passing of the laws, there were instantaneously 26,000 illegal cannabis-growing operations in the township.^[10] Cooke believes that the RCMP should not perform the function of road traffic control to cater to events in support of for-profit corporations unless the municipal government has coordinated or is in support of the event.^[11]

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