Determining whether the Dawson Creek RCMP officer who killed James McIntyre will face charges could take between six months and a year, a spokesperson for the B.C. Independent Investigations Office (IIO) said.
The office has confirmed that investigators have left Dawson Creek but continue to probe McIntyre's death outside the Fixx Urban Grill on July 16.
"[Investigators] are no longer actively deployed, however, the file is still being investigated back here in Surrey," said spokesperson Ralph Krenz.
"It's not unusual for these types of files to take anywhere from six months to a year before we're in a position to report out or make any conclusions."
According to the office's latest annual report, previous investigations have run an average of 165 days, ranging from 98 to 373 days between the incident and the release of the office's findings.
IIO officials say the McIntyre shooting has been one of the most complex cases the office has dealt with, following an initial report that McIntyre was causing a disturbance at a Site C open house at the restaurant that evening.
Spokesperson Kellie Kilpatrick later said that McIntyre and the man at the Site C event were not the same person.
McIntyre, 48, was the sixth person to be shot by police since April 1. He later died of his injuries.
"At this point, we're in the very early stages of this investigation so we don't have a sense of when we'd be able to think about an end point regarding this file," said Krenz.
Fatal police shootings have become more common since the IIO began operations in 2012. The office was created after public inquiries into the deaths of Frank Paul in 1998 and Robert Dziekanski in 2007. Its first case was the shooting death of Greg Matters in Prince George.
Since April 1, the start of the IIO's fiscal year, police officers have shot six people in British Columbia.
That follows on the heels of a record 2014-15, which saw 13 people die in interactions with police--seven of which were shooting deaths. Nine people were killed by police officers in both 2012-13 and 2013-14. In the first year, four of those deaths were shootings, while in 2013-14 one person was fatally shot. Reckless driving, Tasers, use of force and deaths in custody accounted for other fatalities.
Since 2012, the IIO has investigated a total of 124 incidents, the majority of which were non-fatal.
Once an investigation is open, the office will determine whether the officer was justified in killing or injuring a person. If the officer acted appropriately, the IIO will typically issue a report detailing what happened. If not, the IIO will forward the file to Crown Counsel, which determines whether to charge an officer.
Thirty-six of those files have been sent to the Crown, six of which have led to charges including assault, assault with a weapon, reckless driving and second degree murder. Only two of those cases have concluded, and only one with a guilty verdict.
In Oct. 2014, an officer in New Westminster was convicted of distracted driving after he drove his cruiser into a van, injuring the 67-year-old driver.
