IAPE Evidence Blog

Peter­bor­ough Exam­iner (Ontario)

Ban­croft, Ontario, Canada

This story about a man being attacked out­side his Ban­croft area home left read­ers with a cou­ple of unan­swered ques­tions –includ­ing one big one. The man was beaten so badly by some­one wear­ing a dis­guise and car­ry­ing an unnamed weapon that he had to be hos­pi­tal­ized overnight. Provin­cial police took it seri­ously enough to bring in their emer­gency response team and offi­cers with police dogs scoured the area for hours. A man from nearby Carlow-Mayo Town­ship was arrested the next day and for­mally charged.

But OPP offi­cials aren’t releas­ing his name to the pub­lic. They aren’t even releas­ing why they aren’t releas­ing the infor­ma­tion. Nor­mally, once indi­vid­u­als are for­mally charged the names are given out to the media in press releases or dur­ing rou­tine phone calls with the duty offi­cer. But not this time.

Read­ers should won­der why. Is it the local reeve that got charged? A fel­low police offi­cer? One of the officer’s rel­a­tives? We don’t know.

The lack of dis­clo­sure comes at a time when police forces across Canada are fac­ing unprece­dented scrutiny. It’s been just over a year since Robert Dziekan­ski was shot and killed by an RCMP offi­cer at Van­cou­ver Air­port. The offi­cers ini­tially tried to deny some details until an ama­teur video was posted online and shown around the world.

Closer to home, a Peter­bor­ough police offi­cer pleaded guilty to dis­cred­itable con­duct this month. He became enraged and ver­bally abu­sive to his wife after she looked at real estate with­out him being present.

He also went into the police evi­dence room while off-duty and got caught look­ing for evi­dence against him. A charge of improp­erly using his posi­tion as a police offi­cer was qui­etly dropped by the Crown. The rea­son? Again, not disclosed.

Dur­ing this month’s Police Act hear­ing, the offi­cer was accom­pa­nied by two other con­sta­bles for sup­port. He was sen­tenced to hav­ing 24 hours of his pay docked. But he was reas­sured this can be taken from vaca­tion allot­ment or over-time so he will hardly feel the effect.

Police need to cre­ate firm rules on dis­clo­sure to the media, who relay the infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic. Police are clearly not above the law. And if they occa­sion­ally aren’t going to release the names of peo­ple who are charged, they should at least say why. Oth­er­wise ques­tions — includ­ing the big one; whether the pub­lic can trust them –will remain. 

DAVID HATTON
Den­nis Drive North York

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
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