Officer paid $400K while suspended quits the force

CHATHAM • A veteran Ontario police officer has quit the force after costing taxpayers nearly $400,000 in pay for the more than three years that he was suspended while facing a criminal charge.

The departure of Sgt. Robert Mugridge, announced Wednesday, comes days before the 29-year veteran of the Chatham-Kent force is to be sentenced for fraud and is certain to renew calls for Ontario to hurry up legislation ending its distinction as the only province where officers facing serious charges cannot be suspended without pay.

It also comes ahead of a disciplinary hearing where Mugridge would have faced almost certain termination from the force.

“It happens all the time, all the time,” John Sewell, a former Toronto mayor and outspoken policing critic, said of officers facing serious allegations being kept on the payroll for years, only to quit before they’re disciplined.

“This is something that, in fact, police associations have used to help their members for many, many years,” Sewell said Wednesday.

Under legislation proposed by Ontario’s Liberal government, police chiefs in the province would be able to withhold wages from officers suspended while they face serious allegations, a power their counterparts in other provinces have long wielded.

Pressure to change the law came in the wake of a number of high-profile cases, including that of a Waterloo Regional police constable who sent an email thanking his force “for a dream come true” during a three-year paid suspension he said allowed him to golf, travel and take a firefighter course.

Mugridge pleaded guilty last summer to a single count of defrauding about $247,000 from dozens of people. He’s to be sentenced Tuesday in Chatham.

He had fraudulently obtained loans from family members, friends, co-workers and others between 2009 and 2014, falsely claiming he needed the money to pay for a child’s university tuition, to repay a loan or replace cash that a substance-addicted sibling had stolen from his mother, court heard. Sometimes, he’d wear his uniform when asking for the loans. At least two of the requests were made at police headquarters in Chatham.

Chatham-Kent police had sought to fire Mugridge under the Police Services Act, the law governing policing in Ontario and under which police forces hold disciplinary hearings into professional misconduct, after he pleaded guilty to 50 counts of discreditable conduct last year.

Since being suspended in May 2014, Mugridge had continued to collect his $110,000 annual pay.

“It has taken way too long,” said West Kent Councillor Bryon Fluker, a member of the Chatham-Kent police services board.

“I certainly hope that over the next period of time the Police Act gets far more clarified, so that these things don’t take as long as they did.”