12th officer charged in probe of warnings

A 12th Ottawa police officer has been charged after a probe into fake traffic warnings issued by the force, the Citizen has learned.

Const. Andrew Badeen is scheduled to make his first appearance for the Police Services Act charges on May 2. Badeen has been charged with two counts of discreditable conduct, insubordination and deceit.

He has not, however, been arraigned on the charges. In nine of the 11 other cases in which officers have been charged for faking the warnings, officers have pleaded guilty and had the deceit charges against them withdrawn.

Badeen is one of seven officers whom the police service asked the police board for an extension to investigate. The extension was requested in September 2016, nearly one year after the probe began. The six others — Const. Peter Dawson, Const. Paul Stam, Const. Kevin Benloss, Const. Sean Ralph, Const. Paul Laforest and Const. Trevor Gunsolus — have all been charged and all but one have pleaded guilty. Badeen is not one of the 11 officers who had been reassigned or suspended in the probe, which began in the fall of 2015, as first reported by the Citizen.

Two whistleblowing traffic officers, neither of whom were implicated in the probe, became increasingly suspicious of how Const. Edward Ellis was skyrocketing to the top of the traffic squad’s internal stats. One of those officers found undelivered warnings in Ellis’s cruiser and took them to the chain of command, sparking an audit of all traffic warnings issued by police.

Warnings carry no fines and are used by police to correct driver behaviour before they lay charges. The force believes that officers were falsifying the warnings and police records for their own internal metrics.