Fire officers who mocked daughter, family urges
TORONTO • Two Toronto police officers who were recorded mocking a 29-yearold woman with Down syndrome should lose their jobs over their comments, the woman’s mother said Tuesday as the pair faced a disciplinary hearing.
Const. Sasa Sljivo and Const. Matthew Saris made a brief appearance at a police tribunal before their case was adjourned to Sept. 19.
Sljivo is charged with misconduct related to the use of profane, abusive or insulting language, while Saris is charged with misconduct related to the failure to report Sljivo’s comments, which contravened the Ontario Human Rights Code, police documents show.
The officers had previously issued a written apology, calling the Nov. 5, 2016, incident a “lapse in judgment.”
But Pamela Munoz, whose daughter Francie was the subject of the comments, said that’s not enough. She said the officers should at least apologize in person, though she believes a harsher penalty is warranted.
“In our heart, a great outcome would have been for them to leave the Toronto Police Service, because it’s shameful for our police officers to feel that way,” she said after the hearing.
Munoz said the family had hoped the matter would be resolved in a day and are disappointed that the hearing was adjourned to next month.
She said they are also filing a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
The family’s lawyer, Faisal Bhabha, said the comments were made inside a police cruiser after the officers pulled over his clients.
He said the comments were captured by the police vehicle’s dashboard camera.
The family heard the comments because they decided to fight the ticket that was issued at the time and requested the evidence against them, he said.
Bhabha said one of the officers is heard referring to Francie as a “half-person” and mocks her appearance. Some snickering can also be heard, he said.
The case is less about what happens to these individual officers and more about “what the service is doing and what the police chief is doing to root out these sorts of attitudes,” Bhabha said after the hearing.
“They’re trying to deal with this as a couple of bad apples rather than taking responsibility institutionally and coming to face the public and face, more importantly, the community of people with developmental disabilities to say, ‘yes this happened, yes this was wrong, and yes we’re going to do something about it,’ ” he said.