Mayor’s public snark leaves officers with little recourse
Mayor Jim Watson doesn’t want to hear anonymous complaints about Chief Charles Bordeleau of the Ottawa police. He wants unhappy officers to call their boss out publicly, so he can ignore their complaints in person.
The mayor’s energy for happy public events is properly legendary. You have to follow him on social media to see his id come out and snarl. It happened Tuesday night, after a meeting with Bordeleau about public safety. People keep getting shot. Watson has chosen not to sit on the police services board, so he discusses these things with top cops behind closed doors.
When he tweeted about what a good meeting it had been, Watson drew a critical reply from an anonymous tweeter, @RealCanadianCop, who purports to be an Ottawa patrol officer.
“This is what, your 3rd highly publicized meeting in as many years, yet the shootings not only continue but get worse,” @ RealCanadianCop wrote to him. “Your Chief of Police does not know what he’s doing and has completely lost the confidence of the front line cops.”
“Too bad you hide behind the anonymity of social media,” Watson answered back.
When Watson gets to Watsoning, there’s really no stopping him. He’s a maddening debater this way, taking on straw-man versions of his opponents and dismissing honest disagreement as dithering or stalling.
Somehow his critics always choose the wrong venue, or the wrong point in the process, to complain.
What this person should do, Watson tweeted, is arrange a meeting with his or her superior and come with some constructive suggestions, as if “the chief hasn’t a clue” is in the same category as “I have some thoughts on how to streamline our paperwork.”
That would go so well: “Hey, Sarge, you know how the chief ’s no good? What if we got a better one?”
Of course there’s no way to be sure that somebody with a Twitter account claiming to be an unhappy police officer is a police officer at all, and even if he or she is, any workplace has malcontents. Watson would be foolish to make mayoral decisions on what one anonymous person says. But it’s also foolish to go out of your way to tell such a person to be quiet, particularly when there is no proper mechanism for demoralized street-level officers to complain about their leaders. Chirping on social media is pretty much what there is.
Consider what’s happened to Insp. Samir Bhatnagar. His career in the Ottawa police has stalled even though he’s aced assessments to qualify for a promotion to superintendent. He’s filed a human-rights complaint saying he’s been held back for five years because of racism — only one person with dark skin has ever made superintendent in Ottawa and that guy left. Three entire cohorts of eligible applicants have been promoted ahead of him, he says.
No, no, it’s not racism, the Ottawa Police Services Board says in its formal response to Bhatnagar’s complaint. “The chief has significant concerns about his suitability for senior leadership,” the board says. “The applicant has demonstrated an open defiance of and disrespect for the chief and other leaders and an attitude signifying his belief that he knows better than those individuals.”
Nothing ever reached the level of discipline, but the police board’s position is that openly challenging the chief is grounds for spiking a career in the Ottawa Police Service. So yes, patrol officer, please ask for a meeting so you can bring your criticisms of the chief to your sergeant.
This isn’t a novel complaint. Watson personally got dozens of letters from rank-and-file officers in 2016 saying they’d lost confidence in the chief. An inspector, Pat Flanagan, said the same thing publicly. Watson
advised them all to shut it or quit.
Last summer, police union boss Matt Skof told members that there wasn’t any point talking to the brass any more. He’s said more than once that his members don’t believe in their chief.
Looking outside the force, Bordeleau’s botched his dealings with organizers of the Ottawa gay-pride parade last summer, insisting he’d walk in the parade in uniform over their objections before eventually backing down.
The civilian leader on the Ottawa police race-relations committee, Ketcia Peters, said this winter that rank-and-file morale is in crisis because officers don’t feel supported by their commanders or by the community.
After police officer Daniel Montsion was charged with manslaughter in the deadly arrest of Abdirahman Abdi in Hintonburg, some of his colleagues decided to wear wristbands supporting him, either blind to how that would look or pretending to be, and Bordeleau had to tell them to knock it off while they’re on duty.
An external survey of Ottawa police released last fall found 85 per cent of female officers described the force’s culture in negative terms. Promotions, in particular, are more about who you’re friendly with than what you’re good at, the survey found, consistent with Bhatnagar’s complaint.
Also, by the way, crime’s up. Ottawa’s still a safe city, even by Canada’s high standards, but the raw number of crimes here has been increasing and so has their severity. The police have had big problems investigating gun violence, in particular, because people won’t tell them anything.
The complaints don’t all come from the same direction, mind you. The police union and the people who didn’t like the Montsion wristbands don’t agree on what Bordeleau should have done about them. LGBT Ottawans, especially in the police force, weren’t unanimously behind the Pride parade organizers’ request that uniformed cops not march in the parade.
Bordeleau’s been criticized for approving an application from a Somali-Canadian police recruit who didn’t pass a background investigation, allegedly for “political reasons,” though the background-check system is archaic — and the chief has the authority to overrule it.
We pay Bordeleau $300,000 a year and he keeps emerging from those challenges having not impressed with his deftness. But Watson has stuck loyally by the chief throughout, and if you don’t like it, take your whining somewhere else.