London police department staff reporting harassment: activist
The growing workplace harassment furor engulfing London city hall has spread to the police force, according to one activist, amid calls for an outside agency to investigate the city’s workplace culture.
Five women from the London police service have now come forward to share complaints, Megan Walker of the London Abused Women’s Centre said Thursday, adding they don’t know where to turn. “They’re mostly concerns around harassing behaviour where the callers are saying, ‘We don’t know what to do,’ ” Walker said.
The women from the London police reported facing harassment at work because of their gender, Walker said.
The women coming forward represent the latest in a string of complaints by civic employees about workplace harassment, bullying and retaliation, an issue that exploded Monday after city council spent two hours behind closed doors in a special meeting about personnel issues related to employment. Afterward, the city issued a statement condemning harassment. Before Thursday, Walker had said, nearly 70 civic employees — mainly from the fire department — had relayed complaints to her agency about how they were treated at work.
The city has said it will not publicly address any specific complaints, or even the volume cited by Walker, pointing to the need to protect employee privacy.
Now, Walker said, her agency has fielded so many calls, it has simply stopped counting them. “Those numbers have now climbed so high, we don’t know what they’d be,” she said. “These are not isolated incidents that are being reported. These are patterns of behaviour that can’t be explained away by someone being in a bad mood.”
Walker said she planned to meet with the latest women who reached out to her from the police department, but couldn’t say whether they were officers or civilian employees of the force.
City politicians have vowed to ask for a revamped city complaint policy, and to push for an outside review of city culture, when council committee meetings resume next week. City manager Martin Hayward sent an email Thursday to staff, saying the city will hire an external organization to examine the city’s complaint policy and review overall practices.
“It’s important to me to have a workplace that is free from harassment and discrimination. That’s my commitment to you,” Hayward wrote in the email.
The police service operates separately from other civic departments, overseen by its own board. The police anti-harassment policy — a document that’s published internally — allows both civilians and officers with the force to report a complaint to any service employee, deputy chief Stephen Williams said.
“You go to somebody you can trust and make your concerns known,” he said.