KEEP POLICING DEBATE PUBLIC
The problems are bad, but secrecy is worse
The Ottawa Police Service has found itself in something of a PR crisis, with one officer slagging police Chief Charles Bordeleau’s leadership in an email to the entire force, then the police union calling for the resignation of police services board chair Eli El-Chantiry, and finally a few dozen cops emailing the mayor about the whole brouhaha.
And what a brouhaha it is. And it’s made all the more interesting because we — that is to say, Ottawans — are following the whole affair in mostly real time.
This is messy, and frankly, Bordeleau and El-Chantiry aren’t looking all that great. (Nor, for that matter, is anyone else. Almost everything about this affair has been simultaneously alarmist and alarming.)
But transparency and accountability mean the public must get a glimpse into the messy business of running a police force. We got a little bit of it Monday night, when Bordeleau spoke before the Police Services Board, and rank-and-file officers who had shown up.
“Morale is a hard conversation in policing,” Bordeleau said.
It began last week with an opinion piece from the chief about tackling violence in town, written for the Citizen, which led to an open letter from veteran officer Const. Paul Heffler to the entire force — promptly leaked to the media — deriding the police brass’s handling of the shootings and lamenting the poor state of morale on the force.
No doubt, Bordeleau would prefer that cops not grouse about their jobs in public. “There’s no question that making this public is not healthy for an organization,” he told reporters Monday night.
Ask yourself this: Would you prefer internal problems at the Ottawa Police Service were made public or debated quietly? Secrecy is becoming the norm in public affairs. Officials regularly refuse to comment because something is “before the courts” or they don’t want to duke it out “in the media.”
In most cases, that really means they don’t want the public to know, because that’s inconvenient, or they would prefer to avoid becoming snarled in some sort of unpleasantness.
To be sure, us media types can be a bit self-serving about it; we depend on this sort of thing to remain employed. But if not through the media, where else? Not every Ottawan can attend a police services board meeting.
The police union boss, Matt Skof, called for El-Chantiry’s resignation, unhappy with the handling of allegations that Bordeleau interfered with a traffic ticket given to his father-in-law, and saying that the police services board was misled about the private security at the Ottawa courthouse.
The board asked Monday for the Ontario Civilian Police Commission to investigate Bordeleau’s conduct regarding the traffic ticket. The complaint regarding courthouse security was dismissed, with El-Chantiry saying the chief made no effort to mislead the board.
And then there’s the internal investigation into whether members of the traffic patrol have been issuing false warnings to boost their internal statistics.
There are obviously issues with our police and the public must know about them.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as unproductive squabbling — aren’t there bigger issues in town?
The reality, though, is that policing will only become better if complaints are aired, particularly if internal problems are somehow spilling over into these real-world issues.
It doesn’t necessarily matter who’s right. As policing changes — think restrictions on carding, where police record information about people during routine stops on the street — there are going to be growing pains. How the police negotiate moving boldly into the future affects all of us as the people who are policed.
The police may well not like it. But in plain view is the appropriate place to debate — and explain — challenges in policing. PR crisis or not.