Police discipline standards need to be fair
Ottawa police Chief Charles Bordeleau has, in many cases, been the guy at whom all fingers point when it comes to the ongoing and troubling allegations of shabby police behaviour.
From the death following the arrest of Abdirahman Abdi last July; to Bordeleau’s own missteps in the case of a traffic ticket involving his father-in-law; to an independent review of how the Ottawa police handled the Mountie child abuse case; to now, with the Ontario Provincial Police investigating senior advisers to Bordeleau over allegedly tampering with evidence — this (partial) list doesn’t reflect particularly well on the chief’s leadership of the boys and girls in blue.
Apart or together, these are worrisome and, to varying degrees, scandalous. The Ottawa Police Association, captained by Matt Skof, clearly tastes the blood in the water; it is circling Bordeleau and his crew. In the latest instance, Skof wrote an opinion piece in the Thursday Citizen, flogging Bordeleau for an apparent double standard when it comes to dishing out suspensions to officers under investigation.
There is obviously union politicking and posturing, but he also makes a sound point on both practical and principled grounds.
Why indeed should an officer under investigation from the province’s Special Investigations Unit for potentially criminal behaviour get yanked off regular duty, but not senior officers who are under investigation from the provincial flatfoots?
Coun. Eli El-Chantiry, the head of the Police Services Board, says the law doesn’t insist upon suspensions in this case; there’s discretion on the chief ’s part. (The province is reviewing its police act; the new law ought to be more insistent.)
The larger point, of course, is the extensive protections offered to police officers in Ontario. They cannot, for example, be suspended without pay — a practice that in 2015 cost taxpayers $13,000 a day and is damaging to the police’s public image. It barely deserves saying that this should end. The problem with police staying on the job — in many, maybe most, policing capacities, honestly — when they’re under investigation is that they’re working under a miasma of suspicion.
The sound principle that people are innocent until proven guilty is not, in any way, an argument that they’re able to conduct their work in an honourable fashion. You may well be not guilty of criminality; that doesn’t mean that while under investigation you’re up to snuff. There are consequences in society at a far lower threshold than criminal guilt; they’re meted out all the time because sometimes even the odour of wrongdoing is enough to end one’s employment, to which nobody, including police, have the right.
People work at the pleasure of their employer, and in the case of police, that employer is you and me. Which brings us back to the brass. If one believes, in the case of police officers — public servants, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force — that being under investigation means they are fundamentally unable to carry out their work until cleared, then the principle applies to the top cops, too. After all, they are overseeing the rank-and-file: If they’re tainted, that suspicion permeates the work done elsewhere in the force.
Considering the last year or so in the history of the Ottawa police, that’s not really something they can afford. The blame in these instances is the fault of many different officers. It has at time verged on a collective complicity in bad behaviour, as in the case of police buying and wearing wristbands supporting Const. Daniel Montsion, who faces criminal charges in Abdi’s death. The point is that the fault isn’t Bordeleau’s alone.
Yet he’s the guy in charge. If the problems aren’t his fault, they’re certainly his responsibility to right; the captain goes down with his ship, but he’s also responsible for navigating icebergs and keeping a weather eye out for lighthouses.
This is the lighthouse warning the chief away from the reef. The standards for suspension should be consistent, regardless of rank. Simple as that.