ACTION unit expected to issue 4,000 tickets a year: trial
‘Ghost ticket’ trial hears from another street person who tells of throwing tickets away
The Hamilton police ACTION unit, created to improve safety, was expected to generate 4,000 tickets a year, says a constable charged with writing fake tickets.
Const. Staci Tyldesley testified Friday at the trial of four officers charged with obstruction of justice and fabricating provincial offence notice tickets in 2014 — Constables Bhupesh Gulati, Shawn Smith, Steve Travale and Dan Williams.
Tyldesley faces the same charges but hers are being dealt separately in a preliminary hearing.
In January 2014, she said Friday, supervisors met with the unit and expressed how many tickets were expected. “It was 4,000 as a unit, for all of ACTION (which had 40 officers).”
Tyldesley said she was never told how many she had to produce but set her goal at 100.
The ACTION — Addressing Crime Trends in Our Neighbourhoods — unit was created to reduce violence, improve safety and enhance quality of life in Hamilton’s most vulnerable areas, with officers often on foot or bikes.
Tyldesley told court she didn’t know what all the fuss was about on Sept. 19, 2014, when some green copies of her tickets — copies that were supposed to go to the offender — were discovered in a bin for shredding.
She was at central station on King William Street that day when Const. Trevor Holmes — who discovered the copies — confronted her. “He said, ‘Do you throw tickets in the shredder.’ I said, ‘Yes, I do, when they are refused.’”
When Holmes told her not to do that, “I said, ‘OK, but I’m not hiding anything.’”
Tyldesley said she was shocked by his demeanour. “I just don’t know why he was reacting the way he was … he was almost frantic, and I didn’t see why because I didn’t think it was an issue.”
There was no policy on what to do with refused offender copies, she said. (There are four copies to a ticket — two go to court offices, one stays with the officer and one is given to the offender.)
Tyldesley’s testimony contradicted Holmes, who testified Monday that she admitted officers wrote “ghost tickets” — ones written up but not issued on days when officers didn’t write real ones.
The fake tickets were counted in police statistics, court has heard.
The tickets Tyldesley is accused of faking name street people regularly ticketed for drinking in public, panhandling and other such provincial offences. She maintains they sometimes refused the tickets she tried to give them.
Two of them — Dwight Perry and Thomas Groves — testified earlier, however, that they never refused a ticket, despite throwing them away because they had no means to pay them. Perry, 59, received 285 tickets worth about $20,000 over the years and Groves — with as many as three a day sometimes — agreed with the defence that his amounted to $48,000.
On Friday, Gary Palmer, 58, said he also received tickets downtown — for drinking outside, once for not having a bike bell, and another time for riding on the sidewalk. “I’d just throw them away.”
This trial centres on the alleged fake tickets but a recurring theme has been the hundreds of legitimate tickets issued to street people that inevitably go unpaid.
Earlier this week, Sgt. Michael Dunham expressed frustration over the seemingly pointless exercise of issuing such tickets.
Dunham said it was all for show — to give the public a sense that police were doing something about problems downtown.