Two more reasons to mistrust police
Public confidence in policing has been shaken like a rag doll in a week where one senior Toronto officer is fighting to retain her rank at a disciplinary hearing and another veteran Toronto officer has been found guilty in criminal court of stealing from dead people.
Both are severe breaches of trust. Both have brought the Toronto Police Service into disrepute. Both have smeared the reputation of the police force that employs them.
Supt. Stacy Clarke, “deeply sorry,” had already pleaded guilty to seven counts of misconduct under Ontario’s Police Services Act for providing confidential interview questions to six Black officers she’d been mentoring in advance of their exam for promotion to sergeant.
Const. Boris Borissov has been criminally convicted of stealing a luxury watch and credit cards from a suicide victim in one case, an apparent natural death in another, possessing and driving a stolen car and misusing police databases in what court heard sounded very much like a scheme to obtain vehicles by fraud, with an accomplice, to resell.
The comeuppance for Clarke, after closing arguments on Friday, won’t be delivered until possibly midsummer. At the hearing, her character was vouched for by former police chief Mark Saunders, among others, and scores of community supporters attended daily. Clarke has explained that, in a flash of desperation she profoundly regrets, she’d been trying to help level the playing field for Black officers within an institution historically beset by career-limiting anti-Black racism. There was no profit in the cheating for her.
Meanwhile in Newmarket, Justice Mary Misener, in written reasons released after Wednesday’s judge-only conviction of Borissov — 16 years a cop — ripped the suspended officer, calling his version of events when he took the stand “riddled with lies,” testimony she further described as “completely unworthy of belief.” The crimes — guilty on all 15 counts — were by any measure of the evidence utterly motivated by avarice.
What are we to make of all this? Because, while less than three per cent of the Toronto police force has faced suspensions in the past decade, the statistics — and certainly the ledger for criminal charges — don’t reflect actual depth of rot. Judges are part of the same law enforcement system and juries are loathe to convict police officers.
Last month, a Toronto officer with 25 years of service was suspended for allegedly assaulting two women; another charged with two counts of obstruct justice and one of perjury in relation to an “inappropriate personal relationship with a member of the public during the course of his duties,” as per the Toronto police press release.
A few weeks ago, at the trial of Umar Zameer — acquitted on a charge of murdering Toronto Det.-Const. Jeffrey Northrup by deliberately running into him with his vehicle — the presiding judge suggested rather sharply that two witness officers may have colluded to shape their evidence.
In March, three Toronto officers were hit with misconduct charges, including neglect of duty and discreditable conduct, stemming from an incident where officers failed to properly investigate calls from concerned staff at a North York shelter. As the Star’s Wendy Gillis reported, a woman was barricaded in a room for 38 hours with the romantic partner who allegedly killed her.
In December, a Toronto cop and a former Ontario public servant were handed sevenyear prison sentences for cooking up a bogus will that deprived a dead man’s estate of $834,000.
I’ll reach back further, to 2019, for an especially appalling and tragic case: A 12 Division officer who committed suicide after being targeted in an internal investigation that culminated in theft and perjury charges against two fellow officers. In that instance, the accused officers were involved in busting an alleged drug dealer, an investigation that began with a discarded purse containing cash and drugs. The officers then seized 1.69 kilos of cocaine, 113 grams of methamphetamine, 113 grams of heroin, 8.7 kilos of hash and $130,000 in cash from a suspect’s car. But they allegedly kept some $50,000 for themselves.
Humans are fallible, cops no less so, though we do expect better from them, which might be unrealistic because of their daily proximity to the worst among us. For a police service that employs more than 7,000 people, uniform and non-uniform, there are bound to be some dirty cops, some foolish cops, some mendacious cops.
From 2017 to date, the SIU has laid criminal charges against police officers in 86 cases (there may be more than one officer charged in a case); 14 of those involved the TPS. The SIU doesn’t systematically track convictions but according to the Ministry of the Attorney General, from 2011 to 2021, 32 charges were withdrawn while 42 resulted in acquittal, committed for trial, sentenced, dismissed or stayed, with 10 cases pending.
Under the Police Services Act, police chiefs could only cut off pay to a suspended officer if they were convicted of a crime and sentenced to jail time. Since the revised provincial Community Safety and Policing Act came into effect April 1, chiefs are now able to suspend officers without pay, but only under specific circumstances — serious indictable offences committed while off-duty, such as murder or aggravated sexual assault.
Borissov collected $115,392 in 2023 alone and will continue to be paid until after his sentencing in the fall.