Skip to content

Column: Are demotions really enough for officers convicted of fraud?

Ontario laws concerning police charged with crimes needs to go under the microscope
260115_gsps_labreche_charged660
Const. Christopher Labreche (pictured) and Const. Kathryn Howard of the Greater Sudbury Police Service were recently demoted for defrauding the police service's benefit program. File photo.

We give police officers a lot of power. We give them the ability to restrict our movement, to lock us away and to confiscate our stuff. We even give them the right to shoot at us under certain circumstances.

However, there’s a trade-off. Since we’ve empowered and armed police to enforce certain rules we’ve deemed ethically appropriate, police officers must be beyond reproach — when you enforce the rules, you have to be better than we are.

That’s a tall order and a lot to ask, I know. But it is one the vast, vast majority of police officers have no trouble living up to, and they do it every day. These are men and women we can all be proud of and ones we should be grateful for — after all, we pay them (and pay them handsomely) to put themselves in harm’s way to keep us safe.

But what happens when officers aren’t better than we are? What happens when they break the law?

That’s where things get a bit fuzzy. If an officer is found not guilty, some people will always suspect the outcome was fixed. That poses real problems for police services in the realm of public perception.

In Ontario, when an officer is charged with a crime and suspended, he or she keeps getting paid. It’s legislated right into the Police Services Act. This protects officers from false accusations, which do occur given the nature of the job. This is a good mechanism to protect officers from bogus charges.

The problem is it protects the minority of bad officers as well, and police chiefs in this province don’t have the discretion to choose, though they’ve been asking for it for years. In other provinces, they do. In Ontario, they should.

Of course, police chiefs should have that discretion. They know their officers. They know some should be suspended with pay and some shouldn’t. Most of the time, they can tell a bogus complaint from a real one. 

Which brings us to the recent demotions of Const. Christopher Labreche and Const. Kathryn Howard.

A married couple, both admitted to defrauding the Greater Sudbury Police Service’s benefit program and both pleaded guilty to discreditable conduct. The amount of the fraud wasn’t terribly high, more than $3,000 but less than $5,000.

They were demoted for three years, publicly embarrassed and have had their salaries slashed (her by more than $6,000 a year, him by more than $20,000 a year).

Had they worked somewhere where the Ontario Police Services Act didn’t dictate the rules of their employment, they likely would’ve been fired. Employers don’t like it when you steal from them.

Chief Paul Pedersen called the charges against Labreche and Howard “disturbing” and they are. They broke our trust, and for many people that broken trust extends to every man and woman in uniform, regardless of whether that’s fair (it isn’t).

But is demoting them sufficient? For many members of the public who commented on the outcome of the case, the answer is clearly “no.” 

When someone steals, we’re supposed to phone the police. When an officer is found to have stolen, is it any wonder the public reacts with vehemence?

And this isn’t the first time Labreche has been the subject of scrutiny. In 2015, video surfaced of him smashing a handcuffed suspect’s face through a police cell window.

He was cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident, but that footage of a hulking, angry cop driving the head of a much smaller, handcuffed man through a window is still very much in the public’s mind.

For him to admit committing fraud a year later, it’s no wonder demotion feels like an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Even if the police service wanted to fire these two constables rather than demote them, it’s notoriously difficult to fire a police officer in Ontario. 

Search for yourself, you’ll find dozens of stories of officers committing much more egregious crimes than defrauding an insurance company who are given chance after chance.

In a Globe and Mail editorial in August, 2015, Alok Mukherjee, the former chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, said dismissal is so difficult he wondered how realistic it was to even try.

The long and the short of it is this, there has to be a better way to weed out the minority of bad officers while protecting the vast majority of good ones. The law shouldn’t protect police who flout the very rules they’re sworn to protect.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and Sudbury.com.


Comments

Verified reader

If you would like to apply to become a verified commenter, please fill out this form.




Mark Gentili

About the Author: Mark Gentili

Mark Gentili is the editor of Sudbury.com
Read more