‘Not a few bad apples’: Ottawa police deputy chief says service’s culture has permitted inappropriate behaviour

Deputy Ottawa Police Chief Trish Ferguson is seen in this undated file photo. (CTV News)

The Ottawa Police Service’s deputy chief says issues of sexual misconduct and inappropriate actions within the organization are not due to “a few bad actors” but instead to a culture that has been permissive of the behaviour.

This week, CTV News Ottawa obtained a video in which Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs addressed a pattern of inappropriate activity within the force, telling officers they had a choice to either “change your behaviour or quit.”

Speaking on Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron on Wednesday, Dep. Chief Trish Ferguson said the organization is reckoning with a systemic issue.

“It is not a few bad apples,” Ferguson said. “It is a culture that has allowed this, permitted people to do things and others not speaking up.”

Ferguson said policing culture can be very positive and promotes camaraderie, but can also be “ripe for this type of behaviour.”

“There’s some darker sides to our culture as well that I think are the result of some of the work that we do, that I think has come to a head in a number of cases here not just with the Ottawa Police Service — this is happening in services across Ontario and across the country,” she said.

In April, an Ottawa police officer was charged with assault and criminal harassment in connection with an intimate partner violence incident, while another officer received an 18-month demotion for using police databases to search for information on his ex-partners and other members of the public.

The Ottawa Police Services Board also held an in-camera meeting in May to discuss “the seriousness of recent reports involving gender-based misconduct, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and harm connected to members of the Ottawa Police Service.”

Ferguson said she was unable to say how many cases of misconduct or harassment the police force has seen.

“What I can tell you is there’s enough that it’s a problem, clearly,” Ferguson said. “It’s enough that, you know, every week we are hearing about an update on a file or a new file.”

In his video address, Stubbs quoted part of a letter from a group of women within the service, saying there was a long-standing and ongoing issue within the culture in which sexual misconduct was unaddressed or accepted.

Ferguson says the misconduct is an embarrassment to the police force.

“I think in a bit of like a ‘Me Too’ moment,” she said. “We’ve got more women in these organizations, and I think just an intolerance in general from the people who go out there every day and do a great job to put up with this sort of embarrassment.”

‘They need to be protected’

The service has gone through multiple “lengthy, costly” investigations to handle allegations with inappropriate behaviour, a process that Ferguson described as divisive.

“They pit people against each other, people take sides. Many people are brought in for interviews to try and corroborate or alleviate the allegations. And it’s just not a great system for restoration and for healing and for our members to then be able to return to work.”

According to Ferguson, the service’s goal is to give officers the tools to intervene and put a stop to bad behaviour before things escalate to the point of an investigation. Ferguson says the service will also be hearing from people who have been through their reporting and adjudication processes.

“Our processes should not be more harmful than the incidents that brought them to the door to complain. When people report, they need to be protected and they need to be believed,” she said.

Ferguson says the service is well equipped to deal with cases where there is clear criminal behaviour or misconduct, as they are handled through criminal court or the Community Safety and Policing Act, provincial legislation that governs policing.

“But it’s the ones where it’s toxic, it’s low level, it is a persistent issue in, let’s say, a unit or somebody’s behaviour — those are the ones when we start to hear from people in those units to say, ‘this has been going on for a while and I’m finally feeling like somebody’s going to listen to my story and somebody is going to take this seriously,’” Ferguson said.

The adjudication process can pose challenges. Ferguson says it is outside the organization’s and noted there were three recent cases where the police service asked for officers to be dismissed due to their behaviours, but adjudicators opted instead to hand them a demotion.

“We welcome having an outside agency. There’s the new police civilian sort of oversight, OPAAC, that will be taking a look at these cases and actually looking at them on the merits of the case and not about through a police culture lens,” she said.

“We have a lot of retired members who are doing those hearings, and we welcome some fresh new eyes on these scenarios because we want to get these people out of our services.”

‘We are going to make a change’

While Studds’s video address was delivered in May, Ferguson said discussions around the issues have been ongoing for a significant amount of Chief Stubbs’s three-and-a-half-year-tenure.

“I just want to say, in terms of people who are saying, well, why now, what’s different? We’re not asking for people to simply trust the system. We have to show that we are going to make change,” she said.

Ferguson said it is up to the leadership to the Ottawa Police Service’s high-ranking members to bring about the change, but all officers will have a part to play.

“It’s definitely it’s a leadership issue. That’s where it has to start. And we need to set the tone, I think, which is what the chief’s video firmly did last month,” Ferguson said.

“We sign up to do this job to protect the vulnerable, to advocate for those who can’t for themselves, and yet we can’t do it within our own walls. That’s where we are going to be placing the blame on the perpetrators of this, and we are going to place responsibility on every one of our staff members to step up and call it out when they see it.”

Ferguson said the police force has assembled a table of senior leaders to propose simple solutions to the issue, and the force is also working toward a goal of having 30 per cent of sworn members in the force be women, something Stubbs outlined in his video address.

“When they’re part of the demographic and making up 30 per cent of that, they are, if you will, they become part of the furniture,” Ferguson said. “They have an influence and they move things in the right way. They’re no longer an anomaly.”

With files from Ted Raymond.

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