The Star’s view:
Saunders deserves credit,
Chief Mark Saunders acknowledged an erosion of trust in Toronto police after four officers were arrested on Thursday and charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. Coming in the same week that saw one constable found guilty of attempted murder and another charged after 14 rounds were fired into a motionless car, public confidence in Canada’s largest municipal police force has been understandably shaken.
But it would have been considerably worse over the long run had Saunders done nothing after a Superior Court judge ruled last fall that police had planted heroin in a man’s car and “obviously colluded” in their testimony in court.
Rather than leaving that finding to fester without imposing any discipline at all, the Toronto Police Service put its internal investigators to work with the Crown attorney’s office. Their four-month probe resulted in nine charges of obstruction and eight charges of perjury against veteran officers who together have served more than 50 years on the force.
To his credit, Saunders hasn’t stopped there. He has assembled a team of professional standards investigators to examine previous cases involving these four officers in order to check for possible past abuses.
“We will leave no stone unturned,” Saunders said on Thursday. “The public can rest assured that we will not tolerate any bad behaviour of any kind.” That’s a message Toronto needed to hear. An award-winning 2012 Star investigation found that police officers were seldom disciplined after being caught giving false or misleading testimony. Reporters David Bruser and Jesse McLean exposed more than 100 cases of police dishonesty in courts across Canada. All too often there was little consequence for the officers involved.
The legal process ended up injured in two ways: Judges confronted by illegal searches and fraudulent testimony from police had little choice but to set criminal offenders free. That undermined public safety. Furthermore, unjustified searches and officers’ lies on the witness stand sapped people’s trust in those whose job is to serve and protect.
That’s why it was important for charges to be laid after a judge ruled that Toronto police had planted heroin in a man’s car. The four officers in question must be considered innocent until proven guilty, but they deserve to be held accountable in a court of law given the egregious nature of their alleged offences.
Charges stem from a ruling by Justice Edward Morganin September, when he refused to allow seized heroin to be used as evidence and stayed drug charges against defendant Nguyen Son Tran.
Tran was stopped by police on Jan. 13, 2014, supposedly for running a red light. Officers claimed they found a pile of loose heroin on his dashboard, prompting a search that yielded another11 grams of heroin hidden behind the car’s steering column.
In court, however, all four officers presented different versions of what happened and much of what they said didn’t stand to reason. “There is too much falsehood, and too many unexplained and otherwise unexplainable elements in the police testimony,” wrote Morgan. “I conclude from all this that the loose heroin was placed on the console of the Toyota by the police after their search.”
In light of that clear and troubling ruling, it would have been irresponsible not to launch an internal investigation.
Saunders wasn’t even Toronto’s police chief when this traffic stop happened, nor when Const. James Forcillo shot17-year-old Sammy Yatim on a streetcar in 2013. But a jury found Forcillo guilty of attempted murder on Monday. And Const. Tash Baiati was charged on Wednesday under the Police Services Act after 14 bullets were fired into the engine block of a stopped car in the Distillery District in September.
With all that going on in the past few days, Saunders described this as an “anomaly week.” It has, indeed, been a period of grim headlines for the Toronto Police Service. But Saunders can take some comfort in knowing that his effort to root out internal wrongdoing helps restore public confidence in the department he heads. And there will be better weeks to come.
Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders has helped restore public confidence in Canada’s largest municipal police force