Inside the Toronto Police Scandal: Accountability, Oversight & Public Trust

Hi, welcome back to the TC Legal Podcast.

It's been a few months since we've been on here, but with the news coming out of Toronto, we definitely felt it was time to stop in and say hi again.

With me today is Jeremy Newton, a criminal defence lawyer here in Calgary that I've worked with for the majority of my career.

Jeremy was previously a federal prosecutor for 10 years and then decided to make the jump to private practice and opened up a firm with his partner called New Bullock Law.

Can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to make the jump to defence work?

A number of reasons.

I had a private practice before I went to the federal Crown, and there's just something about having seen both sides of it. You kind of appreciate the value of good defence work.

There's more flexibility in terms of your lifestyle, but also you get to feel like you're taking on some of the harder work.

There's something about being isolated as a prosecutor. You're just seeing one side of the file.

You see the human element of the file again. It's nice to have clients feel like you're really looking after people.

You know what it's like. You've made the jump too.

It's just a different way of connecting with people and almost standing up for the little guy a bit more, and maybe a bit more why you got into law to begin with.

I've enjoyed it for that reason.

Yeah, I definitely agree that it's more the reason why I got into law.

I enjoyed my time in the Crown Prosecutor's Office and I felt like there was a lot of value and responsibility in it, but it didn't have the same impact on me personally.

Just being able to feel like I'm helping people move forward — people who are really trusting me to do that for them.

So yeah, I made the jump to the Crown and then lasted much less time than you did, only five years, and zipped back.

I definitely think my experience at the Crown mixed with doing defence work made the news out of Toronto a little bit more shocking.

For the viewers, what we're talking about is the arrest of seven current Toronto police members as well as one retired Toronto police member and a number of civilians who were allegedly involved in an organized crime corruption ring that recently came out.

Jeremy, obviously in advance of this conversation I sent you the article.

What was your first gut instinct when you heard about this?

It just blows you away, doesn't it?

My first gut instinct was that I go back to thinking about, can you imagine what it was like to be Crown in this moment and think, "Oh, 10%, 20% of my files just became over."

Immediately.

These officers are completely dead in the water in terms of witnesses now.

That's right.

Even if they're acquitted, effectively their careers as frontline police officers might well be over.

Their credibility is just shot.

I can't imagine what it would look like to have a defence lawyer have one of these officers on the witness stand.

The Crown will see that well in advance.

That's why a lot of legitimate prosecutions are going to have to end, even if they were just peripherally involved, because of their involvement in this case.

My first instinct was, I can't believe what's going to happen to all these other files.

The second is, we've seen the inside of the justice system for a long time.

It's not so much even bad actors as it is bad actions.

Not every cop that gets in trouble with the courts or gets a misconduct package is a bad cop.

Maybe they made a bad decision.

We've seen it from inside the Crown's office so much.

You know how much this kind of stuff goes on and how big of an impact it can have on everyone.

It was mind-blowing.

How did you feel?

Funny enough, same thing.

I think the first thing that I thought was definitely business things.

I was like, there's about to be a lot of paper being typed up as stay letters in Toronto right now.

Definitely from the Crown perspective, chatting with some of my friends that are still Crowns and being like, "What are you supposed to do?"

There's a saying that says, "We don't build the plane, we just fly it."

Well, these planes are now basically grounded.

They're not going anywhere.

It's something that does lead to a lot of concern about how prosecutions are going to handle it there.

I was talking to another lawyer here at TC Legal, and he was like, "Man, this is straight out of Training Day."

It's just crazy to see the amount of alleged corruption.

That's what they're describing it as, and from everything that we've read, just the level of alleged participation that these officers had in taking information and providing it to known criminals, known drug traffickers, things like that.

Actively obstructing police investigations to protect dispensaries and assist with drug trafficking.

That's Hollywood-level police misconduct, to say the least.

It was kind of shocking to see that here, north of the 49th, and not in New York or Chicago or places Hollywood has really ramped up as being that type of area.

And the arrogance it takes to believe you can get away with that too.

To be an officer standing on maybe the drug squad and saying, "No, you don't look here, you look there."

Or to be doing these database searches with civilians or other members of the justice system knowing that you're being tracked.

Every time you type a name into one of these police databases, they have a record of it.

I don't know if these people were under duress, thought they could get away with it, just didn't care or didn't know.

I have no idea.

But it's mind-blowing.

Definitely arrogance is probably the best word.

I didn't think of that word, but it's a really good way to describe it.

It's probably fair because a lot of the officers who were involved in this were quite senior.

One of the officers was 56 years old and had been with the force for quite some time.

Another officer who was charged had reportedly received recognition for 20 years of good service.

These are officers who know everything's being tracked.

They know every time they put a name in the computer it can come back to them.

It seems like they must have been extremely confident that wasn't going to happen.

Maybe I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist or a pessimist, but it makes me think, how many other people in that detachment or in that service must have been involved for them to have been that confident that it wasn't going to go anywhere?

Then obviously, it did.

It blew up, quite frankly.

From exactly what you said, one of the articles says what really triggered Project South, the probe into how deep the alleged corruption went, was when there was an attack on a correctional officer's home.

They were like, "Where did these people get this person's address from?"

They went to a police database that you normally need authorized use for, ran a search on this person's address and asked, "Why was this constable looking for this?"

It's crazy how, reading everything, it appears the first piece of evidence led to the investigation expanding.

It sounded like it flowed pretty well after that.

Can you imagine being a member of the public in these places too?

We were overwhelmed.

There are seven charged, but you wonder whether there are more people who knew or were letting it happen or turning a blind eye.

It obviously happens in other departments, government agencies and police forces where it may never rise to the level of charges or even being caught.

Can you imagine being a civilian where you're looking at your local police force and saying, "Really, guys?"

You're taking my son away and I'm supposed to trust you that you're going to look after him and that you're above board to begin with?

Or I'm trusting you because I've got this threat hanging over my head and you're going to look after me right now?

I can't imagine that.

Even some of the charges — not even the bigger charges with respect to allegedly giving out information or accepting bribes to provide details — but there are also charges relating to stolen identities and things like that.

If somebody handed in a passport or driver's licence, instead of logging those in evidence and using them for what they were supposed to, some officers are accused of holding onto them and providing them to criminal organizations or known criminals in exchange for bribes or money.

That's a huge problem.

Not only are you worried that the police aren't doing their job, you're worried that the driver's licence you handed in because you got an impaired driving charge, speeding ticket or it was seized for another reason is now potentially being used by somebody else.

The news has been very clear that it's a huge hit to public trust, and I think that might even be an understatement.

It's going to be a really high hill for them to climb back over.

The only reason why the police get to do what they do and have the level of authority they have is because we trust them.

You are the people who can carry guns in public.

You are the people who, if you say stop, we stop.

Most people understand, if someone's speeding, the police will stop them.

I don't react emotionally in this way or make this mistake because I'll get caught.

I can trust that if someone hurts me or my family, the police will look after us.

If I give you my passport, for example, because you have the authority to detain it for a while, I trust you're not going to abuse that.

I trust that you're not going to abuse the fact that I called police to report an issue.

Maybe I'm having a domestic issue.

Maybe my neighbours are dealing drugs or something like that.

I trust you're not going to use that information in a way that might get me hurt.

I trust you.

And if I can't trust my police, what are we doing here?

I did appreciate how, forced or otherwise, the police officers out of Toronto were doing these news conferences.

They are not holding back, at least in my perception.

You have to do that.

That's the only hope.

I still appreciate that it's happening.

They're quite clear that these officers are not who they thought they were and they're openly addressing the allegations.

At least they're owning up.

I was listening to one of the conferences where the chief was basically saying, "I became aware early on there was an investigation going on, and even though I wasn't part of it, I made it very clear that we were going to be cooperating."

I think that's what they have to do at this point.

Everybody who's left behind now has to rebuild a reputation that's been damaged.

It's just been completely tanked.

It's also unfortunate timing.

I don't want to dive too deeply into it because it's a sensitive topic for a host of reasons.

It's unfortunate timing that this comes out when everything in the United States is happening with ICE and federal agents that are struggling with public trust.

There have been protests and other serious incidents.

It's unfortunate that we're dealing with this huge breach of trust at a time when south of the 49th there are already major concerns about agency trust.

But like you said, we always like to think that here in Canada we're somehow removed from that.

That just doesn't happen to us.

We're a different type of person.

People are still people.

It's going to happen.

It's shattering for that reason too.

I will say, and I chatted with you before we started that I was going to bring this up, it is interesting going through this alleged corruption because as defence counsel there are a lot of times we're worried that we're not always getting the whole story.

We're concerned that police maybe aren't providing all the information.

I'll start here and say this: out of all my time with the Crown's office, all my time as defence, I think for the most part an overwhelming majority of police officers, RCMP, CPS, EPS, they're there to do a really good job.

They want to do a good job.

They take it seriously and appreciate the role they have in society.

The majority of this conversation applies to a very small percentage of the force that we're dealing with.

But as defence counsel, on every file I'm always wondering whether or not I received all the information.

Whether somebody's saying something that's maybe not true or a little bit misleading, and how you can go about proving that.

When you look at what you described as the arrogance of some officers thinking they're able to get away with things and nobody's ever going to find out or things can be swept under the rug, it raises concerns.

Again, in my dark little conspiracy mind, I'm like, "They're doing this intentionally."

Just the small percentage though.

I think a lot of that comes down to what they disclose and what we can find that's missing.

There always is something missing, isn't there?

I don't know if you're finding it more and more these days.

It feels like when we get our disclosure — the Crown's case against us, which only comes to them from the police — we don't get it all at first and have to ask for things by name.

Of course I want the third officer on scene's body-worn camera.

He actually talks to my client.

The idea that you have to ask for that and it can take six to eight months for that to come through is mind-blowing.

I get files from clients who tried to handle the file on their own for six months and they say, "You know what? I need a lawyer."

They say, "Here, I've got the whole Crown disclosure. They gave me everything."

It's not everything.

The idea that we almost have to ask for things from the police that they know they need to provide is disappointing.

I get that there are resource issues.

But I have found on many occasions that the last items that come in are usually the most compelling.

They're the items that make or break whether the Crown is even going to think it's worthwhile to go ahead.

That's right.

Or is there a good Charter issue here?

Does what the first officer said really hold water when you view it through the eyes of somebody standing next to them?

I tell my clients all the time, until I can see all of the police disclosure, I'm going to have my initial meeting with you, figure out generally what we're dealing with, and then I want to know what the police have.

I particularly want to know what they're going to get because the Crown has to prove it, and they have to prove it with what the police give them.

That's always the best starting point.

But you're right, sometimes you're waiting four, five or six months to get video.

The one thing I always say to the Crown — because that's who we talk to.

We don't talk to the police and say, "You're not giving this."

We talk to what is effectively an intermediary in the disclosure game.

As a side note, that's something I didn't fully understand as a Crown.

In the first couple years of my defence practice, I was like, "I don't understand why they won't just give this to me. They must have it."

Then, working at the Crown's office, I realized I did not have it.

I was not the one not giving it to defence.

It was a constant battle to try to get things in a timely manner.

Resources are definitely a problem, but at some point there are times I felt it just wasn't a priority.

The amount of times I got the impression from people being like, "Why do they need it? It doesn't matter."

And I'm like, "But it does matter."

One, because they asked for it.

And two, if you don't give it to them, then I cannot help you.

I'm just stuck with a very broken plane, if we go back to the first analogy.

In some instances, the solution that government or judicial decisions have had is to rule that it's not really important.

One of the things that frustrates me in this day and age, where almost everything is video recorded, almost all police vehicles have in-car video, and most police officers increasingly have body-worn cameras, is what happens in immediate roadside suspensions and administrative impaired-driving allegations.

The legislation specifically allows for video evidence not to be provided in some circumstances.

For me, that's a huge problem with the IRS regime in particular because you're not allowed to cross-examine police officers and you're limited in how you can call evidence.

Whatever's in the police report is assumed to be taken under oath, and you can't really impeach it.

You can get your client to contradict it, which gives a he-said-she-said situation.

But there's a section in the legislation that has been renewed where video evidence doesn't necessarily have to be provided.

Even though they may have it because it's policy to make it.

For me, that is almost like a rubber-stamp form of avoiding what actually happened.

Which is ridiculous to me because I would say most of the time the video is probably going to show something pretty close to what the officer said, or somewhere between what my client and the police say.

Nobody's ever 100% perfect.

It's mind-boggling to me that they can simply say it doesn't have to be provided.

It's really disappointing.

You and I know full well the video file's there.

It's on the officer's desk.

They just have to click upload, walk away, get a cup of coffee, and by the time they come back it's uploaded.

We've seen it.

I'm sure you've seen IRS files where some good RCMP officer says, "Sure, I'll upload it. I have it."

We know it's there.

But how many files have we had where it's just, "This officer says this is exactly how it happened. Take my word for it."

And they don't upload it.

Which is frustrating because at the top of their notes it'll say the body-worn camera unit was a certain number.

So they have it.

They start it in case there are criminal charges because obviously that legislation doesn't apply to a criminal investigation in the same way.

In a criminal investigation they're going to have to hand over that video.

At the time they pull someone over, they don't know if it's going to be criminal or administrative.

So most of the time that video is there.

They've just been given legislative permission not to give it to us in certain circumstances.

And how many times have you seen on a criminal file where there's a difference between what the officer perceives and writes down and what's actually on the video?

Huge.

They're humans.

It happens all the time.

Our government is really letting us down because they love this expedient impaired-driving regime.

Charge them, seven days to appeal, if not you're done.

Even if you appeal, there are significant hurdles.

And the only reason they get away with it is because it's not criminal charges.

But really, I feel like our courts and government are letting us down by authorizing this.

I was talking to another lawyer in my office earlier.

She was saying that in some parts of Canada maybe you think, "Okay, driving a vehicle, we say it's a privilege."

But in Alberta, is it really?

I think it's higher than that.

It's not a right, but it sure is a necessity.

If you live in rural Alberta, you can't not have a driver's licence.

Unless you live and work in downtown Calgary or Edmonton, you pretty much need a driver's licence to function in this province.

And yet we're so quick to take them away with this IRS regime without what we consider sufficient due process.

It's very frustrating.

With this disclosure, they're basically saying, "We know it exists. We're just going to cover our eyes. Our notes are enough."

Then a decision can be made based on that.

It's a frustrating process because obviously there was debate and discussion about whether this was going to be the case and why this was the best course of action.

The only possible answer is efficiency because there's never a situation where having the video is not a better source of evidence for what happened.

It's a video.

The only possible reason is efficiency.

We don't want to risk this side-railing things or making things go differently than expected.

It's an efficiency argument.

Efficiency towards convictions.

Yeah.

Not just an efficient process.

Nobody really cares about not having to watch a 30-minute video.

You want convictions.

In reality, you're not necessarily playing that whole video in front of somebody either.

The efficiency argument has a lot of flaws to it.

In comparison to what's going on in Toronto, I think the other difficulty is it can send a message to police that we're just not worried about it.

You don't have to worry about it.

Whatever you say, we're going to accept.

They can write it in their notes and then we're stuck with it.

We'll never know any different.

That's right.

All the best cops I know love body-worn cameras.

They love it.

Their complaints go down.

The ones that do good work, their files don't go to trial because it's there for everyone to see.

The officers worried about video getting disclosed may be officers who are flying by the seat of their pants, or agencies that aren't training officers well enough.

Or files where things went sideways or mistakes were made, which is fine.

Then a Crown reviews it and decides that it shouldn't go forward, and that's the appropriate remedy as opposed to trying to sweep it under the rug.

That's what it feels like to me, again with my little conspiracy mind.

But you've seen both sides, so I think you can appreciate that there's probably something to that.

Yeah.

Again, going back to say most cops that I've dealt with have been very professional.

They're there for a reason and should have that job 100%.

Then there are some officers, luckily I've not had to deal with very many of them, who are just like, "I don't think you need that. It doesn't matter. They're guilty anyways. Why give them an opening?"

I've had an officer say something like that to me before.

"If I give that to you, defence is going to make a big deal of it."

And I'm like, "Well, then that's probably something we should know about. We should be talking about this right now."

It goes back to what you described as arrogance.

They're just like, "We've taken care of it. Just trust us. It'll be fine."

Having that behaviour, and then having what we have in Toronto where officers are accused of accepting bribes and actively engaging with known criminals to assist them, is where public trust takes a real hit.

As defence counsel, we're immediately taken aback at the size of it, but not necessarily taken aback by the concept that misconduct can happen.

I think it underlies the majority of every time you look at a case.

You're looking at it with the assumption that probably something can be dug up somewhere.

That's why most defence lawyers keep track of officer misconduct.

We see an officer in the news, know an officer was involved in something on another case, or there's a reported decision.

We keep track of it because those officers will come up again and again.

That's part of our job too.

To make sure that bad actors, or even decent officers who made a mistake, have that information see the light of day if that mistake could impact our client's rights in their own case.

It could also impact credibility and reliability.

As defence counsel, when you are assessing your client's case, it's something you've got to be alert to across the board because you don't want to miss out on a readily available defence if it could have been avoided.

In your time with federal prosecutions — because federal prosecution does mostly drugs and guns and a lot of serious stuff — did you ever have anything, obviously not on this magnitude or we would have heard about it, but any similar behaviour to what we're seeing out of the Toronto situation?

Yeah, not to this level.

When I was prosecuting in areas outside Calgary about 10 years ago, we had one officer who got in trouble for effectively breaking into a residence to steal evidence.

It was in the news.

Every file with that officer on it was just done.

That was it.

Anything they touched, that officer had no credibility whatsoever.

You couldn't possibly put that witness on the stand and hope for anything resembling a fair trial for the accused or advance a conviction.

A lot of good police work went out the window.

A lot of people who had made really big mistakes didn't get prosecuted.

Someone made a serious mistake and the ripple effects went on for years.

I never experienced something quite like what we saw in Toronto.

But you hear about it from other prosecuting agencies and other police agencies.

Personally, that was my biggest exposure to something like that.

The situation you're describing here in Alberta — how did it come to light?

Was there just a mistake on a file that was flagged, or was it some manner of investigation?

No, there was definitely an investigation.

I can't remember what caused it to exist.

It happened in a smaller town, so I don't think it was that difficult to figure out and find more information once people started digging.

I don't think it was a mistake.

It was a pretty brazen act.

Once they got caught, it all kind of fell apart.

One of the things I don't think we touched on before with Toronto is that the biggest part seemed to be accessing otherwise fairly innocuous information.

It's just who it was allegedly provided to.

It was allegedly provided to people to coordinate shootings, coordinate different sorts of criminal activities, or stake out people's houses and things like that.

Going back to the first question about how it hit me, putting aside comparisons to a TV show and the news describing it in a very serious manner, which they definitely should, the first time I thought about it without my lawyer hat, I was like, "Man, that's why some people don't want to pull over."

That's why people have little placards that say, "Show me a warrant."

You don't want to believe these situations exist, but when you see allegations that close to home, you're like, "That's not good."

Odds are you will never encounter a police officer in your life who is that kind of person.

You probably won't.

But it will be in your head.

You just never know, right?

You never know.

Here we are talking about whether we pull over for police.

This is corruption stuff.

It's a different level of it.

But I can't even imagine being a person of colour having to already wonder, "Am I safe in this situation?"

That's a totally different ball of wax.

Now we're seeing a whole different angle and a reason why maybe somebody doesn't trust a police officer.

It's really unfortunate because, like you said, the overwhelming majority are good people who would never do this.

I've been doing this for 13 years, and I would say for the majority of police officers that I deal with: do they make mistakes?

Sure.

Are they professional about it?

Do they acknowledge it?

Do we move on?

Absolutely.

Then when you have police blow up in the media like they are right now, you wonder if you're ever going to run into someone like that.

Even my neighbour once said that if somebody tried to pull her over — she lives out on a road where you have to go down the highway sometimes — if you get pulled over on the highway, there's nobody around.

She said, "I'm not pulling over for the police. I would drive into town and pull over at No Frills or Safeway."

I said to her, "That's flight from the police. You shouldn't do that. As your unofficial lawyer, you should probably pull over."

And she was like, "I'm not doing that."

She's never had a real negative interaction with the police either.

But she's like, "It's scary because lots of them are men, they have guns and there's nobody out there."

"I know that there are videos and I know that there should be videos."

She's just a random member of the public who's never even been involved with police, and she's like, "How do I know they're going to give them the video?"

That's right.

It's weird to be in this job and have a lot of respect for everything police do, even though we're on opposite sides, and then interact with members of the public and watch press conferences about this and see people who don't have that opinion of police even though they've never dealt with them.

Then you wonder if there's an ongoing problem with general members of the public who've never had a specific personal reason to feel that way, but just have that doubt about whether or not they can trust them.

I'm sure you've had clients say that to you.

I've had clients say that for sure.

Clients who might have no reason otherwise to doubt it.

But you just get pinged with all these things in the news, on the radio and on your phone.

Just these little bits of doubt.

Or maybe they already have a mind that goes to a place of lacking trust.

They don't trust the government.

But these things don't help.

All of a sudden these clients feel like, "I'm not pulling over for this cop."

Our Court of Appeal has said that fleeing from police can result in serious consequences.

It's a wide gulf.

Then we have to clean up that mess.

It's really unfortunate because I think defence lawyers — part of our job is to find issues with the way police conducted their investigation.

But deep down, we still want good police officers as members of our community.

We're still members of the community.

We still want police officers to treat our clients fairly, to find out when somebody is committing a crime and to make sure that the community is safe.

We still want that.

And to do it in a manner that means there are going to be consequences for those people.

Yeah, for sure.

Of course.

We all want that too.

But you've talked to clients, I'm sure, who make you think, "I really hope you don't get pulled over anytime soon because you're going to get in a lot of trouble for beliefs that I don't want to say are unreasonable, but are rarely founded."

I think they're rarely founded.

But the concern is real.

The noise just keeps getting louder, which is unfortunate.

Well, Jeremy, thanks for coming in to chat with me about this.

I think we can both agree that we don't envy Toronto police having to rebound from this particular situation.

I appreciate you coming in to chat about it on such a short turnaround, and hopefully we'll have you back on another matter.

Sounds good.

Thanks so much for watching.