If OPS And Services Board Got Tighter, They’d Need A Room

Published 12/21/2023 · Updated 06/10/2024

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“Matters concerning the police and police oversight board are understandably under a powerful microscope, especially in recent years.”

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen

No they aren’t.

The meetings rarely get covered, the members provide almost no oversight and what few questions are made wouldn’t get the members a passing grade in public-school social studies.

Almost every item on the agenda has “no consultation” on it and the chief’s report is verbal so it can’t be Googled. Plus the obvious thing, community groups have had their access to the board drastically curtailed so much so that those same groups have taken the board to court over the matter saying their Charter rights have been abrogated. The board chairman chooses what groups can make video presentations unlike standing committees who give everyone five minutes access until meetings drag into two or three days if necessary. Speakers must submit their presentations to the board in advance. What kind of garbage is that? That wouldn’t pass muster at a PTA meeting.

As for the city auditor general’s report on the Freedom Convoy, commentators thought it had all the punch of cold oatmeal cereal. You finish reading the convoy audit and you wonder why the city has an AG. Dropping the audit on the Trillium Line procurement only reinforces its incompetence. The public expects more. It’s not getting it from the AG.

Furthermore, if the members of the board got any tighter with the police, they’d have to get a room. Stockholm Syndrome personified.

A Police Service Rotten To The Core: WHOPPER WATCH

And as for chief Eric Stubbs wanting to win back the public trust, just saying it doesn’t do anything. The police are so incompetent that it will take them 1.5 years to get the public into their office in the Rideau Centre. Is someone splitting the atom in there? Just open the damn doors. That just reinforces many terrible images of the police which, unfortunately, are often true. The most obvious? They don’t want to deal with the public.

The current police services board is an affront to free speech, democracy and open, caring and inclusive government. If it did any less, it would be doing nothing.

Meanwhile, the Ottawa Police Service makes a mockery of good law enforcement and has lost the trust of the community. That lack of trust is well deserved. And the police services board and the police are so scared of public scrutiny that it is embarrassing. The OPS and the OPSB resemble nothing more than a tight club that desperately tries to cover up for each other. The police would need fewer officers if they weren’t suspended with pay and watching the soaps at home while collecting a cheque from taxpayers. Or in front of a judge, not in a good way. Or planting evidence.

What did the OPSB have to say about those things? Nothing.

And that’s exactly what the pols at city hall want. No muss, no fuss and no publicity.

Democracy dies in darkness, the Washington Post says on its banner.

That being true, the police and the OPSB are officially dead. Someone take their pulse to see if there is one. Doubtful.

Who do the police services board and the police service serve? The public? No. Themselves.

You wonder why Ottawa has one of the worst police forces in North America? No scrutiny. Who to blame? The noversighters on the OPSB.

Both the police and its so-called oversight body have gone rogue. Unfortunately both are too simple, uncaring, scared and lazy to know better.

Ken Gray

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