Volume 1, Issue 1 (July 2026)

We've seen skyrocketing costs for policing in Ottawa with little to no oversight. We've witnessed cops abuse protesters' rights with little accountability. We've watched OPSB shield itself from the public. We've started COPOUT 613!

COPOUT 613 (Community Oversight of Police Operations to Uphold Transparency) is an Ottawa-based collective dedicated to monitoring and conducting research into policing in Ottawa, focusing on the lack of transparency and accountability from the Ottawa Police Service (OPS), Ottawa Police Service Board (OPSB), and various provincial "oversight" bodies.

In this issue:

1. Oversight* highlights

   Our monthly review of OPSB's "oversight" of OPS

2. In focus

   Sexual misconduct at OPS

3. Bad apples or rotten barrel... You be the judge!

   Our monthly round-up of cops in the news

4. This and that

1. What we're reading

2. Did you know?

3. Upcoming OPSB meetings

4. Other announcements

5. Dog and pony show

   Our monthly antidote to cops being cops!

The noun "oversight" has two very different and opposite meanings. Which does OPSB do?

1. "watchful and responsible care"
2. "an inadvertent omission or error"

Last month's meetings

June 22: Meeting of the full board

This was the first in-person meeting since 2022. Since this meeting occurred two full months after the previous one, the agenda was long: the agenda package runs to over 700 pages. As usual, the package was made public only a week before the meeting. How many members of the public have time to study 700 pages of documents in a week?

The focus of the meeting was sexual misconduct at OPS. (See the In Focus segment below for more information on this topic.) The report on use of force was also presented. Once again, OPS used force disproportionately against Black and Middle Eastern people.

OPSB also approved the body-worn camera contract and the use of facial recognition.

Reports presented to OPSB

OPS declares body-worn camera pilot a success

On June 22, 2026, OPSB provided the chief of police with the authority to enter a contract with American company Axon to purchase AI-enabled body-worn cameras for $27.2 million between June 2026 and May 2031.

OPS had conducted a pilot with 30 body-worn cameras in 2025. At the March 25, 2026 meeting of the OPSB Governance Committee, OPS presented their report on the pilot. They declared it a success, despite the poor-quality data collected by the pilot.

At the Governance Committee in March and the full Board meeting in April, OPSB had questions for OPS about the contract, the privacy impact assessment, storage of data, and acceptance of AI reports by courts. Despite these questions and lack of detail in OPS' responses, the contract was approved in June.

COPOUT 613 will be continuing to monitor the use of body-worn cameras by OPS. We have many questions about the financial implications, especially regarding what is and is not covered (data storage, telecommunications, etc.) by the figures provided, about what policies OPSB is planning to develop around camera usage, and about whether there will be any independent oversight.

City of Ottawa auditor finds gaps in OPS project governance

On May 2, 2026, the OPSB Audit and Finance Committee met to discuss the audit of project management at OPS, conducted by the City of Ottawa Office of the Auditor General.

As reported by CBC, the auditor general expressed concern about several areas of governance within OPS, two of which she highlighted as being of critical concern:

A formalized and consistent project intake process to properly prioritize and deploy projects is not in place. AND

A formalized budget is not consistently established for strategic projects, impacting the accountability of project teams to deliver projects in a cost-effective manner.

One example of the lack of a defined budget was the District Revitalization Project. This project had an initial budget of $600,000. The current budget is $2.2 million, although the auditors could find no documentation to support the increase. The spending as of January 2026 is $5.2 million dollars. Spending on the project is therefore nearly 800% over the initial approved budget!

OPS have accepted all the auditor's recommendations and say they are on their way to making the necessary changes. Chief Stubbs did have to include the usual statement that they have a lack of resources to explain some of the noted shortcomings.

The Board's proposed solution (mainly from member Curry) is to send the audit to the Solicitor General, possibly with a letter from the Board, to ask the Solicitor General to consider providing funding for governance work.

She also asked about project management training for OPS and if this was funded.

As usual, OPSB's solution to poor project governance at OPS is to provide training (this is often the proposed solution to deficiencies at OPS) and more funding (this time provided by another level of government).

Chief Stubbs stated that OPS are not planning to start many new projects but that any new ones would be managed based on the recommendations in the audit. He did, however, mention the work that they've started on the new training facility. That will be another large project. OPS submitted a 6-page document to OPSB in April requesting a budget of $233 million. Even this Board couldn't accept a request of that amount with little documentation. The Board sent it back asking for more details. COPOUT 613 will be closely following this request.

In summary, the auditor found issues with governance and project management at OPS. OPS claim that they will resolve these issues in the near future. The members of OPSB had many questions of OPS but seemed to accept superficial answers to them. They did say, however, that they will be discussing project governance further.

Semi-annual report shows low satisfaction with and trust in OPS

On July 28, 2025, OPSB approved the 2024-2027 Strategic Plan. (Confusingly, OPSB sometimes refers to the same document as a "strategic plan" and a "strategic direction" on the same page.)

OPSB states that the plan was developed with input from residents, community partners, and OPS members.

OPS has launched 30 projects that are designed to meet the objectives listed in the strategic plan. At the April 27, 2026 OPSB meeting, OPS presented their 52-page report on the progress of these initiatives.

Some takeaways from the report:

• Satisfaction with police has decreased to 57%, well below the objective of 80%. Public trust is at 48%.
• The proportion of traffic stops involving Black, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and other racialized groups is at 59%, far above the 33% of the population that these groups represent. This number is trending upwards despite being "monitored" by OPS and OPSB. The same can be said for the proportion of use of force involving racialized groups (57%).
• Response times have not met targets, especially for the lower-priority calls (P2-P4).
• The mounted unit is slated to have two operational teams in June 2026. As of early July, the mounted unit seems to be active. The budget and mandate of the mounted unit have not been made public. COPOUT 613 has requested this information from OPS but has not yet received it.
• The police helicopter is not scheduled to be operational this year, mainly due to dependencies with the Ontario Provincial Police. The helicopter is currently being flown over the city on a near-daily basis for testing.
• A Use of Force Community Review Panel has been constituted and is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2026. COPOUT 613 will be watching this panel once it becomes operational.
• Overtime is 19% above target.

For this issue, COPOUT 613 has not been able to analyze these initiatives in detail. In future issues, we will be looking at the initiatives and how OPS is measuring their progress.

This report contains many references to staffing pressures and a lack of resources. It's likely that OPS will use the fact that they have not been able to reach their objectives on some of these initiatives as a reason for another large budget increase.

Since receiving its base operating budget approval of $344 million in 2022, OPS has received a total of $117 million in increases via various city financial structures. That's an additional 33% over the 2022 operating budget. COPOUT 613 will have much more to say on this in the coming months!

In the weeks preceding the June 22, 2026 OPSB meeting, a string of media stories about sexual misconduct at OPS, including unauthorized use of police databases, allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment made by college students, and an allegation of sexual assault against Ottawa police union president Matthew Cox, were published. The misconduct even made news in the United Kingdom. Chief Stubbs released a video telling OPS members that they either have to change their behaviour or quit.

At the meeting, several women's and survivor's groups made powerful presentations about how the allegations of sexual misconduct by OPS officers affect investigations of sexual violence and the eroded trust in the service.

Several Board members thanked the presenters for their courage in speaking up and highlighted the importance of the issue. At one point, member Donaldson pointed out that there were 11 OPS superintendents in attendance because of the importance of the issue. It's interesting to note that despite the great importance of this issue, one member of the Board left the meeting minutes before the presentation began.

After the buildup of media reports, public delegations, and the Chief and Board expressing their concerns about sexual misconduct in the force, Deputy Chief Trish Ferguson gave a presentation titled “Rebuilding Trust,” outlining OPS' plan to deal with the issue. This presentation describes a new initiative called THRIVE (Toward Healing Respect Integrity Values and Ethics [sic]) that has been created to change workplace culture and deal with sexual misconduct and harassment in the workplace.

She stated that there have been three separate initiatives that had no impact on workplace culture but provided learning. Deputy Chief Ferguson stated that “harm cannot be explained away by a few bad actors” and admitted that the problem is systemic.

It's not clear to COPOUT 613 how this initiative will be successful when previous ones have failed. Deputy Chief Ferguson claims that the success of this initiative will be based on outcomes, not process, and that the culture will be measured by surveys on member experience.

A few things stood out to us after hearing the presentation: This initiative is targeted solely at sexual misconduct within the OPS. Nothing is being done to handle the rash of allegations of sexual misconduct by OPS officers against the public. When asked about this by Vice-Chair Carr, Ferguson stated that by improving their internal behaviour, they will also develop a more respectful relationship with the public.

Ferguson also noted that OPS is aiming to increase the proportion of female officers to 30%, up from the current 25%. It's not clear to us how the additional 5% of female officers will change workplace culture.

Ferguson also seemed to believe that new recruits are less likely to commit sexual misconduct because of changes to the broader culture that make the behaviour less socially acceptable. In response to a question from member Henschel, Deputy Chief Bell said that they are reviewing and adapting recruitment to try to ensure new hires will reflect the new culture.

As seems to be the norm at OPSB meetings, although several members asked relevant questions about OPS' plans to deal with their sexual misconduct problem, the answers from the service were vague and superficial but did not get any push back from the Board. On the contrary, the Chair went out of his way to thank OPS for all their hard work on the issue. Member Henschel also wanted OPS to come back to the board if they need more resources to deal with issue.

At the end of the presentation, Chief Stubbs said that OPS will not be providing any more media reports on the issue as they need time and space to work on this, since culture change takes time.

In short, after years of audits and reports, and millions of dollars spent on initiatives that evidently didn't work, OPS will now start a new initiative that will resolve their workplace culture issues once and for all. How do we know it will work? Because they said so. But don't ask them about it for some time because the work requires time and space.

OPS will be reporting on progress to the Board. Let's hope that the members find some tougher questions for the service and continue to press on how to deal with misconduct towards the public. COPOUT 613 will be watching.

As the articles about the Toronto Police Service and others in the Bad apples segment below indicate, sexual misconduct is not just an OPS issue.

If you're concerned about police sexual misconduct, CPEP (Criminalization and Punishment Education Project) is holding a rally/BBQ at 3:00 pm on July 27, 2026 at City Hall, immediately before the 4:00 pm OPSB meeting.

This is a recurring segment that acts as a round-up of police misdeeds, by everyone from chiefs of police to everyday cops on the beat, covering Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the rest of the world.

Whenever police misconduct comes to light, we hear that the cops responsible are just "a few bad apples." No one ever seems to remember the full saying: "A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel." If you keep finding bad apples in your barrel, maybe you should throw it out!

Ottawa

May 2026

Ontario SIU finds ‘evidence of misconduct’ after Ottawa man’s body not found until hours after crash — The Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which looks into “serious injury, death, the discharge of a firearm at a person or an allegation of sexual assault” by cops in Ontario, found no reason for two OPS officers to be investigated after a single vehicle roll-over on a rural Ottawa road. Cops arrived at the scene and didn't see a body in the snowbank, so they left. The body was found the next morning.

April 2026

A driver ran a red light and hit this cyclist. It wasn’t enough for police to show up — Cops didn't come to a cyclist hit by a car running a red light. The cyclist has requested his OPS tax dollars back. More of us should be demanding our OPS tax dollars back.

February 2026

Ottawa police are now targeting the poor in the poorest area of town — An op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen criticizing OPS' Project Pantry, which targets shoplifting by some of the poorest people in our community at a grocery store in downtown Ottawa.

Ontario

June 2026

Toronto police officer charged with sexual offences involving girl, SIU say — The SIU says it has reasonable grounds to believe Const. Parsa Hazeri committed sexual offences against a girl under the age of 16 in Toronto between September and December 2025.

May 2026

Three Toronto police officers arrested over sexual assault in Barcelona — Even though it took place in Barcelona, Spain, it involved three off-duty TPS cops. They've been charged with sexual assault. One has also been charged with assaulting an officer. One report claims that the cops tried to flash their badges to the cops in Spain, hoping that would get them off the hook. While these allegations haven't yet been proved in court, if they're true, we wonder what these three get up to in Toronto when they're wearing the TPS badge?

April 2026

When Police Kill, Civilian Voices are Sidelined in News Reporting — An excellent analysis of how the police and media refer to victims of police killings. The media often parrot the police news release and don't get the victim's or other witnesses' perspectives.

March 2026

Expert, former SIU director question findings in OPP investigation into Umar Zameer trial — On July 1, 2021, a TPS officer was killed after being struck by a car in a parking garage. The driver, Umar Zameer, was charged with murder, but was later found not guilty at trial. The defence argued that Zameer and his family believed they were being carjacked when three plain-clothed TPS officers approached the vehicle, and that Zameer had inadvertently hit the officer, without seeing him, while trying to flee.

After the trial, the judge stated that she believed there had been collusion by the other TPS officers on the scene to coordinate their stories. True to form, TPS called in the Ontario Provincial Police to do a “third-party investigation”. The OPP “investigation” cleared the three TPS officers and more or less made the assertion that the judge, the TPS crime reconstruction experts, the defence experts, and everyone else who had suspicions about the three cops' story were wrong.

February 2026

‘Militantly illegal police conduct’: Conviction shatters years of protection for Thunder Bay police sergeant — Guilty ruling involving a Thunder Bay cop and a wide array of misdeeds of the Thunder Bay Police Service, including cover-ups by the TBPS chief.

Canada

June 2026

Edmonton police chief visited illegal West Bank settlements during Israel trip — EPS chief Warren Driechel's February 2026 trip to Israel, funded by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, included visits to the illegal West Bank settlements Beit Horon and Qasr al-Yahud. The delegation that he was part of met with members of the Yamas Ayosh - Judea & Samaria Unit, a police unit operating in the occupied West Bank under the command of the Israeli military that had engaged in what the UN human rights chief called an “apparent summary execution" of two unarmed Palestinians just months before the trip.

May 2026

Firing Victoria’s School Board Was an Abuse of Power — An opinion piece in The Tyee explains how the BC Minister of Education and the Deputy Chief of the Victoria Police Service colluded to get school board trustees fired for opposing a program that put cops in schools.

April 2026

More from EPS: Lawyers Group Wants a Criminal Probe of Edmonton’s Top Cop — EPS chief Driechel tried to strong-arm the province’s Crown Prosecution Service to repeal a plea agreement in a high-profile case.

Still more from EPS! Edmonton police emails, documents provide new information on Canada-first AI facial recognition bodycam pilot — EPS officers are reversing the use of body-worn cameras (BWC) to surveil the population. We're told that BWC are there to help preserve evidence of police interactions with the public. Now we find that cops are turning the cameras around to surveil us!

International

June 2026

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People — Many police departments across the US use automated licence-plate reader cameras provided by the company Flock. The Flock system allows officers to search for a licence plate number and find every time the car passed a camera. In multiple jurisdictions, officers have been suspended, fired, or criminally charged for using the system to stalk current, former, or prospective romantic partners, in some cases looking up their licence plates or those of their family members hundreds of times in the span of a few months.

May 2026

‘Hand to God’: Florida traffic stop goes viral for all the wrong reasons — A traffic stop in Florida is drawing millions of views online after a sheriff’s deputy repeatedly accused a woman of holding a cellphone with her right hand – a hand she does not have. He made her swear “hand to God” that she wasn't holding the phone. She raised her arm that did not contain a hand and said “hand to God”. Priceless!

February 2026

An ‘impossible’ situation or ‘unhinged’ police? Inside the chaos at Sydney’s anti-Herzog protest — When Israeli president Isaac Herzog visited Australia in February, the New South Wales police attacked protesters in Sydney, as documented in the timeline and videos in this article.

What we're reading

Proof: a Novel, by Beverley McLachlin (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2024)

Since it's summer we're reading something on the lighter side. Proof is a somewhat predictable, but entertaining mystery novel. It's the second novel in the series written by former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin. It's interesting that the main character in the novels, who is a criminal defence lawyer, has a healthy distrust of the police. Does Beverley McLachlin share this distrust? If so, what has she seen in her years in the legal system to foster it?

Did you know?

Upcoming OPSB meetings

• July 14, 2026, 10:00 am: OPSB Human Resources Committee meeting (Zoom)

• July 27, 2026, 4:00 pm: Full OPSB meeting

  (Note: this meeting is currently listed on the OPSB website as "on Zoom", but it's not yet clear whether it will occur online or in-person at City Hall.)

• July 29, 2026, 1:00 pm: OPSB Policy and Governance Committee meeting (Zoom)
• August 7, 2026, 10:00 am: OPSB Finance and Audit Committee meeting (Zoom)

Other announcements

• July 27, 2026, 3:00 pm: CPEP (Criminalization and Punishment Education Project) is holding a rally/BBQ at City Hall, immediately before the 4:00 pm OPSB meeting

Dog and pony show

When pitching the OPS mounted unit in November 2024, Chief Stubbs claimed that "[o]ne horse can equate to 10 to 12 officers." In light of this equivalence, we at COPOUT 613 assume that OPSB will be replacing the 1,600 OPS officers with 134-160 horses.

This recurring segment will explore other non-human animals that could replace cops.

Some baseball teams use dogs to retrieve bats. Now that is the kind of K-9 unit we can get behind!