The Decibel - How police corruption allegations erode trust in justice system

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

This week, Ontario’s Inspector-General announced it is launching a provincewide review of corruption among police services in the wake of the arrests of seven Toronto police officers and a retired constable. The allegations – including corruption, leaking of information to organized crime members, accepting bribes and drug trafficking – have rocked civic institutions and are proving to be a threat to public trust in policing.Mike Hager, reporter for The Globe, details the allegations against the officers and why cases of police corruption are difficult to investigate. Later, The Globe’s justice reporter David Ebner joins the show to explain why the investigation of the accused officers may put other criminal trials in the justice system at risk.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, this is a deeply disappointing and sad day for policing. This investigation also underscores the insidious corrosive nature of organized crime. Late last week, York Regional Police Chief Jim McSween made an explosive announcement. Seven Toronto Police Services officers and one retired constable had been arrested in one of the largest investigations into police corruption in Canadian history, dubbed Project South. To the people watching this at home, I know you may feel shaken,

confused, or angry about this news. Understand that we are resolute in our commitment to identifying, apprehending, and prosecuting everyone responsible for these reprehensible crimes. Three Peel Regional Police Officers have also been suspended. This all started in June, when York Regional Police uncovered an alleged murder plot against a corrections officer at a Toronto jail.

They came across this plot and they were watching these people kind of surveil the home. Mike Hager is a staff reporter for the Globe. And at night, they had a dramatic takedown as these hit men allegedly arrived to kill this officer. You know, there was a crash of their car into a police cruiser in the driveway. It was something out of a Hollywood movie. York Regional Police found information connecting the corrections officer to a police constable who allegedly accessed private information from police databases and passed it on to criminal networks. Now they allege that this one constable kind of recruited others into this web of criminal activity

from trafficking of illicit drugs to stealing things allegedly from the police facility, driver's licenses, passports, health cards, and then pass. passing along prized information to organize crime networks. These arrests have wide-reaching implications on policing in Canada. And on Monday, Ontario's Inspector General of Policing announced a province-wide review of how police detect and respond to corruption. Today, Mike is here to talk about what these officers are accused of and why these cases are so hard to investigate.

And then the Globe's justice reporter, David Ebner, joins us to talk about how these charges against the police officers could have broad implications for the justice system. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for joining us. Hi, Cheryl. Thanks for having me. Okay, so Mike, so now we know that there have been police officers in Toronto that have been arrested. How big of a deal are these arrests? Well, I think you see in the swift reaction from not only the police chiefs in the

area, but the premier, the mayor, everyone has been very shocked. And I think it's a huge deal. We don't typically see a collection of this many officers facing criminal charges at once. Over the history of Canadian policing, you know, there's one or two that get charged with corruption or crimes of other of another nature, you know, periodically. It's very rare. But this does appear at a scope and scale that many say is unprecedented. Can you give me a sense of who was arrested? I mean, there's a lot of information here, but, you know, kind of like the broad strokes of the officers involved here. Like, what do we know? The suspects come from a wide range of backgrounds and experience. We have 20-year veterans to constables.

who've only been on the force a couple of years. And one was a retired constable, a range of experience, and some of them had prior disciplinary history. So this investigation is still ongoing, and we could see, in theory, we could see many more officers charged across different departments.

And of course, this all is being linked to the tow truck industry, which has had some real troubles over the recent years. our colleague Molly Hayes has done great reporting on that. But murders in that industry are not uncommon. And there's a lot of allegations swirling around how these police officers allegedly helped organize crime networks that also operate in the tow truck industry. So what are these officers accused of?

Yeah, the allegations are very explosive. They include that these officers allegedly leaked information. to organize criminals that resulted in extortions and shootings around southern Ontario as part of the turf wars between the towing industry. And they're also accused of protecting drug trafficking networks by accepting payoffs and then sharing this confidential info they glean from their own databases. And we just recently found out from court docs, they're also accused of trafficking clothing and uniforms from the Toronto Police Service.

So very, very serious charges here. Investigations like these into alleged police corruption can be really complicated, especially because essentially it would involve police, policing other police, right? How exactly does that work? It starts with complaints within the department typically. And those complaints, if they're alleging criminality, then those are, then those would be referred to an outside police agency to investigate. And of course, it's incredibly difficult to catch police committing crime.

You're investigating the investigators, right? They know the playbook of how to build a case. And so they also know the playbook of how to avoid getting charged. So these are very complicated cases if there's alleged criminality. on the part of an officer. And I think that's what we're seeing now. The personnel used by York, I think it touched over 200 people. Can you give us an example of when this happened in the past?

Yeah, sure. When news of this broke, I went looking for past cases and came upon Jim Lowry. He was an internal investigator with Toronto for a long time and was involved in this huge case dating back to the late 90s of this rogue drug squad that had about five members who were roughing up drug dealers allegedly taking their drugs and flipping it. And so I phoned up Jim and he went through the details of how this took 12 plus years to bring these guys to justice and just how complicated it was investigating them. He spoke of how he busted down the door of one of the officers

and found in, he was executing a warrant, of course, and found a bunch of drugs in the guy's garage. And ultimately, because of a technicality, the way the warrant was written, those charges were thrown out. And that really got to him. So ultimately the five officers, they were charged with a range of offenses. And they got off on a number of them.

And they were only convicted in 2012 of perjury and attempting to obstruct justice because they were proven to cover up a warrantless search of this small town heroin dealer. So they were acquitted of many other serious charges, including theft, assault, extortion. So it just gets at like how complicated it is to meet the threshold to gather enough evidence. At the end of it all, these five rogue cops were all spared jail and just given 45 days of house arrest. So that was, you know, a decade and a half legal saga funded by their police union. And it cost the authorities about $22 million according to Jim Lowry. He was so disillusioned with it all.

that he retired, he was eligible to retire anyways, but he retired and then went to law school and now as a defense lawyer. He said that after that investigation, he kind of was really looked down on by his fellow police officers. You know, one who investigates their own is not really taken too kindly in many departments. What do we know about how big of a problem police corruption is in Canada? Given the shadowy nature of these offenses and, you know, how easily officers can obscure their criminality, it's very difficult to tell how big a problem it is in Canada. We can say that it is relatively rare.

The best data we have is the RCMP conducted an internal investigation into corruption. in its ranks, and they looked at incidents and allegations from 95 to 2005, and they found that just over 200 Mounties had been involved in known incidents of corruption. And that report was published more than a decade and a half ago. So I'm really hoping for more data from this provincial investigation that has just been announced into policing across Ontario. But what the RCMP did find was that the most common type of corruption was that, you know, selling or disclosing secret information from their databases, about a fifth of the 322 incidents over that decade were related to that. So police hold the keys to just very, very important information and

our great asset if an organized crime group can get them involved. involved in their activity. Mike, I'm curious to know about what we know about how police become corrupt in the first place. Because, of course, they do this job as a way of upholding the law, right? So how do they become corrupt? I've been talking and rolling this marble around my head since the news and talking to high-level police sources and just asking that very question.

I get a range of answers, but they mostly hinge on kind of. two paths towards alleged corruption. It's, you know, there's the truly bad apple who maybe lies their way into a career in policing, like obscures their true intent and is always kind of wanting to break the law and cross the line. And then the other more common route is just the slipping, like the slipping of habits of attention to detail. Jim Lowry's a former

Canadian Forces reservist and he said that, you know, police are paramilitary and if they don't adhere to the strict rules and they don't have a culture of following the letter of the law to a T, then bad things start to happen.

And he recalled, you know, when he joined Toronto Police in the 70s, he said he had leaders kind of explaining these were like lower level, you know, sergeants explaining how you could fudge notes or do this, do that to get charges and get a conviction. And he called that the noble cause argument. So, you know, officers who are found to be corrupt kind of can delude themselves into thinking that, yeah, I cut this corner, but, you know,

it's to put the bad guys away. So that's quite common in terms of why and how officers do end up breaking the law themselves. I mean, part of why stories of police corruption or alleged corruption can feel particularly significant is because, you know, officers stand in for the state, right? They're here to uphold the law. They're here to protect the people. It can kind of sort of feel like a bit of a betrayal, a public betrayal. Yeah, it is shocking when officers are charged with crimes this serious.

And it does rock the public's trust in police. You know, there's been a number of PR setbacks for numerous forces over the past decade or so, and this doesn't help. So everyone will be watching with a keen eye what this provincial probe of all these different forces across Ontario uncovers. Do we have a sense of what might come out of Ontario's investigation in terms of police reform? Yes. So they are going to look at the protection of this classified information to see if the systems in place are up to snuff. And they have kind of marching orders to do anything they can to uncover ways to prevent, detect, respond, and to fortify these police departments against corruption and ensure their integrity. So the inspection will look at the way that officers are.

supervised, the way that they screen recruits for potential problems, and then also the way that they handle evidence and, you know, the personal problems of officers, how those are supported. So we're talking about substance abuse. We know that a couple of the officers that were charged last week had recent-ish bankruptcies. And so those types of financial problems would really paint a target on an officer's back for organized crime to try and use those money troubles as leverage to, you know, corrupt them. And so those are things that the inspector general will also look at. Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Cheryl. We'll be right back with Justice Reporter David Ebner.

Hi, David. Thanks so much for joining us. It's good to be back. Thank you. So David, we just heard from Mike Hager about previous examples of police corruption in Canada, like the Drug Squad case from the 1990s. What do we know about the effect an investigation like that can have on other criminal cases? That's really the big one from the late 90s, early 2000s, the Drug Squad cops who were accused of a number of crimes. And people immediately thought of that last week when this all came up. Back in the day, those police officers were accused and charged with crimes such as extortion and theft. They weren't actually years later convicted of those particular charges. They ended up convicted of obstruction of justice.

But still, in the early 2000s, their potential prosecution and alleged conduct was seen as a key factor in about four dozen other criminal cases that were derailed because of their involvement. So from late 99 through May 2000, Crown prosecutors effectively gave up on stayed or withdrew charges in four dozen criminal cases. And that meant more than 80 people who were charged of different crimes were effectively let off before a finding of guilty or not guilty because of these officers tangential and direct involvement in their cases. Can you spell this out for me? How would these officers compromise a trial? So basically the situation is, you know, if you have a police officer who's not tangential, he or she wasn't just at the crime scene, but they were handling evidence or they took a confession from an accused. So suddenly that officer is quite central to a trial and a potential conviction. And so when at court they review the evidence or they review the confession and that officer is on the stand and they are being examined.

by the prosecutors and then cross-examined by the defense, what they say and their credibility is absolutely central to those trials. And they may have done their duty totally straight up in those other cases, but once a police officer is accused of quite serious crimes, you know, their credibility becomes a bit less certain. And so you don't necessarily have to say the police officer did a bad job in another case, but the crown can get worried. And if you're the prosecutor and your key witness is actually arrested in another case, you probably have a little less faith in that key witness than you would like to. And you heard from John Neely, a retired RCMP assistant commissioner on this. Can you tell me what Neely told you? Yeah, his memories were

really great to illuminate the past and how it might indicate how the present and future would unfold. John Neely, he's a retired RCMP assistant commissioner. In the early 2000s, he led a special task force that investigated the Toronto Drug Squad cops. And so, again, similar to right now, a separate police agency looking into the alleged wrongdoing of another police agency. And what happened was the Crown prosecutors with different cases that involve these accused officers. The Crown wanted to know, like, what's going on with the case against them. And the RCMP, on the same hand, though, John Neely was saying, well, we can't disclose the evidence because we're trying to put together a case against these officers.

And so because they couldn't really disclose that much evidence about the officers, the crown was put into a bind. They couldn't really be sure what was going on. But then they had this situation where their witnesses might not have been exactly all that they wanted to be. And so they chose the path of caution deciding to withdraw or stay charges rather than end up at trial with a witness that would. not live up to billing. Okay. Let's take a moment to talk about what defense lawyers might be thinking in this moment. So if a defense lawyer has a case working through the courts that might involve a police officer that's involved in Project South, what might they be doing right now?

Well, quite a bit of action already over the past week. So the first day, effectively last week, when the press conferences happened with the police chiefs, the names of the officers came out, the seven plus the one retired. And I spoke with Chris Sue Ratton. He's a criminal defense lawyer in Toronto. And he told me, quote, I guarantee every lawyer doing a case in Toronto is going to be looking for these names. And what he meant by that was how these officers might intersect with other cases, whether charges or trials occurring. Criminal lawyers in Toronto slash Ontario have an email list. And so those names all went out to everyone. And again, it doesn't mean that everything that they touched is tainted necessarily. But if they do play a central role, it could be a big

factor. And Chris, thinking back to the past, he was saying charges that involve these officers are ripe for withdrawal. You know, the Crown prosecutors, they don't want to stay or withdraw charges, but sometimes pragmatic choices have to be made. One example is from a defense lawyer I spoke with last week. One of the Project South officers was supposed to be part of a trial last week, and he wasn't able to be there. He was an arresting officer on a case, but there was another arresting officer in the same case. And so the other officer was able to be called as a witness. So what might have been a problem ended up not being a problem, but there is an example of how Project South could end up touching other cases to greater or lesser degrees. Okay. So it sounds like

what's really interesting here is that a Crown prosecutor would kind of go the cautious route here. certain points, right? Instead of perhaps a police officer might not be tainted, but in fact, they might be more cautious because of what's happening. And that's exactly right. So if we step back and think of what the aim of crown prosecutors are, is to, you know, get a conviction at trial. So charges are brought by police. So already the justice system believes there's some likelihood of guilt, potential guilt. And so then the charges start going through the process. Disclosure, defense lawyers are involved. They're preparing for trial. And the crown, you know, at any point, you know, has the choice to say, okay, you know, unfortunately, this isn't working out.

And bringing in case to trial is time-consuming and expensive, but also really important when the charges are of significant public value, you know, to see wrongdoing punished. But if the crown sees, you know, the trial not working out in the end to seize the probability of their key witness failing at trial and not securing a conviction, sometimes, unfortunately, the decision is made to not go to the case. trial rather than just push through and see what happens. Do we know at this point if there are any criminal cases that are going to be compromised? That was already a big question at the press conference last week.

And the answer from police was, no, not yet. York Deputy Chief Ryan Hogan said investigators had no immediate information about other current police work or court cases that have been compromised by the accused officers. And he said police are going to look into the roles in other cases. to determine whether their involvement, quote, may have jeopardized cases in the past, present, or future. So police are going to be looking at the roles these accused officers have played in other cases. Defense lawyers are going to be. And then crown prosecutors as well are going to be taking that same sort of look.

David, as you've pointed out, there could be wide-reaching implications of Project South on the criminal justice system more broadly. And I'm just curious, like what kind of impact does a story like this have on public trust? You know, the words of Anna Maria Naser resonated with me. She's a thoughtful criminal defense lawyer in Toronto that I speak with relatively often, and I talked to her last week. She said to me, quote, this is extraordinarily corrosive to the public trust in policing and the justice system as well. And I think we all saw that.

You know, sometimes when big things happen, we liken them to movies or TV shows. And I think last week there was a tendency to think this is something that happens in the United States, perhaps, not to defame the United States. But police misconduct definitely happens relatively regularly in Canada across the country. And it's a serious situation always. But something like this, you know, a number of officers accused to be wrapped up with organized crime, the alleged arrangement for a murder. It's super intense. And the public can't help but wonder, are there more police, the police chiefs last week were quite morose about it. I think they were, it hit them really

hard because most cops are good cops and there's a lot of work as we heard earlier underway to start restoring trust in police. And back to Anna Maria and Azra, the criminal defense lawyer, she says, she pointed out, you know, the public's going to worry that everything that these police officers have touched will collapse. And that's not necessarily true. You know, the courts themselves We'll try to keep other cases on the rails. But if a key witness, if their credibility becomes a bit less certain, there's going to be cases that unfortunately are bumped off course because of these officers potentially. David, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Cheryl. That was David Ebner, the Globe's Justice Reporter. We also heard from Mike Hager, a reporter in the Globe's BC Bureau. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Rachel Levy McLaughlin. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.