Hamilton police need to answer some serious questions

It’s worrisome how little attention has been given to an alarming court decision released recently by Justice Andrew Goodman that was reported by The Spectator and the CBC.

The judge threw out more than $500,000 worth of drug and cash evidence seized by police because the officers had violated a suspect’s Charter rights when they executed a search warrant at an apartment.

Goodman stated the officers took a “cavalier approach to Charter rights” and engaged in “serious state misconduct.” The Hamilton police conduct, Goodman wrote, showed “an absolute ignorance of well-established Charter rights.”

It gets worse.

When Hamilton officers executed the search warrant, they employed what’s known as a “no-knock entry.”

A no-knock entry, also called a dynamic entry, is a sanitized way of describing what’s really going on. It means police are busting down the door, in this case with a battering ram, and bursting in, usually with their weapons drawn.

During the trial in this case, the officers who testified all said they shouted “Police” or “Police, search warrant” upon entering the apartment. What they didn’t know at the time was that their actions had been caught on a CCTV security camera.

To put it simply: They lied on the stand. Or perhaps more gently, they “misremembered” the truth. The video and audio showed that they never announced they were the police and only shouted “Search warrant, get on the f—-ing ground” once they were already inside.

But there’s an even more important reason to be concerned, and it relates to how Hamilton police do their job.

During the officers’ testimony, it was revealed that 90 per cent — and perhaps more — of all search warrants executed by Hamilton police are carried out by way of no-knock entries. Meaning that in almost every case of a search warrant execution, doors are being kicked in and weapons are being drawn.

“To me, dynamic entries were verging on becoming a systemic problem in Hamilton,” Goodman wrote in his decision.

In this particular case on trial, Goodman wrote, “no officer was even able to explain the rationale for the dynamic entry.”

I know a little bit about this subject matter. In 2022, with my Toronto Star colleague Rachel Mendleson, we published an award-winning series that looked at police across the country who seriously violate people’s Charter rights.

We found hundreds of cases where judges had to take action, as Goodman did, because of the seriousness of the Charter breaches committed by police.

Shockingly, in almost all of the cases, there were no consequences for officers who violated people’s Charter rights. In some cases, the officers themselves weren’t even informed they had violated someone’s Charter rights. And most frighteningly, some police services admitted they had no idea how many cases of Charter violations involved their officers or if discipline was ever considered.

So why do police rely on no-knock entries? It’s simple. Because they can.

Police are given wide latitude to carry out their duties as they see fit. As Goodman noted in his decision, police are not required to seek prior judicial authorization for a no-knock entry.

When justices of the peace deal with search warrant applications, they likely assume that police know what they’re doing and how to do it, and that police have the community’s safety (as well as their own safety) top of mind. So they’re not likely going to micromanage how the sausage gets made.

You would think that another case of officers violating someone’s Charter rights would be a concern for Hamilton police, given the past record of Hamilton police on this front. Or that they’d be sensitive to another case of having an officer’s trustworthiness questioned by a judge. And you’d also think Hamilton police would be highly sensitive to the issue of no-knock entries.

This is the same police service that infamously burst into the wrong apartment when executing a search warrant and then beat up a small, slight southeast Asian refugee who spoke little English in a case of mistaken identity.

This is the same police service that caused a Hamilton man to spend eight years in jail until the Court of Appeal released him after ruling his Charter rights had been violated by Hamilton police in the first place.

This is the same police service that had to pay $60,000 in damages after officers dragged a Black preacher from his car and assaulted him for the apparent crime of sitting in the front seat talking to another Black man late at night.

And this is the same police service where one of its officers was found by a judge in 2019 to have engaged in “carelessness with the truth” and giving “misleading and contrived in-court testimony” in an attempt to substantiate information he had received from a confidential informant.

In light of all this, here are a few pertinent questions for the Hamilton Police Service, and more importantly, the police services board.

Are there going to be any consequences for the officers who, while testifying under oath, “misremembered” the truth?

More importantly, are there going to be any consequences for the officers who violated someone’s Charter rights and caused a significant drug case to be lost?

Is the Hamilton Police Service – or its board – concerned that 90 per cent (or perhaps more, according to the testimony) of its search warrants are carried out by violent entries?

And finally, is the service or its board concerned that there might be a pattern of bad behaviour here that keeps being repeated?

I know what some of you are thinking. A Charter rights’ challenge by a defendant is a last-gasp Hail Mary by someone trying to use any loophole they can to escape guilt.

Fine, then let’s think this through. By not doing their jobs properly, Hamilton police are allowing potential criminals to walk free.

So if you aren’t concerned with people’s rights being violated, be concerned with that.