Ticket fixing by cops arises again

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2017 (3178 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Manitoba’s legal community was convulsed by a ticket-fixing investigation that led police to arrest a dozen lawyers and court officials, including a provincial court judge.

The case came to be known as Ticketgate and led to changes on how traffic tickets are handled by the justice system. So, naturally, most of us thought the problem with traffic-ticket fixing had been fixed.

It hasn’t, according to one Winnipeg Police Service officer who contacted the Free Press.

“I call it Ticketgate 2.0,” the officer said. “If you know the right police officer, you can get your ticket pulled before it gets in the box.”

The “box” in reference is a locked, metal receptacle officers are required to drop completed traffic tickets into.

The officer described what are known as provincial offence notice booklets — each with traffic tickets, numbered sequentially. The traffic-ticketing booklets are issued from a secure area by a supervisor, who enters the numbered book into a record management system. One would think that process would make it difficult to beat the system.

However, the informant — the cop with a conscience, as I read the officer — professed to have personal knowledge of the ticket-fixing practice.

So why come to a journalist with the information and not someone in the WPS? Because, as the officer explained, there’s a stigma attached to informing on other police by going to professional standards.

“Who do you go to that it will never come back?” the cop asked rhetorically. “No one is going to stand up in a crowd and say, ‘I don’t like this. I’ve seen this.’”

How pervasive is the alleged practice of Winnipeg police “fixing” traffic tickets?

The officer couldn’t say with any certainty, but did say the illicit voiding and even “shredding” of traffic tickets has been going on, to the officer’s knowledge, for at least a decade.

The examples the officer provided didn’t involve police officers using their “discretion” and maybe not issuing traffic tickets to other officers, family or friends. There would be no voided or unaccounted for traffic tickets if that happened.

Instead, the officer outlined circumstances in which the cop who issued the traffic ticket would be contacted soon after by another cop, who had tracked him or her through the badge number written on the “pink” copy handed to the offending driver. That driver could be a friend of the cop who was now asking the officer who wrote the tag for a favour: void the ticket before it goes into the “box.”

A variation of that method was in evidence two years ago in Ontario. A veteran Hamilton Police Service officer was discovered trying to do a favour for a friend by — with a supervisor’s assistance — retrieving a $40 speeding ticket from the locked drop box and voiding it.

The offence was only caught, the Hamilton Spectator reported, because the administrator processing the tickets noticed the green driver’s copy, required when the ticket is voided, was missing.

The Winnipeg Police Service appeared surprised by allegations of similar behaviour by any of its officers. Informed one of its serving members had told the Free Press illegal voiding of tickets had been happening — and asked if the service had any concerns about tickets being pulled — police responded: “The WPS does not have any information to suggest that some officers may be ‘pulling’ (traffic tickets) prior to their being submitted.”

I also asked the WPS if it has any way of knowing, or determining with any certainty, if an officer has voided a ticket as a favour?

“The service does not track the reason why the ticket was voided by the officer,” the WPS said. “If a (ticket) is lost or damaged, this has to be accounted for by the officer and the officer’s supervisor.”

But unlike, for example, the Seattle Police Department — whose “cancelling and voiding tickets” policy can be found online — the Winnipeg policy does not specifically detail when officers “shall void” tickets or “shall only cancel tickets in special circumstances.”

Central traffic division Insp. Kendra Rey said she didn’t have a readily available number of how many tickets are voided annually, and she couldn’t locate any examples of tickets that simply get lost. She acknowledged there are many voided over the course of a year because officers issue so many — 36,800 in 2016 alone — and writing errors are often made that result in tickets being voided and another ticket written.

About two years ago, Rey said, there were so many errors in tickets and so many being cancelled by magistrates, the court asked police to take a look at what was going wrong and correct it.

Of course, the fact so many tickets are written and so many are voided suggests keeping strict track of any “favours” being done is made more difficult without a specific overall annual audit, which doesn’t happen. I wondered — as in the Hamilton police example — if any tickets show up without the pink-shaded copies given to drivers not being attached.

“Rarely,” Rey said, after checking with three clerks responsible for data entry of all tickets on the police record system, including voided ones. She said one clerk estimated less than 10 voided tickets a year arrive without the necessary driver’s copy.

“If it doesn’t have a pink attached.” Rey said, “it gets some more scrutiny at the Crown level.”

In any event, the head of the Winnipeg traffic unit appeared to welcome the information supplied to me by the anonymous officer; even if the inspector made it clear it would have been more helpful if the officer had provided the information to her or someone else in the service so the organization could address it with more information.

“I’m open to receiving this information,” Rey said, “so that we can review our current process and see if there is a gap where this type of event can be happening.”

Meanwhile, there is something on the way that will make any temptation for local cops doing traffic ticket-pulling favours more difficult.

Rey said direct-entry e-ticketing is scheduled to be piloted in the traffic division within the year.

Hopefully the final fix will be in then.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca