"THE $1.27M "BAD APPLE"

The above title is taken from a report written by Kelly Donovan in regards to police claims that there are only a few bad apples within the police service who need to be corrected. Her report advises that through a Freedom of Information request the Waterloo Regional Police have spent $1.27 million on ONE law firm to cover Labour Relations matters between 2009 and 2017. That is an ongoing, awfully large chunk of money to be spending on lawyers. She also includes a graph which indicates that the spending has hugely escalated since 2009 and is now currently in the $225,00 per year range. Ms. Donovan's point is that "Ineffective oversight and poor governance are costing the Ontario taxpayer millions of dollars and ethical integrity.". Keep further in mind that there are about 60 municipal police forces in Ontario. Many such as London, Toronto, Peel and Ottawa police services have long histories of internal complaints and lawsuits regarding discriminatory behaviour and harassment of officers. Exactly how many unnecessary millions of dollars per year are all our combined municipal, provincial and even federal police forces costing Ontario taxpayers? By unnecessary costs I'm referring to costs incurred due to systemic racism, homophobia and harassment? These costs should also bring home to taxpayers the human suffering and accompanying costs to individuals mistreated by the behaviour and poor governance of senior police administrators. Then of course above and beyond reprehensible police behaviour towards their own employees is the no small matter of some, hopefully few, police officers behaviour towards members of the public who are either marginalized or incapable of paying huge sums of money to lawyers to protect their rights. It is less difficult to believe that this occasionally occurs when we learn that the senior officers at the top apparently have had no problem existing with ongoing disgusting behaviour within their ranks.