Accountability: complaints, discipline, oversight and the law

A service can have an excellent code of conduct and well-trained officers and still lose public trust if people believe that misconduct, when it happens, will be ignored or covered up. Accountability is the set of systems that make officers and services answer for what they do. Desjardins invites Inspector Grace Achebe, who heads the Port Ardent Police Service's professional standards bureau, to explain how those systems work in practice. She begins by telling the class that most of her work is not catching bad officers. It is making sure that people who complain are heard, that officers who are accused are treated fairly, and that the service learns from what goes wrong. A good accountability system, she says, protects the public and good officers at the same time.

Layers of accountability

Police accountability comes from several directions at once. Internally, supervisors review officers' work and the professional standards bureau investigates complaints and allegations of misconduct. Externally, civilian bodies such as Ontario's Law Enforcement Complaints Agency receive and oversee complaints, the Special Investigations Unit investigates incidents of serious injury and death, and the Inspector General of Policing monitors services' compliance with standards. The courts hold officers accountable through criminal prosecution, civil lawsuits and the exclusion of improperly obtained evidence. Police service boards hold chiefs accountable for how the service is run. And the public and the media hold everyone accountable through scrutiny, which body camera footage and bystander video have dramatically increased.

Each layer has strengths and weaknesses. Internal processes are fast and expert but can be seen as police investigating themselves. External bodies are more independent but may lack resources or powers. Courts are authoritative but slow, expensive and focused on legal liability rather than professional standards. Effective accountability uses the layers together.

How a complaint is handled in Ontario

Under the Community Safety and Policing Act, any member of the public can make a complaint about an officer's conduct, a service's policies or the services it provides. Conduct complaints go to the Law Enforcement Complaints Agency, which replaced the Office of the Independent Police Review Director when the Act came into force in 2024. The agency screens each complaint and decides whether it will investigate itself, refer the complaint to the police service to investigate under its oversight, or screen it out, for example because it was made too late or is frivolous. Some complaints are resolved informally with the agreement of the complainant and the officer. If an investigation finds reasonable grounds to believe misconduct occurred, the matter can proceed to a disciplinary hearing before an independent adjudicator, and penalties range from a reprimand to forfeiture of pay or days off, demotion, suspension and dismissal. Separately, any incident in which a person is seriously injured or dies after an interaction with police, or alleges sexual assault, or is shot at by police, must be reported to the Special Investigations Unit, a civilian agency that investigates and decides whether to lay criminal charges.

Fairness to officers

Accountability systems must be fair to officers as well as to complainants. Officers are entitled to know the allegations against them, to have representation, usually through their police association, to respond, and to have decisions made on evidence by people without a conflict of interest. Investigations must be timely, because long delays harm complainants and officers alike: officers under investigation may be suspended or reassigned for months, and memories fade. Achebe tells the class that the large majority of complaints her unit handles end without a finding of misconduct, and that it matters to officers and to the public that those outcomes are reached fairly and explained. An officer cleared after a thorough, transparent investigation has his or her reputation protected in a way that an officer cleared by a superficial one never does.

Fairness also requires proportion. Discipline should match the seriousness of the misconduct, the officer's intent and record, and the harm caused, and similar misconduct should receive similar penalties. Research has found that inconsistent discipline, where well-connected officers receive lighter penalties or where penalties vary widely between supervisors, damages morale and strengthens the code of silence. Ontario's discipline system uses independent adjudicators, and decisions are published, which allows penalties to be compared.

Measuring the complaint system

Achebe shows the class how her unit tracks the system's performance. The code below uses Port Ardent's 2025 complaint figures to calculate how complaints were resolved and how long they took. Timeliness matters because a complaint that takes a year to resolve fails both the complainant and the officer, and because the Act sets time limits that can bar discipline if an investigation runs too long.

# Port Ardent 2025 complaints: outcomes and days to close
from statistics import median
outcomes = {"screened out or withdrawn": 18, "informal resolution": 11,
            "investigated, no misconduct found": 25, "investigated, misconduct found": 10}
days = {
    "screened out or withdrawn": [6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 40, 44],
    "informal resolution": [21, 28, 30, 34, 38, 41, 45, 49, 52, 58, 63],
    "investigated, no misconduct found": [62, 70, 75, 81, 84, 88, 90, 94, 97, 101, 104, 110, 112,
                                          118, 121, 126, 130, 137, 141, 150, 158, 166, 175, 190, 212],
    "investigated, misconduct found": [96, 118, 131, 144, 152, 160, 171, 188, 205, 241],
}
total = sum(outcomes.values())
for name, n in outcomes.items():
    d = days[name]
    assert len(d) == n
    over = sum(1 for x in d if x > 180)
    print(f"{name:35s} {n:3d} ({n / total:.2f})  median {median(d):5.1f} days  over 180 days: {over}")

screened out or withdrawn            18 (0.28)  median  23.5 days  over 180 days: 0
informal resolution                  11 (0.17)  median  41.0 days  over 180 days: 0
investigated, no misconduct found    25 (0.39)  median 112.0 days  over 180 days: 2
investigated, misconduct found       10 (0.16)  median 156.0 days  over 180 days: 3

Most complaints close within a few months, but five of the 35 investigated complaints took more than 180 days, including three of the ten that found misconduct. Achebe says those are the cases that worry her most, because delay in a serious case can mean that an officer who should be disciplined continues working without restriction, or that a complainant gives up on the process. Her unit has since added an investigator and set a target of closing investigations within 120 days.

Governance and transparency

Accountability for individual officers sits inside a larger question: who holds the service itself accountable for its priorities, policies and culture? In Ontario, each municipal police service is governed by a police service board, made up of municipal council members, provincial appointees and community members, which sets objectives and policies, hires the chief, approves the budget and monitors performance. Boards are not supposed to direct officers in individual operations, which protects police independence in investigations, but they are responsible for the policies that shape everyday policing, such as rules on street checks, body cameras and use of force. The Inspector General of Policing can inspect services and boards and direct them to comply with the Act.

Transparency connects governance to the public. Services that publish data on complaints, use of force, stops and discipline, explain their policies in plain language and release body camera footage of serious incidents within a reasonable time give the public the means to judge them. Transparency has limits: privacy, the integrity of ongoing investigations and the rights of accused officers all justify withholding some information. Achebe says the test she applies is whether withholding information protects a legitimate interest or merely protects the service from embarrassment. Port Ardent now publishes an annual professional standards report with the kind of figures shown above, and she says the first year it did so, the number of people who told the community survey that complaints were taken seriously rose noticeably.

Legal accountability

Officers are subject to the same criminal law as everyone else, and in some respects to more. Officers who use excessive force can be charged with assault or worse; officers who lie can be charged with perjury or obstruction; officers who steal can be charged with theft and breach of trust. Section 122 of the Criminal Code makes breach of trust by a public officer an indictable offence. Criminal prosecutions of officers are relatively rare and convictions rarer, partly because the law gives officers latitude in using force and partly because juries and judges are reluctant to second-guess split-second decisions. But they happen, and the possibility shapes conduct.

Civil liability is more common. People harmed by police misconduct can sue the officer and the service for damages. In Canada, claims are brought in tort, for example for battery, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution or negligent investigation, which the Supreme Court recognized in Hill v. Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police Services Board (2007), and for damages under section 24(1) of the Charter. Large settlements often lead to policy changes, and the cost of repeated claims is one reason city governments press for reform. In some provinces, coroners' inquests into deaths involving police make recommendations that services are expected to address.

A last legal question concerns what happens to officers after they are dismissed. Researchers in the United States have documented the problem of wandering officers: officers fired or forced to resign from one agency for misconduct who are hired by another, often a smaller agency with fewer applicants. A study published in the Yale Law Journal in 2020 found that such officers were more likely than others to be fired again or to receive complaints. Canada's provincial systems address the problem through the appointment process: under Ontario's Act, officers must meet provincial standards to be appointed, services check applicants' employment and disciplinary histories, and dismissal for misconduct after a hearing makes reappointment very difficult. Some provinces have moved toward licensing or registry systems that would make an officer's status portable and visible across services. Desjardins says the issue matters to every honest officer, because each wandering officer who commits misconduct again damages the reputation of the whole profession.

Accountability as learning

Achebe ends by arguing that accountability should not only be about blame. Some of the most valuable things her unit does are reviews that ask what the service can learn: why a policy was unclear, why training did not prepare officers for a situation, why supervisors missed warning signs. Aviation and medicine have shown that systems which treat errors only as individual failures tend to hide them, while systems that separate honest mistakes from misconduct and study both tend to improve. Policing is moving in this direction with sentinel event reviews, which examine serious failures, such as a wrongful arrest, by looking at every contributing factor rather than searching for a single person to blame. Discipline remains essential for misconduct. Learning is essential for everything else.