Ottawa Police Board
Stubbs told the board that Ottawa police make hundreds of database searches every day and it's tough to keep track of them, and while there is some auditing in place, "it's not robust." To drive home how serious the abuse of police databases is, the force is about to send an email to all of its employees notifying them of increased penalties, Ferguson said. CbC report
The Audit Ottawa Police Could Already Have
At Monday's police board meeting — the first held in person in more than three years — Chief Eric Stubbs told the board something worth sitting with. Officers run hundreds of database queries a day, he said, and while some auditing exists, it "isn't robust."
That admission came in direct response to a board inquiry into database misuse, prompted by reports that officers had been searching internal systems to track women they were interested in — pulling license plates outside gyms and coffee shops, then running them through police systems to get names and addresses. Stubbs has to give the board a full answer in July: how misuse gets detected, whether audits are internal or independent, and how much time typically passes between an improper search and anyone noticing.
That last question is the one that should worry people most. Because the honest answer, right now, appears to be: not until someone else complains.
This isn't a hard technical problem
"Not robust" makes database auditing sound like some frontier challenge OPS hasn't caught up to yet. It isn't. Anomaly-detection systems that flag unusual access to sensitive records are mature, off-the-shelf technology. Hospitals have used versions of this for years to catch staff snooping in patient charts they have no clinical reason to view — it's a standard feature of health-records compliance. The pattern-matching involved is not exotic: a query with no linked case file, repeated searches on the same name over time, access clustered around a particular time and place — these are the kinds of signals a modern audit system flags automatically, in real time, rather than waiting for an unrelated complaint to surface it months or years later.
None of this requires OPS to invent anything. It requires deciding that reviewing database access is worth building properly.
Which brings us to the budget
The Ottawa Police Service's safe workplace program — the unit meant to be dealing with exactly this kind of misconduct — had its budget cut from $8.2 million in 2022 to $5.4 million now. That's not a rounding error; it's a third of the funding, gone, in the years leading up to a second wave of the same category of scandal.
You can't credibly tell a board "our auditing isn't robust" while the unit responsible for workplace accountability has been shrinking. Robust auditing costs money and staff time. If the board is serious about the questions it's asking in July, the answer needs to include what it would actually cost to fix — and whether OPS has been asking for that money, or quietly deprioritizing it.
What real accountability looks like from here
The board has apparently ordered quarterly updates going forward, which is a start. But quarterly updates are only accountability if they come with numbers: how many flagged accesses, how many investigated, how long detection is taking, and whether the safe workplace program's budget is actually being restored to do this work properly.
Ottawa doesn't have a technology gap. It has a prioritization gap, and prioritization is a budget decision the board can actually act on — not a technical mystery Stubbs needs another decade to solve.
Watch the debate between King and I on this matterThe Audit Gap: Why "Not Robust" Shouldn't Be Good Enough for OPS
Database-misuse auditing is a solved problem elsewhere. In Ottawa, it's an admission of failure, and a funding choice.
When Ottawa Police Services leadership was pressed on how well the force audits its own members' access to law enforcement databases, the answer that came back — attributed to Stubbs — was that the auditing process is "not robust." Said plainly, in public, about the systems meant to catch officers misusing confidential databases for personal reasons.
I want to be direct about why that answer doesn't sit well with me. I'm a trained data analyst. Anomaly detection on access logs — flagging unusual query patterns, off-hours lookups, searches on names with no case connection — is not experimental technology. It is a mature, largely off-the-shelf capability that police services elsewhere have implemented specifically because self-reported honesty isn't an oversight system. When an organization with a nine-figure budget tells the public its auditing isn't robust, that's not a technology gap. It's a resourcing and priority choice.
The resignation that vouched for competence
This is where Rawlson King's record on the Board matters. King sat on the Ottawa Police Services Board and resigned in 2022 — issuing a statement at the time vouching for the Board's competence on his way out the door. Since then: the independent workplace investigations office was quietly closed, the Auditor General found inaccurate reporting to the Board, and this spring brought a documented misconduct crisis.
If I were on that board, I would not have quit. Oversight isn't a role you vouch for and then leave — it's a role you stay in and use.
This fits a pattern I've written about before with King: strong public statements calling for stronger oversight, paired with an actual record of stepping back from the oversight bodies themselves. He never sat on the Transit Commission or Light Rail Subcommittee despite repeated public calls for stronger LRT oversight. He left the Police Services Board with a vote of confidence, shortly before the Board's own record showed that confidence wasn't warranted.
What accountability actually requires
None of this is about painting a technical problem as unsolvable, or an oversight failure as unfixable. It's the opposite. The tools exist. The methodology exists. What's been missing is the funding commitment and the sustained presence of people willing to sit on these bodies and push, rather than issue a statement and step away.
Ward 13 residents deserve representation that treats institutional oversight as ongoing work, not a credential to claim on the way out. That's the standard I'm running on.
I AM A Candidate for Rideau-Rockcliffe*
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.
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