#417 Inside the Black Box

Municipal Transparency · Reading time: 4 min

Regular Audit of the Police Black Box

Blind spots and millions overspent: the case for regular, independent audits of the Ottawa Police

Peter Karwacki · Candidate for City Council, Rideau-Rockcliffe · Thursday, 13 August 2026

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Trust in public institutions relies entirely on transparency. When a public agency handles an annual budget of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, we expect every single penny to be accounted for. Yet recent findings show the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) and its civilian oversight board are operating with real financial blind spots. To restore public trust and ensure fiscal responsibility, the City of Ottawa should mandate regular, independent third-party financial and operational audits of our police force.

The Breakdown of Civilian Oversight

For years, the public was told that the Ottawa Police Services Board (OPSB) kept the force in check. That claim took a hit in October 2025, when a small claims court found the board had improperly restricted residents critical of police from speaking at its meetings — arbitrarily exercising its discretion in a way that infringed their Charter rights. The court awarded damages to two of the plaintiffs, Robin Browne of 613-819 Black Hub and Jeffrey Bradley of the Crime and Punishment Education Project.^[1]

To be clear about what's proven and what's my own inference: the ruling establishes that the board mishandled public criticism at its meetings. It doesn't by itself prove the board is failing at financial oversight — those are two different functions. My view is that a board willing to bend its own procedural rules to limit uncomfortable scrutiny is not the board I'd trust to aggressively question the department's internal spending. That's my judgment call, not something the court decided.

The Proof Is in the Numbers

On the financial side, we don't have to speculate — the City's independent Auditor General, Nathalie Gougeon, already did the work. Her May 2026 audit of OPS project management found gaps serious enough to raise real questions about value for money:^[2]

• The district policing overrun: A project to decentralize OPS operations into four zones started with a budget of $600,000. That figure was later revised up to $2.2 million — and OPS has now spent $5.2 million on it, nearly nine times the original estimate.
• Unreliable reporting to the board: The audit found a December 2025 report to the OPSB contained inaccuracies, including outdated budget figures for the force's body-worn camera rollout — a project expected to cost roughly $30 million.
• Obsolete staffing models: A separate 2025 audit found OPS deployment targets date back roughly 30 years and haven't been updated to reflect Ottawa's population growth or current call volumes.

The District Policing Budget, in Three Numbers

Original estimate vs. revised estimate vs. actual spend to date

Initial estimate

$0.6M

Revised estimate

$2.2M

Actual spent

$5.2M

The district policing pilot's budget moved twice before landing nearly 9× above its original estimate — without the kind of checkpoint that would have flagged the growth as it happened. Source: Office of the Auditor General, OPS project management audit, May 2026.^[2]

It's Not Just Project Budgets

The same pattern shows up outside project spending, too. At a June 2026 OPSB meeting, Chief Eric Stubbs told the board that Ottawa police run hundreds of database searches every day, and while some auditing of that access exists, he described it plainly: "it's not robust."^[3] That's the head of the force saying, in his own words, that the system meant to catch officers misusing confidential databases isn't equipped to do the job.

This isn't a hard technology problem — anomaly detection on access logs is a solved, off-the-shelf capability. What's missing is prioritization and funding, not know-how. That gap tracks with the board's own safe workplace program budget, which has been cut from $8.2 million when it was committed in 2022 down to $5.4 million today. Put the project overruns, the unreliable reporting to the board, and an admittedly under-built audit trail for database access together, and you get the same conclusion three different ways: OPS oversight is not something the force can be left to build on its own timeline.

No More Grading Their Own Homework

When a powerful institution self-reports its data and controls who gets to question it, public accountability suffers. The Ottawa Police Service shouldn't be marking its own work. We need to move away from reactive, one-off reviews that only look backward after the damage is done.

The ask: City Council should tie future police budget increases to a clear rule — mandatory, annual, independent financial and operational audits, conducted by outside experts and reported publicly on a fixed schedule.

Our community's safety, and our tax dollars, depend on it.

Posted by Peter Karwacki, PMP · Candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)

References

1. CBC News, "Court rules Ottawa's police board violated critics' freedom of expression," Nov. 2025 (small claims court ruling issued Oct. 30, 2025).
2. CBC News, "Audit finds Ottawa police projects lack proper budgets, oversight," May 12, 2026 (Office of the Auditor General, City of Ottawa).
3. CBC News, "Frank talk on Ottawa police misconduct dominates 1st in-person board meeting in years," June 2026 (OPSB meeting remarks by Chief Eric Stubbs).