Recommendations to The OPS Board

We Want Officers Who Show Initiative. We Also Need to Know Where It Stops.

Posted to the campaign blog — Rideau-Rockcliffe, Ward 13

There's a version of "police discretion" everyone actually wants: an officer notices something wrong and follows it, instead of waiting to be told. Nobody runs for council on the platform of "less initiative, please." So when a case comes along where the Ottawa Police Service disciplined an officer for exactly that kind of self-directed digging, it's worth asking honestly whether the Service overreacted — or whether the case reveals something the Ottawa Police Services Board still hasn't fixed.

The case

Between June 2020 and January 2022, then-Detective Helen Grus of the Ottawa Police Service's Sexual Assault and Child Abuse unit accessed the Records Management System files of nine infant or child death cases she wasn't assigned to, without logging her involvement. In January 2022, she called the father of one deceased infant to ask about the mother's COVID-19 vaccination status — without the lead detective's knowledge. She said she'd noticed what looked like a doubling or tripling of infant deaths and believed the pattern warranted scrutiny of a possible vaccine link.

A three-year Police Services Act disciplinary hearing found her guilty of discreditable conduct in March 2025. The hearing officer, retired Superintendent Chris Renwick, found the investigation had "no checks and balances, no consultation with the coroner or medical community," and was undertaken "without the knowledge or authorization" of the Service. The Ottawa Police Services Board separately settled a related privacy complaint with one of the affected families.

Grus's defence argued something the Board should sit with: several officers, including detectives and a sergeant, testified under oath that ad hoc access to RMS files for police-related reasons is common practice. Her lawyer pointed out that neither the Police Services Act nor OPS policy actually defines what an "unauthorized project" is. The tribunal ultimately found her conduct crossed a line — but it drew that line after the fact, in a three-year hearing, not from a standard that existed beforehand.

Why "more initiative" isn't the fix, and neither is "less"

The instinct to defend initiative is correct in general. Rule-bound, checklist-only policing has its own well-documented failure mode: officers who see something and don't act because it wasn't formally assigned to them. But this case isn't really a story about initiative being punished. It's a story about the absence of a written line between:

• a detective noticing something in the course of her own casework and following it further, and
• a detective building a freestanding, unlogged investigation into a subject — vaccine safety — that isn't a policing mandate at all, using police database access and police authority to pursue it.

Good initiative stays visible: it gets logged, and it gets reported up so the organization can catch errors or redirect it. What made this case costly wasn't the underlying question Grus wanted answered — it was that nine files were accessed with no record of why, and a grieving father was contacted with no one else in the loop. The risk of being wrong landed entirely on families who had no say in it.

What I'd recommend to the Ottawa Police Services Board

1. Define "unauthorized" in writing. If officers themselves can't agree under oath on what counts as authorized access, the Board is enforcing a standard that only exists in hindsight. A written test — assigned case, same-day logged self-assignment with a stated reason, or supervisor notification within a fixed window — replaces "we'll know it when we see it" with something an officer can actually check against before acting.
2. Separate the access question from the investigation question. Pulling a file to check something in the course of legitimate police work is a different act than opening an entirely new line of investigation. The first should be easy and just require logging. The second — anything that amounts to a self-initiated investigation — should require a formal self-assignment or escalation step, precisely because it's the kind of action that puts public trust on the line.
3. Make logging structural, not optional. Most of the harm here came from access that was never recorded. RMS access to sensitive case categories — death investigations especially — should require a reason code at the point of access. That removes the need to trust an officer's memory or discretion after the fact, and it's exactly the kind of audit trail the Auditor General has already flagged as "not robust."
4. Build a real channel for "I don't trust my direct chain on this." Grus said she felt she couldn't raise her concerns internally because of a unit-level directive not to discuss the topic. Whether or not that's a fair account of what happened, a Board serious about wanting initiative — rather than silence or freelancing — needs a documented escalation path outside an officer's immediate chain of command for exactly this situation.
5. Use anomaly detection on access logs, not just after-the-fact discipline. Pattern-based auditing of database access is a solved problem in other law enforcement contexts and isn't expensive next to the cost of a three-year tribunal. It also catches problems while they're still small, rather than after nine families have already been affected.

The point

None of this is about wanting officers to do less. It's about making sure the initiative we say we want comes with a visible trail and a defined ceiling — so an officer who's right gets vindicated quickly, and an officer who's wrong gets caught before the damage is done, not three years and one privacy settlement later.

References

• CBC News, "Ottawa police detective found guilty of discreditable conduct" (March 26, 2025) — cbc.ca
• CTV News Ottawa, "Ottawa police officer accused of accessing police databases in death of infant and child cases" (Nov 23, 2024) — ctvnews.ca
• CTV News Ottawa, "Ottawa police Det. Helen Grus found guilty of discreditable conduct" (March 25, 2025) — ctvnews.ca
• Western Standard, "Ottawa detective found guilty after investigating possible connection between child deaths and COVID vax" (March 26, 2025) — westernstandard.news
• Yahoo News Canada, "Ottawa detective found guilty of discreditable conduct over unauthorized child-death investigations" (March 25, 2025) — ca.news.yahoo.com
• Ottawa Police Service, "Decision with Reasons — Det. Grus" disciplinary hearing decision (posted March 25, 2025) — ottawapolice.ca (PDF)
• CBC News, "Detective tried to uncover vaccine status of dead children's parents, sources say" — cbc.ca
• Ottawa Police Service Board, "Report to Ottawa Police Service Board" (quality assurance / policy development activity, April 22, 2024) — pub-ottawa.escribemeetings.com (PDF)
• Ottawa Police Services Board, Policy Manual (April 2026) — ottawapoliceboard.ca (PDF)