Ottawa Canada Police Chief Eric Stubbs

Eric Stubbs is the Chief of Ottawa Police Department in our Northern neighbor.  He gave a recent statement condemning his officers that are engaging in a pattern of conduct.  

Using phrases like "Change your behavior or quit."

Give me 3 and a half minutes, maybe four to convince you why Chief Stubbs approach is better than most.

-LEO

Note:  I said that he addressed the media, which was inaccurate.  This was an internal video sent to his department.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuimcnlPN68

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning. Happy Sunday. And I'm doing a little flurry of releases here this weekend, here in mid-June, just based on current events. They're all going to be pretty short when I'm doing current event things and just kind of give my angle and my take on things as somebody that's been in law enforcement for a pretty long time now. Last month in Ottawa, Canada, it came out that some officers were misusing databases. I don't think it was like NCIC type stuff where they're running tags, which, as all of us cops know, is like a crime down here. I think it was just like their local databases. They were trying to meet girls with it. You know, they'd see girls at coffee shops and, you know, check their tag in their local police database or something like that. There's not a crime, but it's definitely a policy violation. The chief of police up there got wind of it. His name's Eric Stubbs, and he did something that I have a lot of respect for, which is the hard thing. It's the opposite of what I think a lot of people would do. And he went to the media and he gave a seven-minute statement on basically how he was ashamed of his officers and how they would be held accountable. Find it very easily. I respect that a lot. The common mindset behind closed doors when somebody's doing something stupid is treat them as one bad apple and handle it in-house. And if it's bad enough, how do we deal with this? There's like this political mindset of how do we deal with this? And it's the opposite of transparency. It's the opposite of honesty. It's the opposite of what's expected. And to me, my trust in that chief went through the roof when he made the choice to say, we have a systemic problem here with officers misusing a database. We're going to do everything we can to uncover that, to hold people accountable. We owe that to the public. So well done, Chief Eric Stubbs. I have a lot of respect for the way you handled that. I imagine the people that work under him have seen a pattern of that throughout his career. And if every supervisor and every police leader thought like that, instead of how do I cover this up? How do I hide these problems? How do I put the blame somewhere else? He said, The blame is on us. We are being a problem. And I intend to fix that. So well done. Nice short message for Sunday, and I hope you all have a very nice rest of your weekend.