A police officer who ultimately lost his job with Waterloo Regional Police wrote the organization’s lawyer a letter boasting of the lifestyle he enjoyed while on a three-year paid suspension.
Const. Craig Markham was found guilty of breach of trust, in connection with an incident where he passed confidential information to a man in custody.
The man in question, the boyfriend of a friend of his, was believed to be connected to the Hells Angels biker gang.
Markham was ordered to either quit the police service or be fired.
Instead, he appealed his conviction and remained on paid suspension.
By the time he left the WRPS payroll, he had received nearly $165,000 in salary since the charges were laid.
This March, Markham sent an email to Gary Melanson, Waterloo Regional Police’s director of legal affairs, stating that he had finished the resignation process and returned a number of items he had been asked to give back.
In the message, which was made public Wednesday, Markham said he was “very thankful and fortunate” to have received the “nice gift” of a suspension.
“I was able to sit home, take courses, travel, and play lots of golf and get paid a first class pay check, receive full benefits and a full pension for the past three years,” he said.
Markham wrote that he had also completed a firefighter training program, and been hired as a firefighter, in part due to “knowing the right people in the right places” and receiving two references from WRPS personnel.
“You have opened up other doors for me and have paid me to sit back and watch. What a dream come true,” he said.
The Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge fire departments have not hired Markham, spokespeople for each organization said.
Speaking to reporters, Chief Bryan Larkin called the email “really concerning” and “somewhat offensive.”
“I think that sends a bad message to the community (and) harms and takes away from the incredible work of the 760 other officers who are out there every day,” he said.
Police chiefs have long lobbied the Ontario government to give them the power to suspend police officers without pay, under certain circumstances.
The Markham case would be one example of a good use for that option, Larkin said Wednesday.
“This is one case where somebody who’s involved in the process … actually talks about all the benefits of being suspended with pay, and actually mocks what is supposed to be a fair judicial system,” he said.
“Here we had a criminal conviction, and it still carried on. I believe it’s an abuse of the system, and the system needs to change.”
Paul Perchaluk, the head of the Waterloo Regional Police Association union, agrees that the system needs to be changed – but says the focus should be on moving cases through quicker, rather than giving new powers to police chiefs.
“If you have suspensions without pay, you’re basically going to starve out the officers,” he said in an interview.
Perchaluk also took issues with what he described as a practice of issuing suspensions “for effect,” saying officers accused of wrongdoing could be moved to administrative duties instead of being taken off-duty entirely.
“They’re suspending, sometimes, at the drop of a hat. They get a complaint – and for effect, people are suspended,” he said.
Speaking to CTV News, Markham said he did not expect the email to be made public.
