A Vancouver police officer has been suspended for 15 days without pay for accessing sensitive information of a minor and disclosing it to unauthorized persons.
According to the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner on Tuesday, the senior officer was “found to have accessed and disclosed the information for a personal purpose.”
The watchdog determined this was misconduct on the officer’s part and imposed three five-day suspensions, meant to deter other officers from doing the same thing.
According to the office’s report, staff were contacted by the Vancouver Police Department in January 2018 about an officer who “conducted three queries” about the minor. One involved the minor’s home address, while the other two were redacted to protect the minor’s privacy. The name of the officer was also withheld because of privacy concerns for the youth.
The report said the officer used two police databases on the morning of Nov. 24, 2017, for three searches and then again improperly searched the databases five times on Nov. 29.
Only a written reprimand was recommended initially, but officials determined that that would have brought “the administration of police discipline into disrepute.”
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