ACTION officers put on admin duty amid ticket probe

More officers from one of Hamilton police's ACTION team units have been placed on administrative duty in the midst of a probe on false ticketing allegations.

According to The Hamilton Spectator, all seven officers who worked on ACTION team one – including the team's sergeant – have been taken off active duty.

CBC Hamilton has reached out to Clint Twolan, recently elected president of the Hamilton Police Association, for comment.

In an email, police spokesperson Catherine Martin said that all internal investigations "must be kept confidential" because of the Police Services Act.

"What we can say is that the Service takes any allegations of misconduct very seriously," she said. "Internal investigations are thorough and they involve allegations of potential violations of the Police Services Act as well as the Criminal Code.

"When Police Services Act charges are warranted, there is a Police Services Act tribunal."

According to The Spectator, police sources say detectives are investigating members of the ACTION team after provincial offence notice books were found in a box that was going to be shredded earlier this fall.

The tickets in the books that have to be given to the person being ticketed were still attached.

The Spectator says the tickets were logged with the courts and counted in police statistics but were never handed out.

The ACTION (Addressing Crime Trends In Our Neighbourhoods) team was created four years ago to curb crime rates. The team wears yellow vests and patrols on foot and bicycle, and can often be seen in the downtown core.

No mention of the probe appeared in the service's 2014 year-end crime statistics report. The report does say ACTION officers have issued over 23,300 offence notices since 2010.

It is unclear how this investigation will impact those statistics.