The homeless senior cops hit with $48K in fines: Fake ticket trial testimony

When 65-year-old Thomas Groves isn't in the hospital, like he is now, he hangs out downtown. He often stays at the YMCA or the Salvation Army shelters.

And when he hangs out downtown, he told a courtroom Monday, he guesses police hand him sometimes three tickets a day.

For what? asked assistant Crown attorney David King.

"Drinking in public," Groves said.

And what did he do with them?

"I'd put them in the garbage. I had no way of paying them," he said.

Groves was a witness testifying in the case against four Hamilton police officers from the ACTION and mounted units who are charged with falsifying tickets in 2014. Court heard Monday the officers on the ACTION team were trying to reach a goal of 100 to 120 tickets per officer per year.

Constables Bhupesh Gulati, Shawn Smith, Stephen Travale and Daniel Williams are each charged with obstructing justice between April 1 and Oct. 1, 2014.

Each was also charged with fabricating between two and six tickets, and each pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Groves is the first of a series of witnesses, many of them among a transient population frequently ticketed downtown who allegedly weren't handed some copies of tickets written against them.

Trial begins for four officers

Groves was foggy on a lot of details, and couldn't corroborate dates or months he was asked about. He faces $48,000 in fines from offences over the years, said defence counsel Gary Clewley.

"It added up, I guess," Groves said.

It was never identified in Monday's proceedings whether or how many of the fake tickets had Groves' name on them, but later, Const. Trevor Holmes testified that Groves was one of the ACTION unit's familiar faces – their "frequent fliers," as he put it.

Holmes said he'd issued several tickets to Groves for drinking in public. Groves usually had Laker Ice Beer in his pocket. It's common practice for ACTION officers to pour out the beer, Holmes said, and hand the offender the green portion of a carbon copy ticket packet called a provincial offence notice.

At issue in the trial that began Monday includes times when the accused officers allegedly didn't hand the green portion to the offender – thus counting the ticket as a "stat" toward their goal for number of tickets to issue without actually serving the person.

That goal looked like an average of 100 to 120 tickets per officer per year, testified Staff Sgt. Philip Fleming, who was overseeing the mounted and ACTION units in 2014. They typically were for traffic, liquor, panhandling and trespassing offences.

Fleming said that the ACTION team together came up with the goal together as a "consensus" at the beginning of 2014. He said if anyone was "having issues" with writing tickets, they would work with their supervisor to come up with a plan.

He said none of the officers on ACTION team one, which included Travale, Gulati and Williams, were having issues.

'Ghost tickets'

Holmes testified that he had helped Fleming dig through shredder boxes looking for a lost notebook.

While that was happening, he said, he noticed several green copies of tickets in the boxes. That surprised him, so when he bumped into an officer whose name was on one, Staci Tyldesley, he confronted her, he said.

(Tyldesley also faces related charges; those are being heard in a separate preliminary hearing that began last month.)

He said he asked her about whether she was writing "ghost tickets".

Holmes said Monday that she replied, "Yes, if we can't get anything, we'll make one up."

He said he told her to "not be so stupid."

But under cross-examination from Clewley, he admitted he didn't know for sure whether that was the exact quotes from either himself or Tyldesley.

Clewley will continue cross-examining Holmes on Tuesday.

Police sent in the morning to round up witnesses

Earlier Monday, when King laid out the nutshell of the cause for Justice Pamela Borghesan, he noted there are challenges with rounding up the witnesses.

King said the court will "hear from as many of these people as we can." But most of them, he said, are "living a lifestyle where their address changes frequently," or they have no fixed address.

So the police will be sent out in the morning to see "who they can grab" to testify that day.

They didn't have that trouble with Groves, as he's been in the hospital for several months following a heart attack earlier this year.

The case will include an examination of times and dates written on tickets, contrasted with times when the officers were logged in to computer systems in the station, King said.

The trial continues Tuesday.