Regina police chief commits to more serious penalties for future privacy breaches

The people of Regina have been letting the force know how unhappy they are about a recent discipline decision around privacy, according to Regina Police Chief Lorilee Davies.

In December, a report from the Information and Privacy Commissioner described privacy breaches by Regina constable Clinton Duquette, who’d been snooping on his ex and her friends and family multiple times over about three years.

The punishment from the police service was one day’s suspension with pay and a requirement to take the privacy training again.

“He’s very upset. He is embarrassed. He’s embarrassed for our organization,” said Davies at the time.

When speaking about the sentence for Robert Semenchuck on Friday, Davies mentioned the Duquette case as well, prefacing it by saying the two were very different.

“I think we’ve heard from the (Duquette) investigation that the public expectation in that instance was beyond a one-day suspension … I hear what the community is saying,” said Davies on Friday.

She said the punishment for Duquette has already been laid down and can’t be changed now.

She said she’d let the rest of the police members know that in the future any such breaches would be dealt with more severely. Davies couldn’t say exactly what that would mean, explaining each case needs to be dealt with individually.

The chief also went through the nine recommendations for action the privacy commissioner had made in the case; the service is accepting eight of the nine recommendations.

Davies said the only recommendations the service isn’t accepting is the one that called for Duquette’s access to the police database to be permanently revoked. Davies said he needs the access to do his job, and revoking it would be tantamount to firing him.

She said the police service already does random audits in the system, looking at files to see who’s accessed them and if they had an appropriate reason. The service will soon start also auditing individuals randomly to see if they have any inappropriate accesses.

One of the recommendations was to implement a zero-tolerance policy for privacy breaches, and Davies said the service already has that.

“Zero tolerance does not and cannot mean a fixed disciplinary response to every instance of inappropriate access to information; each case must be considered on its own merits,” she said.

Davies talked about the actions to respond to these recommendations — those already taken and those in the process — as part of the work the police service has been doing to strengthen its systems against breaches like Duquette’s and Semenchuck’s.

The privacy case has been forwarded to the province’s Attorney General to see if it merits charges under Local Authority Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (LA FOIP) legislation.