For 5 years, a high-ranking BC police officer used police resources to track down, spy on and perform at least 92 searches on his ex-girlfriend and her family, according to documents revealed by CTV News on Friday.
An investigation into the misconduct of Staff Sergeant Andrew Walsh, who was at the time chief of the Saanich Police Department Detective Division, began in April 2021 after a woman with whom he had had a romantic relationship reported to the Office of the Provincial Police Complaints Commissioner.
TB, the woman whose identity remains undisclosed, filed a complaint after Mr Walsh ‘in uniform and out of jurisdiction’ showed up at her home, where he had never been before, nearly four years after the end of their relationship, as determined by the Conduct Authority.
“It was absolutely shocking to me,” TB said, adding that she moved in 2020 and was relieved to live somewhere Sergeant Walsh didn’t know where she lived.
The next day, she contacted the Saanich Police Department, where she had worked for 30 years. One of his main concerns was that Andrew Walsh had used police databases to obtain information about him. She filed a complaint soon after.
The 2021 incident, the inquest found, was just one example of what was described as “extremely serious misconduct” by Mr Walsh after his relationship with TB ended in 2017.
The investigation found that Mr Walsh had in fact used a database to obtain information about TB and 13 of his family members at least 92 times. He conducted searches at least 61 times, all while on duty. Those wanted included TB’s children, mother, siblings and nieces. They also included her ex-husband, her current partner and her deceased father.
“Staff Sergeant Walsh demonstrated intermittent and unwanted communications with Ms. B. over the years between 2017 and 2021 despite her multitude of attempts to have him arrested. His actions go beyond passive contact and are instead active and overt steps that have been deemed in similar police investigations to be harassment or harassment,” the inquest concluded.
The appropriate sanction, the conduct authority said, would be for Sergeant Walsh to be fired.
“Anything other than termination would bring the administration of police discipline into disrepute and be contrary to the public interest,” the documents state.
However, Walsh was never fired. He retired before the investigation was completed.
In October 2017, about three months after the relationship ended, TB retired from her position with the Saanich Police Department, where she served for 30 years.