More than 400 complaints made against Ottawa police officers during ‘Freedom Convoy’

The public made 410 complaints about police officer conduct during the “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations in Ottawa last year, but nearly all of them were dismissed. The Ottawa police board’s 2022 annual report says public complaints nearly doubled from the previous year, with an 88-per-cent increase overall, and 94 per cent more complaints relating to police conduct. The provincial Office of the Independent Police Review Director received more than a thousand total complaints about the Ottawa Police Service, and 571 reports about the conduct of its officers. The report said another 70 complaints relating to the protests, still pending in 2022, were consolidated into two complaints. Ottawa police officers were called on almost 215,000 times in total, according to the report.