Police action unit trial continues

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Five members of the Hamilton police action unit facing charges related to writing fake provincial offence tickets were in court today, four of them as defendants and one as a witness for the crown. Staci Tyldesley took the stand today, she is also charged with writing fake tickets in 2014 but she’s being tried separately from the other four action officers on trial, her case is still in the preliminary hearing stage.

She worked closely with Bhupesh Gulati and Daniel Williams, two officers on trial and she knew Shawn Smith and Stephen Travale, the other two accused, although not as well. Earlier in the trial court heard from an officer who had seen parts of tickets in the police paper shredder, the parts that are supposed to be given to people being ticketed for things like panhandling or drinking alcohol in public. Most of the tickets were issued to the same handful of downtown offenders, many of whom have testified they would rip the tickets up. Some have accumulated 10’s of thousands of dollars in fines. The officer who found those portions in the shredder said he asked Tyldesley if she was writing ghost tickets and that she answered yes, if they needed to make their ticket quotas.

Today though, Tyldesley gave her version of events. She said she told the officer she and others would only throw tickets in the shredder if the person ticketed refused to take their copy, after all it contained personal information. She said the only thing that seemed weird to her was that the other officer was making such a big deal of the shredded tickets.

The court also heard from a city worker who processes provincial offence tickets. She said the city could only take someone’s driver’s licence or license plate for moving violations, not, panhandling for example. If those offenses are unpaid they send the finds to a collection agent and notify the credit bureau but she said if the ticketed person had no fixed address, it was unlikely funds could be collected and the city writes off a number of those tickets every year.

Tyldesley has not finished her testimony, she’ll be back on the stand Monday morning.