At this moment I feel like pluralizing the hed, from a previous blogpost about OPP antics on the Queensway, in Ottawa. But such is not my way.

Last month, an OPP cop, clearly out of control, indulged in some bizarre behaviour, including towards me. I went ahead and lodged a complaint with the Office of the Independent Review of Police Review Director (OIPRD), and shortly afterwards received a courteous telephone call from a Linda Pestrin, who asked if I were willing to undertake mediation. Sure, I replied, just so long as we all meet on neutral ground.

Shortly after that, I received an email from Pestrin, claiming that the licence plate number that I had provided in my original complaint was “not connected to a police vehicle,” so that mediation could not go ahead. My memory is, not to be overly modest here, razor-sharp, but I’m not young any more, and figured I might have inverted a couple of digits or letters when I got back home. No, said Pestrin in a follow-up email, OIPRD tried several combinations of letters and numbers. I was just wrong. So the whole matter had, she said, been turned over to the OPP for investigation—of themselves. (No word from them at this point.)

I figured old age had at last caught up with me, and felt a bit embarrassed, to be honest, so I let everything drop. Then, returning on the Queensway this morning from delivering my stepson at the same location as before, I chanced to see an OPP van. I looked at the licence plate, and did a bit of a double-take. BDKF 595. Good grief, that looked very like what I had sent to OIPRD. Maybe I had messed up the last three digits, or done something else that might have misled investigators. So this time I wrote it down during a traffic lull—“BigDogKentuckyFried 595.”

I got home and pulled out my copy of the July complaint.

Identical.

And this means one of only two things. Either OIPRD covers for cops—heaven forfend. Or it is merely a grossly incompetent outfit. I have a new email message in to Pestrin, copied this time to my MPP and to a contact at the Ottawa Citizen.

My confidence in my own memory now completely restored, I would ask those readers interested in the realities of civilian oversight of police to stay tuned. This will not be the last chapter in the tale.