Lack of documentation forces Crown to drop charge of personating RCMP sergeant

The case against a man charged with personating a Nova Scotia RCMP officer has been dropped due to a lack of documentation in court.

A Queens County, N.S., man who RCMP said showed up at a detachment pretending to be another officer has had a criminal charge dropped.

Christopher Allan MacLeod, 43, was accused of personating a peace officer from an incident late last year.

According to the RCMP, MacLeod showed up at the Cookville detachment, near Bridgewater N.S., on Dec. 26 dressed in civilian clothes, saying that he was a sergeant who was transferred from Alberta.

But the trial judge heard the officer who encountered the man found it “odd, for sure,” that a new member could be arriving then, given the fact that it was a holiday and late at night.

“When the officer asked the man for RCMP identification, he advised he didn’t have any,” read a news release from the force dated Jan. 8.

“I’ve never heard of a situation like this,” says Chris Lewis, CTV’s public safety analyst, and former OPP commissioner. “This is odd.”

A second officer arrived on scene, according to trial testimony, and after other police database searches were complete, he arrested the man for personating a peace officer.

But that charge, and an associated breach, were dropped by the Crown in Bridgewater provincial court last week because it didn’t offer the proper evidence to prove the charge.

“The Crown reviewed the file and just doesn’t have the documentary evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was not a police officer,” said Crown prosecutor Hannah Cameron during MacLeod’s trial.

That came after Judge Timothy Landry said results of queries from the arresting officer – to confirm that MacLeod was not in any police database – could not be used as an essential element to get a conviction.

Speaking to CTV News Atlantic on Friday, Lewis explained a sworn document from someone who is in charge of one of the databases would be needed to prove the accused person’s name is nowhere to be found, rather than having that testimony come from frontline officers.

“It’s a serious charge,” says Robert Currie, a criminal law professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law. “We know in Nova Scotia how serious it is.

“I think there is an unfortunate tendency in cases like this for people to say this is a person who got off on a technicality, but the rules of evidence are not a technicality.

“They are what stand between us and the state arbitrarily being able to put us in jail. So, it’s really important that all the proper steps be taken.”

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