A GTA police officer is accused of trafficking official police uniforms
The officer is one of several accused of corruption and organized crime activity following the Project South investigation
Details continue to emerge surrounding Project South, a seven-month investigation that found a group of Toronto police officers allegedly participated in organized crime and corruption. Last week, eight current and former GTA officers were alleged to have unlawfully accessed personal information and shared it with organized crime contacts, who carried out shootings and other violent crimes, including an attack at the home of a corrections management staff member.
Related: Olivia Chow says police officers found guilty of crime “deserve to be thrown in jail”
Ontario’s inspector general of policing announced yesterday that he will order an independent review of alleged police corruption.
Today, the Toronto Star reports that one of the arrested officers, 56-year-old Constable Timothy Barnhardt, is accused of not only of carrying a police-issued firearm outside of work “for a purpose dangerous to the public peace,” but conspiring to provide official police uniforms to members of an organized crime network.
According to documents reviewed by the Star, Barnhardt’s co-accused, 43-year-old Brian Da Costa, is an alleged drug trafficker who was arrested with 169 pounds of illegal cannabis and one pound of fentanyl.
The documents do not detail what exactly the uniforms were intended for, but say the officer traded in police uniforms and clothing last October.
Charges against the two include trafficking in property obtained by crime not exceeding $5,000.
Related: In response to police corruption arrests, Doug Ford says “there’s always a few bad apples”
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
