We witnessed this week the best of policing.An officer who held his nerve and held his ground against a suspect who seemed hell-bent on suicide-by-cop. The dramatic confrontation ended with Alek Minassian — subsequently charged with 10 counts of murder and 14 counts of attempted murder in Monday’s van rampage down Yonge St. sidewalks — on his knees and Const. Ken Lam snapping on the handcuffs.But also this week, over the past five weeks, a different shade of policing — darker, dirty — was exposed in a downtown courtroom.Not a Toronto cop but a veteran of the Hamilton Police Service, formerly a member of the guns and gangs unit.A world where Det. Const. Craig Ruthowsky moved with apparent cunning and greed, simultaneously ringing up bad guys and profiting off them, aligning with them.On Wednesday, late into their third day of deliberation, a jury returned guilty verdicts on charges of bribery, obstruction of justice, breach of trust and cocaine trafficking.When drug dealers with eye-popping criminal histories have more credibility than a cop with 17 years on the force — Hamilton,, you have a problem.Jurors believed the testimony of some unsavoury individuals — including, crucially, Mr. X, a seedy drug merchant and the Crown’s star witness — rather than the elaborate justifications, obfuscations and gerrymandered accounts of the accused.“His evidence was a joke,” defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine told the jury in his closing address. “Total, absolute perjury.”But their verdict puts the lie to the lie. If there was anyone perjuring under oath, by its rendering the jury concluded it was Ruthowsky.Over the course of the lengthy trial in which Ruthowsky took the stand in his own defence, court heard duelling versions of the defendant’s conduct and his reasons for it — that he had groomed Mr. X as an informant, a snitch, which the witness adamantly denied. That he, Ruthowsky, was a m ...
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