This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Creeped out by Men, Police Edition
This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays, I’m skipping the tales of bizarre bylaws and courtroom antics. We’re going to look at three recent police misconduct cases in Canada with male police officers. You may ask yourself, would you rather spend a night alone in the woods with a random bear or a random police officer?
I’m struggling. The weather is lovely in Vancouver, sunny and beautiful, and you like to think that the world is in good shape. Then you start thinking about what’s going on. The release of the files has caused me once again to think about trust. Who can you trust? What are their motivations? It’s a horrible reminder that you simply can’t trust men in many circumstances.
You’ll recall about two years ago, there was a TikTok that posed the question to women whether they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a random man or a random bear. It struck a nerve with many of us. The discussion revealed some fundamental truths and fundamental concerns.
With the release of the files, this is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal. Men aren’t looking very good these days. Women are thinking about this. I don’t know that men are thinking about it to the extent they should.
When it comes to the police, we hold the police in particularly high esteem generally as a society. There are good reasons for that. The police expect us to respect them. In other contexts, respect is earned. The police expect us to respect them for having a badge.
Earlier this week, a news story came out that said 400 RCMP members were accused of misconduct in 2024. This hasn’t got the amount of coverage by journalists I think it should probably get. So I decided to write about bad police behavior this week for Weird and Wacky Wednesdays. I started searching for cases of bad police behavior where the officers were fired and it made it in the news.
It was apparent looking at my Google search results that all of the cases in the news involve police officers who were men. When I started looking at how creepy these incidents are, it shakes your sense of safety.
The atrocious chat logs: racism and sexism In Coquitlam
You may recall that Coquitlam RCMP Constables Ian Solven, Philip Dick, and Mersad Mesbah were suspended over a private Signal chat filled with what was initially described as “atrocious” comments. The details were stomach-churning: jokes about “Tasering unarmed Black people,” cruel mockery of a sexual assault victim, degrading comments about female colleagues’ bodies, and racist slurs against Indigenous and Asian people.
Their defence in the recent code of conduct hearings was that this was just “venting” in a private space. Their commanding officer recognized it for what it was “a campaign of hate, designed to hurt and divide.” He wrote of his anger at watching “sworn members openly engage in racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny.”
The amount of evidence was overwhelming. This was not just in Signal chats but also using RCMP internal communication terminals. These three officers engaged in this behavior for an ongoing period.
Recently, Constable Mersad Mesbah has been fired with immediate effect. This happened after a hearing before our police conduct adjudicator. Constable Ian Solven was ordered to resign or be fired. He resigned in December 2025. It appears that Constable Philip Dick’s Case is still under consideration.
This was never about a few bad jokes. It was the exposed mentality of men who saw the public they swore to serve as objects for mockery and contempt. When the authority figure views you as less than human, you are not safe.
The Predator Who Used His Badge as a Tool
If the Coquitlam case reveals a hateful mindset, the case of former New Brunswick RCMP Corporal Jeremy Bastarache shows it acted upon in the most predatory way.
Bastarache now faces a total of eight sex-related criminal charges involving youths. The allegations include communicating for a sexual purpose, procuring a person under 18, and making child pornography. An international investigation, sparked by Australian police, suggests he used his position and access to target the most vulnerable.
Here, the threat is not just in vile words, but in calculated action. It is the literal weaponization of trust and authority to exploit. The protector is the predator, and the badge is his hunting license.
The Stalker in the Patrol Car
Finally, the case of Edmonton Police Constable Hunter Robinz completes this horrific trifecta by showing the intimate, personalized threat.
Last May, Robinz was sentenced to six months in jail for criminal breach of trust. His method was to target vulnerable women he met on calls. These were victims of domestic violence, break-ins, and distress. He let himself into their homes, stalked their residences, and pursued them sexually. One victim declined a rape kit after a sexual assault because she had “recently had sex with her police officer ‘boyfriend’.”
Justice Susan Bercov, in sentencing him, said a strong message” needed to be sent. The message is clear: for certain men, vulnerability is an invitation, and the uniform is a tool to exploit it.
The sad unavoidable conclusion
These are not isolated “bad apples.” They are connected symptoms.
The chats teach us how these men talk about people when they think no one is listening. It is the ideology that precedes the act. Then there is the exploitation of power, that is using the state-granted authority, the access to private data, and the mantle of the “helper” to satisfy personal predation.
For a woman, a young person seeking help, or a marginalized person, the act of calling the police, the fundamental societal safety mechanism, carries its own latent risk. Is the person who responds a protector, or are they the threat?
This is the point. The release of the files and these cases here at home underscore a terrifying pattern among some men.
That is not wacky. It is a fundamental crisis of safety.
I’ll see you next week if I can pull together three Somewhat less distressing stories.
