What Are The Consequences If A Police Officer Fails To Appear In Court?

You’re in a courtroom. You’re waiting for a police officer to appear. He does not show up.

Interesting position for you to be in. It spawns an obvious question. That question is, what are the consequences if a police officer fails to appear in court? Very common question to ask. It’s common to me that I get this question, when I’m meeting with a client, even before we get to the courtroom. Why does that question come up?

That question comes up for this reason in my experience. I’ve been doing this for approximately 40 years. When I first started into this particular industry, all police officers that were going to attend court had all of their schedule, their entire year’s schedule was on what we would call a furlough list.

It would be a book. That book was a binder. It was probably a four inch ring binder, and you would turn to Officer Smart and on that list would have every date for the year when they’re available and when they’re not available. This book was used hundreds of times throughout the day. In that system, lots of mistakes were made.

The clerk would flip, grab the wrong furlough, so instead of asking, looking at officer smart furlough, she would look at officer not so smart furlough and select the wrong date. Now people would go to court, they would be waiting, and an officer would not appear. And in many of those experiences, the court would demand or the Crown would fail to have the evidence at the court.

They would not ask for an adjournment. They would quickly withdraw the case or the court would dismiss it for not having the evidence there. That is the history that I’ve noted in the Ontario court system. Moving forward, computers were eventually introduced to the system. That eliminated that human error.

That clerk did not have that opportunity to make that mistake. So in our environment today in 2024 across Ontario, those lists are all computerized. So when a date is selected for an officer to appear in court, that is the same date as with the court, with the prosecutor, with the defense counsel, and with the defendant.

Everyone knows the date, it’s accurate, and what that has led to is it’s very rare that officers do not appear in court. It’s very rare that they did not know that they had to be there. And as a result, there’s very little of that. However, that question, you know what’s going to happen, I believe the officer may not appear because that’s what I’ve heard.

You know, when my father or grandfather had gone to court, nobody showed up and they won their case. It’s very rare that that happens. In most of these cases, if an officer’s not there, there is a reason they’re not there. They may be involved in another court case. Which means the matter will be stood down, and they will show up eventually.

They may be at an emergency call. And that will afford the prosecutor the opportunity to ask for a legitimate adjournment to do the case on another day. So, it’s been my experience. Overall that it’s quite rare and it’s not something you want to count on that an officer not showing up is not going to be something you want to rely on to defend such an important thing in that courtroom.