LETHBRIDGE, AB – Lethbridge-West MLA Shannon Phillips revealing damning new allegations against the Lethbridge Police Service in a CBC News exclusive.
In addition to the two officers already identified for surveilling her inappropriately back in 2017, Phillips now tells the CBC she recently received about 9,000 pages under a Freedom of Information request regarding herself and the LPS.
The documents show that Phillips’ name was searched eight times by five different officers in 2018 with no investigative purpose recorded.
Another find which Phillips calls shocking, is a record of a complaint that was made about something that happened at a local pub in 2016 of which she had no awareness.
In a Zoom call with Lethbridge media Monday afternoon, she says “someone complained that they had reasonable grounds to believe that they had been given a drink that had a drug in it and they also had reasonable grounds to believe that drink had been intended for me.”
Phillips says she is listed as a complainant in that police file but was never told about it by Lethbridge Police.
She says it could have been a serious matter, not a credible allegation, or something in between, but she doesn’t know because she wasn’t informed.
Phillips says the Lethbridge Police Service has “a lot of work to do to repair public trust. It has been broken and when law enforcement does not enjoy public trust, then you have a public safety problem. And we can’t have that.”
Lethbridge Police are unable to comment as an investigation is ongoing by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team. You can read more about that here: ASIRT investigating possible unauthorized use of databases by Lethbridge Police
–with files from CBC News
