Let’s talk about a few bad apples, and what they do. Or, about “a few bad apples” — in permanent quotation marks, almost audible in the manner it is spoken — the go-to cliché invoked whenever an episode of apparently unjustified police violence or misbehaviour becomes public.

I’ve heard it, and the phrase has sprung to mind, after news this month about an off-duty police officer who is accused of using a metal pipe to beat Dafonte Miller, a Black teenager from Whitby, so badly he will lose the use of one of his eyes.

Most cops are good people, many say. This is a just a case of “a few bad apples.”

My sense is that people repeating it mean to suggest that the alleged bad actions we’ve become aware of don’t indicate a wider problem, don’t show a system-wide problem, shouldn’t reflect on entire police departments. From the context of the arguments it is used in, that’s what it seems to mean. My colleague Shree Paradkar took on the “bad apples” contention this week, arguing against exactly that interpretation.

But what jumps out to me is that those using the cliché this way seem to be ignoring the rest of the old saying — perhaps they’ve used it so much and so often they forget what it is supposed to mean. And that’s particularly sad because police misconduct is one case in which the cliché seems particularly apt.

“One bad apple spoils the bunch.” Its metaphorical meaning comes from a literal truth: a rotten apple in a bushel full of apples will cause the rest to rot, because overripe apples emit a gas that will hasten the ripening and eventual rotting of all the others around them.

This is not a saying that warns against letting the behaviour of one or two members of a group affect your impression of the whole group. It is a saying advising you to remove bad members of a group before their toxicity contaminates everyone and everything around them.

Let’s look at what we have learned about the case of Dafonte Miller: one night in December, around 3 a.m., Miller and some friends were walking down the street near where he lives in Whitby. It is alleged that Michael Theriault, an off-duty Toronto police officer, and Christian Theriault, a civilian said by Miller’s lawyer Julian Falconer to be his brother, approached the boys as they passed the house where Theriault’s father (also a Toronto police officer) lives, according to Falconer. It’s alleged by Falconer that Theriault identified himself as a police officer and demanded to know what Miller and his friends were doing there. When the boys refused to answer, the Theriault brothers allegedly chased them down, caught Miller and beat him with a steel pipe, breaking bones in his face and wrist and injuring his eye in way that means it will have to be removed. None of these allegations have been tested in court.

According to Falconer, the teen called 911 and attempted to bang on the door of a neighbour to get help. When the Durham regional police arrived, they did not conduct much of an investigation — they took no witness statements, for example. Instead they charged Miller — the teen who had been beaten — with a series of crimes, including assault. Those charges were later dropped by the crown.

Another thing Durham police did not do is call the Special Investigations Unit, which is responsible for handling investigations in which a police officer has seriously harmed or killed someone. They did, apparently, advise the Toronto police department that one of its officers had been involved in the incident. Toronto police did not report it to the SIU either.

It was Miller’s lawyer, Falconer, who finally alerted the SIU to the alleged violent attack. In mid-July, the SIU laid charges against both Michael and Christian Theriault for aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, and public mischief.

Now, let us assume — and hope — that there are very few police officers who would do what Theriault is alleged to have done: chase down and savagely beat a teen for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, that he was walking through the wrong neighbourhood at night — though it appears it was his own neighbourhood too, or close to it.

Most cops I don’t believe would do something like that. Maybe just “a few bad apples.” But look what happened next: the on-duty Durham police called to the scene charged the alleged victim. Two different police departments failed to investigate and take action against the officer involved, and failed to alert the SIU who are supposed to independently investigate such allegations.

It is becoming harder to believe that this type of behaviour — covering up for misbehaviour or violence, looking the other way or refusing to co-operate in investigations of alleged police officer misconduct — is uncommon or accidental.

“It’s not fumbling ‘Keystone Cops’ here, it’s a consistent — and I’ve seen it in hundreds of cases — consistent thought process: Avoid the SIU at all cost,” former SIU director and Ontario ombudsman Andre Marin told the Star recently.

My colleague Wendy Gillis reported this spring on more than 150 letters from the SIU to Toronto’s police chief complaining of actions by police that “appear to have violated their legal duty to co-operate with the provincial watchdog, including allegations police failed to immediately notify the SIU of a serious civilian injury or interfered with a scene after the watchdog took over an investigation.”

The apparent code of silence in the protection of officers extends to the highest levels, where reports on problems and investigations are routinely kept secret from the public.

Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders has called in Waterloo police to investigate the circumstances around the assault on Dafonte. Mayor John Tory has promised to make the findings public. Durham’s police Chief Paul Martin told the Star’s Peter Goffin he has ordered an internal review of his force’s response to the beating. Martin could not say if the findings would be made public.

Some police or police supporters may think that anything that would make one officer look bad is bad for all police. So making sure it never becomes known, they might think, serves some greater cause.

But shielding bad behaviour allows it to continue, and to spread. It makes those with bad intentions certain they have licence to act on them. It makes others less inclined to suppress their own worst impulses. It makes everyone involved — not just those who may have initiated bad actions or made mistakes — part of a coverup that perpetrates injustice. It takes an isolated rotten act and allows it to infect the whole system. The police department is an organization set up to uphold the law — if they start undermining it for their own purposes, they have already failed.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

And when such apparent coverups come to light, they rot out public confidence in the whole system, for good reason.

A few bad apples? Maybe to start. But the only way to ensure they remain “only a few” is if they are identified, removed, and discarded from the rest as soon as possible. Otherwise, the cliché tells us surely enough what’s bound to happen.