“Everybody complains about us.”

That was Barrie Police Const. Jason Nevill on the witness stand earlier this year.

Everybody, it would appear, had a pretty good measure of the man.

There have been at least 20 public complaints against Nevill, substantiated or not, in the past 13 years.

In 2005, Nevill was acquitted of assault against a civilian. But professional standards docked him 16 hours pay.

In 2007, he received a reprimand and was docked one hour’s pay for insubordination. He’d called his sergeant, during parade, a “f------g moron.”

At a 2009 meeting of the Barrie Police Services Board, during a discussion about complaints that could possibly lead to litigation, then-police chief Wayne Frechette described Nevill as a “danger,” speculated the 230-pound weight-lifting officer may have been using steroids, and informed the board that he’d taken away Nevill’s firearm as a disciplinary action.

Those allegations are contained in a statement that Don MacNeill, a former appointee to the board, signed in June, right after Nevill was convicted of assault causing bodily harm and fabricating evidence in the vicious beating of an innocent man at a Barrie mall in 2010.

“When I first heard that the OPP had laid charges against Nevill, I almost fell off my chair,” MacNeill told the Star this week. “I couldn’t believe this man was still on the force.”

MacNeill, it should be noted, was himself kicked off the board following conviction on a domestic assault charge — for throwing a TV remote control at his now ex-wife. But in 2008, he came to know Nevill when both were taking paralegal courses at a Barrie college. “At the time, Nevill was on suspension over an assault,” MacNeill recalls.

He thought Nevill was “a peculiar personality.” As MacNeill wrote in his statement: “For example, he would frequently ask the instructor if he could take his shirt off and attend class only in his tank top.”

MacNeill certainly recognized Nevill’s name when it came up at the board meeting. “He was a conceited guy, with his buttons undone to show off his muscle-shirt.”

When Nevill was charged, MacNeill was astonished that the cop was still out there, carrying a gun, and riding alone in a cruiser on the night he came into violent contact with Jason Stern.

Last week, Nevill was sentenced to one year for the assault on Stern — captured by a surveillance camera — and lying about it afterwards. On Tuesday, a judge rejected Nevill’s bid for bail pending his appeal.

The more significant issue, however, is that Barrie police clearly recognized they had a loose cannon on their hands long before Nevill laid a brutal pounding on Stern. This will no doubt come into play as the police department, the City of Barrie and Bayfield Mall defend themselves in the $1 million lawsuit Stern has brought against the whole bunch of them. Only the mall security company, Paragon Protection Ltd. — employer of the two mall cops who held Stern down during the beating (but were never criminally charged) — has thus far filed a statement of defence.

It’s a convoluted story, packed with duplicity.

On Nov. 20, 2010, Stern was leaving the mall around 1 a.m. after a bowling session with his girlfriend and another couple. The other male in this party of four had jumped up and broken an overhead Christmas ornament. Stern had gone back inside to retrieve the wallet he’d forgotten at the bowling alley when he was stopped by two security guards. They in turn called the cops. Stern, who’s admitted he’d had about a half-dozen beers throughout that evening but was not intoxicated — as a judge would later agree — figured he’d just apologize and offer to pay for the busted bauble.

Within 30 seconds of Nevill responding to the call-out, he had Stern on the ground and was whaling away at him, zero to ballistic in less than a minute, even with Stern handcuffed. To this day, Stern, who’d briefly lost consciousness and was later diagnosed with concussion, can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. But he does remember Nevill becoming infuriated when he, Stern, refused to give his friend’s name.

Stern was bleeding profusely yet it was about 20 minutes — after the blood had been washed from the pavement — before Nevill transported him to hospital. “He told me that I was being charged with assaulting a police officer and that I should plead guilty, that I’d just get a fine,” Stern told the Star on Wednesday, in his first media interview since the whole nightmare began three years ago.

In fact, with an assault police charge, Stern was looking at jail time. The charge against him was withdrawn only after the surveillance video surfaced in early 2011. A private investigator hired by Stern’s criminal lawyer learned of the tape’s existence but the mall would not turn it over. It was the Barrie Crown attorney who got her hands on it, immediately dropped the charge and gave the tape to OPP investigators, who ultimately charged Nevill.

“Up until the video, I was a dead duck,” says Stern, who’d had no previous run-ins with police. “Literally, I didn’t have a chance. It was me against a cop and the security guards, who all falsified their notes.”

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Stern knew he was covered with bruises, knew there was a deep gash over his right eye, knew he was concussed — there are medical records — but what the heck had happened? Had he, this bespectacled slightly-built guy really hit a cop to provoke the violent arrest? “I didn’t understand how, out of the blue, I could just go crazy like that. I kept asking myself, ‘did I really do that?’ That’s just not me.”

Not until he was called in by the OPP to view the video did he finally understand.

“I was completely unprepared for it, because I had no recollection of what had actually occurred. And then I watch it, from a kind of third person point of view. It’s something, to watch yourself getting beaten to a bloody pulp, pools of your own blood on the ground. He’s punching me in the head, he’s throwing me on the ground, he’s sitting on me for an extended period of time.”

The day the charges against Stern were dropped, “I felt like a piano had been lifted off my shoulders.”

He was less relieved than fearful. “I didn’t know if they were going to charge him. I was scared. I thought I was going to be blackballed. I thought they were going to come after me. I thought the band of brothers that is the police was going to get me in some way, shape or form.”

Before the tape, his own friends had doubted that the incident could have been unprovoked. “They said, ‘you must have done something. Police don’t just act out like that for nothing’.”

But, as the tape makes clear, there was nothing to explain Nevill’s fury, though he argued at trial that Stern had been drunk and belligerent, that he was leery because Stern had kept his hands in his pockets when confronted. “The pocket is the unknown,” Nevill testified. “There could be a weapon in there.” And: “He was resisting arrest. I was fighting for my life here, and losing.”

A tissue of lies, all of it, as Justice Lorne Chester concluded in the judge-alone trial.

Stern, a 28-year-old commodities trader by profession, has spent three years combating depression and anxiety, fearful of going out alone, in a panic whenever he crosses paths with a police officer.

“I think, that night, (Nevill) wanted to be judge, jury and executioner. Because I wouldn’t give up my friend’s name, he decided to teach me a lesson.

“It’s scary to think that this guy was a public servant, out on the street protecting us, the people.”

There is little sense of vindication, however. He simply came too close to having his life ruined by a lying, thug cop.

“It’s given me a sense of justice prevailing — but only because of the tape. Justice would have failed miserably if not for the video.

“I know that there are good cops out there. But I also know that they can take your life in their hands, crumple it up, spit it out and feel no remorse. As he has shown no remorse.”