Police Name Tags Are Not a Safety Hazard

Ontario board rules they have not made policing less dangerous

by Gordon Sova (gordon.sova@thomsonreuters.com)

It is difficult to avoid a subtle sense of irony when reading the Ontario Labour Relations Board’s decision, brought down on December 20, that the safety of uniformed members of the Toronto Police Services is not significantly lessened by the requirement that they wear name tags.

The complaint was originally made in 2006 when the policy was instituted, so any relationship to the G20 demonstration charges is coincidental.

The mandatory wearing of name tags is not universal in Canada: the Ontario Provincial Police, the Windsor police and the Winnipeg police are not required to.  On the other hand, the Florida Highway Patrol has had name tags since 1939 with no problems.

The Toronto Police Assn. (TPA) provided a number of scenarios under which wearing a name tag might be hazardous.  Some seem reasonable: criminals and stalkers being able to identify and track individual officers, and members of a minority being able to identify the ethnicity of a police officer through his or her name tag.

Others were less so: the danger that an officer might be injured if a metal name tag (no longer mandatory) were to shatter when struck by a bullet.

The problem for vice-chair Ian Anderson of the OLRB was that the TPA could come up with virtually no evidence to support these hypothetical situations.  “Policing is an inherently risky profession.  Some of those risks relate to police officers being identified.  The evidence does not establish that the wearing of name tags has been related to any material increase in that risk.”

There is a danger when criminals can identify police officers, but the evidence showed that that danger has not grown through the use of name tags.  There are a number of other legitimate ways those names can be obtained and the advent of name tags has not resulted in a rash of assaults against off-duty cops. 

The bulk of the evidence involved spur-of-the-moment threats by people in custody.  The threat would have been made anyway, and almost certainly not been acted on; the difference is that it can be made a little more personal.

The TPA has consistently objected to the requirement that officers wear name tags.  This finding removes one of the few possible legitimate premises for that objection.