A Quebec police officer has been suspended for two working days without pay after admitting he abused his authority by stopping a citizen’s video recording of a police encounter.
In Le Commissaire à la déontologie policière c. L’agent Jérôme St-Louis, file C-2025-5593-3, decided October 2, 2026, Quebec’s Tribunal administratif de déontologie policière accepted a jointly recommended sanction. Administrative Judge Sylvie Séguin found that St-Louis violated article 6 of the province’s police code of ethics.
The finding concerned his handling of the phone and ending the recording—not a finding that he deleted the video. St-Louis expressly denied deleting anything. The tribunal also dismissed two other disciplinary counts at the police ethics commissioner’s request.
A recording interrupted during a police stop
The agreed facts described a July 17, 2022 intervention in Montreal. St-Louis and other officers were responding to a 911 call and looking for a suspect. His colleagues stopped a driver in an SUV near the location of the call.
The driver filmed his exchanges with police. When officers decided to remove him from the vehicle, including to handcuff him, his cellphone fell to the ground. St-Louis picked it up and stopped the video recording.
The driver was detained in a police vehicle and later released because he had no connection to the original 911 call.
According to the driver, the video had been deleted and moved to the phone’s trash folder; he was able to recover it after the intervention. The agreed account expressly preserved St-Louis’s denial that he had deleted a video. He admitted instead that, in the circumstances, he should not have manipulated the phone and ended the recording.
In assessing the incident, the tribunal noted the emergency context of the officers’ search for a suspect. It also distinguished what St-Louis had done from a seizure or search of the phone: he had picked it up and ended the recording, but had neither seized nor searched it.
Why the tribunal accepted two days without pay
The commissioner had brought three counts against St-Louis. Alongside the abuse-of-authority count, they alleged that he failed to identify himself by an official document when asked and that his handling of the phone breached a separate duty to respect the law. Those two counts were dismissed; the finding of misconduct was confined to article 6.
St-Louis acknowledged responsibility before the hearing. The agreed facts said he had been a police officer since November 2021 and had no entries on his police ethics record.
The tribunal explained that a disciplinary sanction must account for the seriousness of the misconduct, the circumstances and the officer’s record, while serving deterrence and public protection. But a jointly recommended sanction receives substantial deference. The question was whether accepting it would be contrary to the public interest or bring the administration of justice into disrepute—not what sanction the tribunal might otherwise have chosen.
The parties provided five earlier disciplinary decisions as reference points. Séguin found that the proposed suspension fit within the tribunal’s case law, while emphasizing that comparable cases did not replace an assessment of the particular facts.
She also considered that the agreement followed serious discussions and avoided the time, stress and cost of contested proceedings over both responsibility and sanction. Taken together, those considerations supported accepting the two-day unpaid suspension.
The ruling addressed only St-Louis’s conduct. It did not decide the allegations against the other officers involved in the encounter, award compensation to the driver or make a criminal finding. Its outcome was a disciplinary sanction for the specific, admitted interference with the recording.
