VicPD pays six years in salary to suspended officers
Between 2024 and 2025, VicPD suspended six officers with pay for a total of 13,040 hours. That works out to 6.2 years of officer time, or an average of more than a year for each of those six officers.
According to B.C.’s Police Act, municipal police chiefs can suspend officers during police misconduct investigations, or if the officers are alleged to have committed a federal or provincial offence. If police boards decide it’s in the public interest, the board can require that those suspensions are served without pay. Officers can also be suspended without pay if they’re found to have committed misconduct.
In this case, VicPD’s 6.2 years of suspensions were paid. While we don’t know the positions and salaries of the officers, we can estimate. At 1st class constable wages of $61.37 an hour, it would work out to over $800,000 in public money spent keeping those officers home. Put another way, VicPD may have spent about 0.5% of its annual budget each year ($400,000) paying suspended officers, while city council made cuts.
If VicPD releases the amount it paid to suspended officers in 2024 and 2025, I will update this post.
Five officers currently suspended with pay
In addition to suspensions over the last two years, I asked VicPD how many officers were currently suspended. VicPD responded on June 26, 2026, to say that five officers were suspended with pay.
Based on the timing, that figure may include a VicPD officer charged with sexual assault.
VicPD’s paid suspensions on the rise
VicPD’s paid suspensions appear to be trending up. Based on a previous FOI, we know that between 2018 and 2023, VicPD also suspended six officers with pay. But that was over a six-year period, and the total paid suspensions averaged out to 1,186 hours (30 weeks) per year. The 2024 to 2025 FOI shows that VicPD’s annual average of paid suspensions has more than quintupled, to 6,520 hours (162 weeks) per year.
Unpaid suspensions
VicPD also suspended four officers without pay between 2024 and 2025, for a total of 144 hours. At about 3.5 weeks of officer time, VicPD’s unpaid suspensions are a fraction of its paid suspensions.
VicPD says “there are some officers that have periods of suspension with pay and without pay,” so we can conclude that VicPD suspended somewhere between six and nine officers between 2024 and 2025.
Some details on VicPD’s unpaid suspensions can be found in the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner’s annual report, including a one-day suspension for a VicPD officer who used their police car to intentionally hit a cyclist.
FOI documents