A South Porcupine OPP officer is humbled to be recognized for his actions.
Const. Graham MacGregor won the 2022 Police Hero Award for being an on-duty difference maker for uniformed officers from the Police Association of Ontario. He was one of three people honoured this year from over 300 nominations.
He was nominated six times for a Police Hero award, but it's the words of Dré that are the main reason he was acknowledged.
In September 2019, she was "very much rushing to hit my rock bottom," she wrote in her nomination.
"I was burnt out, sleep deprived, addicted to anything and everything, and nursing a psychosis from allowing my PTSD to go unchecked. I had hit my breaking point and crashed my vehicle into a tree. Laying out all the facts is important: In my vehicle, I had paraphernalia, medications that weren’t mine, and I was in a state that one could only assume I was impaired. I was brought to the hospital where I met Officer MacGregor," she wrote.
She takes accountability for what happened that day and said MacGregor didn't cut her any breaks. She was given a sobriety test, which she passed, and she was charged appropriately for negligent driving.
When she admitted herself to the hospital to deal with her PTSD and still needed to be given the ticket, MacGregor delivered it to the hospital and was sensitive to her situation.
"But this was the moment that he became my hero; he had a tear on his cheek. He told me he saw the statement that I gave the detectives," she wrote, explaining that he had learned about her past experiences.
He put her in contact with victim services and from there she spent 38 days in the mental health unit, 14 days in shelter, eight weeks in a trauma-based treatment facility and four months in a treatment facility.
When the officer checked in on her one time at the hospital, it was the only visitor she had during her stay. His actions, she said, helped make sure she didn't remain a victim. Instead, she became a survivor.
Today, standing in a room of mostly police officers and her family to honour MacGregor, she shared that she's a grateful recovering addict and a trafficking survivor.
“If that makes you a little uncomfortable, I’m also a convicted criminal,” she laughed.
In nominating MacGregor for the award, she decided to sacrifice her anonymity.
"I didn’t want another person to feel alone. I didn’t want another person to be afraid or ashamed to ask for help. I don’t want people to forget that walking away from unhealthy is brave even if you stumble a little bit on the way,” she said.
After the ceremony, she recalled MacGregor driving her from the hospital to the police station. He asked if she checks her drugs before using them, which she did.
"And then he asked me, but do you still use them if they have fentanyl? And I did. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, I was so sick I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t hurting my child, my child was always with my parents,” she said.
For Dré, he confronted the thought that she was playing Russian roulette with contaminated drugs.
"And that was the thing that clicked," she said.
"My PTSD, I had to get that handled. And when I was in the hospital, I knew I was in the right place. I knew I was in the right place for the first time. I knew the decision sucked, it sucked all around, but I knew I was making the right choice."
In policing, MacGregor said one of the difficult parts is convincing people that officers actually care.
"There’s a lot of challenges to that in our line of work. If I issue a speeding ticket, does the person think I’m doing it simply because there’s organizational pressures or do they realize I’m trying to prevent them from experiencing the carnage from more vehicle collisions?” he questioned.
He doesn't consider himself a hero.
Instead, he named the list of officers recently killed — Andrew Hong of the Toronto Police Service, Morgan Russell and Devon Northrop of the South Simcoe Police Service, Shaelyn Yang of the RCMP, and Hovingh of the OPP in Manitoulin.
"Those are people that sacrificed their lives simply because of the uniform they wear on their back. I didn’t rescue someone out of a burning building, I didn’t lift a car off of anybody. All I did was I sacrificed a little bit of my time, showed Andréa that somebody cared and I made myself available to support her. And I think that’s something that everybody should be doing whether they’re police officers or not. In society today we should be a lot more kind to each other and just taking the time to show each other that we care,” he said.
Whether you go through the people nominated for the award this year or look to officers working in the community, he said there are examples of people who care. Just like he did.
"It’s humbling to receive this in my name knowing there’s so many other officers out there who are doing the same thing … those officers don’t always get the recognition that our profession deserves,” he said.
While the award is engraved with his name, it's Dré who did the really work, he said, noting her story, determination and resiliency.
