Toronto officer wrote ‘female belligerent’ in his notes after woman disputed a stop-sign ticket — his own in-car video proved him wrong
'I saw you look once and you came right to the stop sign,' the officer can be heard telling Anderson.
On April 6, 2025, at around 10 am, Vashti Anderson pulled over her blue sedan at the intersection of Avon Drive and Black Creek Drive, not expecting what happened next. A police officer stopped her and wrote her a ticket for running the stop sign and labeled her as a “female belligerent.” More than a year later, she went on a quest to prove that she indeed stopped at the stop sign and the ticket was wrongly issued. When she laid all the cards on the table, the police and surveillance footage showed that she had stopped, and her ticket was dismissed, according to a report from July 9, 2026, by CTV News.
'I didn't do anything wrong'
Anderson, a 62-year-old Toronto charity director, had forgotten to carry her driver’s license that day, which was indeed a violation. Anderson maintained that the stop-sign allegation was wrong. “I saw you look once and you came right to the stop sign,” he can be heard telling her in the video. She responded, “No, I looked. I stopped.” He went over to his car to write her a ticket, telling her that he was being nice to her. But all the niceness disappeared when Anderson kept standing her ground. “This was something I honestly didn’t do. I wasn’t guilty of it. I was so surprised. I knew I didn’t do anything wrong,” she later told CTV News.
Despite her showing the insurance slip, the officer insisted that she would get all the tickets. He charged her $110 for a stop sign violation, $110 to provide her driver’s license, and a $65 ticket for failing to surrender the insurance slip. When Anderson didn’t see any way out of the muddle, she started her own search for evidence. At first, she got hold of the police officer's notebook, later identified as Upinder Singh’s notebook through the Freedom of Information Act. On a page, he had recorded her car details along with the notes, “Female belligerent. Said she’s going to the police station to complain about me.”
Who's actually belligerent?
“When I saw the words ‘belligerent female,’ that blew my mind. That tells me the kind of police officer I was dealing with,” Anderson described. “I was quite shocked he would use such a term. It shows his bias right up front.” Next, she retrieved the church’s surveillance footage, the police officer’s bodycam, and an in-car video. While her initial complaint at the Law Enforcement Complaints Agency (LECA) was rejected, the evidence worked in her favor. Her ticket was cancelled.
But as the former Toronto Mayor John Sewell said, the whole thing should never have happened in the first place. “This is all dead wrong,” Sewell said in an interview. “The body camera video shows she is clearly not belligerent. It’s the officer who is belligerent.” Anderson reflected that fighting the ticket meant struggling through a matrix of bureaucracy.
Web of bureaucracy
Anderson’s case also comes amid broader concerns about accuracy and accountability in traffic enforcement. As an example, cited by the Northeastern News, Connecticut State Police records identified at least 26,000 traffic-stop records that could not be matched to actual stops between 2014 and 2021, according to an audit. One trooper single-handedly logged 1,350 false tickets during this period. Anderson, for her part, asserted, “I truly, truly, truly want accountability. I just happen to be the one person who decided I’m not going to sit and keep quiet.”
'He is not a cop.'
Meanwhile, viewers slammed the police in the comments, roasting the cops for fraud and deception. @davidbroughall3782 commented, “Three words that will never come out of the mouth of any cop: ‘I was wrong.’” @victorbombosemugooma8320 said, “This is a stain on the department. They need to come out and clear this.” @kevin-j4d7j added, “I can only imagine how many other victims from this cop. Fire him immediately!”
More on Scoop Upworthy
Share on Facebook
