Posted By TREVOR PRITCHARD

A second Ontario Provincial Police officer told the Cornwall Public Inquiry Monday that 22 video tapes seized in February 1993 did not show children being abused.

But in hindsight, the tapes should have been sent to the OPP's child pornography unit for proper analysis, instead of being handled by officers at the Lancaster OPP detachment, Const. Steve McDougald testified.

McDougald, 45, was assigned to review the now-infamous tapes after he and another officer, Det. Const. Randy Millar, seized them from the home of alleged abuse victim Ron Leroux in 1993.

After the OPP destroyed the tapes later that year, rumours began to spread that they showed prominent local people having sex with children.

According to a statement McDougald gave the OPP's Project Truth team in 1998, he and Millar came across the tapes while they were searching Leroux's Summerstown home for two illegal handguns.

Millar found the majority of the 22 tapes inside a locked suitcase that had been placed inside an upstairs crawl space.

After the two officers returned to the Lancaster OPP detachment, their supervisor, Staff Sgt. Jim McWade, gave McDougald the responsibility of reviewing the tapes.

All the tapes, McDougald told Project Truth, showed male homosexual pornography and were "professionally produced and manufactured."

"I believed, at the time, fast forwarding through was sufficient," McDougald explained. "Sixteen years ago, there were no allegations of sexual impropriety."

McDougald said McWade did not send the tapes to Project P, the OPP's Child Pornography Section at the force's Orillia, Ont. headquarters, because they were "too busy with other investigations."

Police destroyed the tapes later that year after Leroux said he didn't want them back.

The inquiry is probing how institutions like the OPP reacted to allegations of historical sexual abuse. When McWade took the stand in October, he too said he was satisfied the tapes did not contain any sexual abuse.

Under cross-examination by Citizens for Community Renewal lawyer Helen Daley, McDougald admitted that while he "more than likely" would have seen a crime using his methods, the tapes should have still been sent to Project P.

Daley asked McDougald what he meant when, during his examination-in-chief, he said he did not feel "comfortable" enough to watch all 22 tapes in their entirety.

"I just did not feel comfortable viewing that kind of tape," said McDougald, adding that didn't affect his ability to carry out his investigation.

Yet inquiry commissioner Normand Glaude suggested there were certain elements of McDougald's investigation - like the fact McDougald had omitted the seizure of the tapes from one OPP document, and had mentioned in his notebook he was keeping an eye out for local people while watching the tapes - that might seem suspicious to people with a "sinister" point-of-view.

The omission was simply an "error," said McDougald, while the reference to local people was just a way to "refresh" his memory.

"That was just a term that I used," he said. "The tapes were seized long before I had any knowledge (of any allegations of a conspiracy)."

Smith is expected to take the stand when this inquiry resumes this morning.