Regina Police Service

Yeah, this story started for me early in 2023 when a good friend of mine, Carrie Benjo, sent me a message on Facebook.

And she said she'd been keeping a low profile on social media, but that if I wanted to hear a sordid story about the Regina Police Service, I should let her know.

Hmm.

Carrie and I worked together at the Regina Leader Post.

Yeah, so she has one picture of him and she puts it into this facial recognition service that she saw on TikTok.

And it comes back with one hit.

And it unveils a picture where there's a police officer she knows from the Regina Police Service.

And he's sitting beside this person that she knows as Jay.

Nothing ever again, right? And that last text, the very next day, is when he was suspended from RPS.

At the time, Tina didn't know that officers with RPS, the Regina Police Service, had seized Bob's phone.

She just thought he'd lost interest.

I was happy.

[laughs] I didn't know the extent of it until I told someone else.

We talked to another woman who knew Bob was a police officer.

We've agreed not to identify her by name, but she worked with him at the Regina Police Service.

They had a casual sexual relationship.

Well, lots of us in our province are familiar with this story.

Robert Semenchuk was a police officer with the Regina Police Service who was found out to have used information from police databases To target women, many of them vulnerable and formed relationships, including sexual relationships with these women.

A lot more people in Canada are becoming more familiar with this story now because of a new podcast.

In Her Defense, Breach of Trust launched a couple of weeks ago.

And early in 2023, after they hadn't seen each other for quite a long period, but, you know, he had been in touch again and they made plans to meet.

And this had led Carrie to uncover, basically pull a string in which she realized that this was not a contractor named Jay Lewis.

This was a sergeant at the Regina Police Service of a different name, Bob Semenchuk.

And that it appeared that he had found her information online.

few years back, one of my friends sent me a message on Facebook saying, She said she'd been keeping a low profile.

She said, if I told you why you wouldn't believe it, but if you want to hear a sordid story about the Regina police service, let me know and I will fill you in.

I spent seven years in Regina covering court and crime for the local newspaper.

I wrote a lot of stories about the Regina police.

And she's like, oh, that's Bob.

Bob Semenchuk.

And Bob was a police officer, a sergeant with the Regina Police Service.

I think the majority, if not all, of the victims were unaware that he had victimized them.

If we look at the weekend forecast, if we look into next week, for much of the province, and I mentioned this earlier, I did a bit of a detour, deep dive, going to different communities in the different corners of the province, trying to get an eye on, are we going to get, can we string together a week without rain so that we're able to get some of the harvest done? And overall, things are looking pretty good going forward.

Through the years at the Regina Police Service, I can tell you that I always very much valued the partnerships that we would have with different community groups and organizations, many different ones that provide a little bit different levels of service, but all of them augment what I consider to be the work to keep our community safe.

The Regina Police Service, any police service for that matter, cannot do it alone.

We need the work, the support of community groups.

And White Pony Lodge is one of those groups.

He did.

The mayor said he would ask the Regina Police Service about it.

They said the indecent exposure charges might happen.

I have a daughter and a wife that must be protected.

It happened at a cafe in Regina.

She was having coffee with a woman she knew who'd worked at the Regina Police Service, and Kerry was asking the woman about a picture of a man she'd found online.

The man had short, dark hair, a salt and pepper beard, and flushed red cheeks.

He was wearing a plaid shirt.

She told Kerry...

"That's Bob, Bob Semenchuk."

A sergeant with the Regina Police Service.

I think it was sort of like, you know, when you get that little electric jolt? It was that combined with hearing his real name.

He was fired by the Board of Police Commissioners, ultimately by the city.

We know that that job now is filled by Laura Lee Davies, the current Chief of the Regina Police Service.

Well, former Chief Farouk Shaikh has his chance to fight that firing at a six-day hearing that actually starts today.

So they've got hearing dates set today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, and then again next week, 23rd to 24th.

It will be obviously sometime in the future.

So that is happening today.

And speaking of the Regina Police Service, they just sent out a news release this morning saying a member, a civilian member of the Regina Police Service has been charged under the L.A. FOIP rules.

The civilian member by the name of Katrina Kazza.

Bob Semenchuk.

And Bob was a police officer, a sergeant with the Regina Police Service.

I think the majority, if not all, of the victims were unaware that he had victimized them.

We went to his workplace, you know, armed, not expecting a physical confrontation, but having that in the back of our minds that that was a possibility.

I remember.

The Regina Police Service was part of it.

They brought in a city bus.

They parked it on 11th Avenue.