Once upon a very long time ago the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, a man named Eric Knowles, saw fit to hire a young and untried kid as a general reporter, and instructed the city editor to assign a string of minor local stories about a road getting paved here, a few trees added to a park there, and so forth. For those and other tales, the kid was paid $32 dollars a week, which at the time was the minimum wage in Saskatchewan.
After a couple of months or so, the city editor declared he’d observed some modest signs of progress, so the kid would henceforth be placed on the police beat. And furthemore, the city editor suggested if there were continued evidence of emerging ability, then better things might well be in store: city hall for example, or perhaps even an opportunity to cover the provincial legislature in Regina. Expense account, hotel, exotic indeed.
But the police beat lasted a long time because the kid went for it like bees to the pollen, and forgot all about city halls and legislatures. He learned to like and respect cops, learned to appreciate the sometimes difficult choices they had to make even in a smallish city of 50,000 or thereabouts, learned there was a seamy underbelly in Saskatoon which was largely unknown to the general public because as the founder of the Metropolitan London Police, Sir Robert Peel, once said “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.” The kid learned the cops were dealing with it, all right, every day and night.
I’ve never forgotten those times and never lost my appreciation for police officers, but I have to admit it’s under severe strain these days because what seems to have happened to the RCMP.
There was a time when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was considered one of the finest law enforcement agencies in the world. Its recruitment and training standards were of the highest order, its public image was without stain or tarnish and its commanding officers were wholly removed from the distasteful realities of politics, and political expediency.
In recent years, though, the force leadership has deteriorated, in my view, to an artful and often conspiratorial cabal, with its primary motivation to no longer serve and protect, but seemingly to simply protect itself: cover its tracks and butt.
For instance, the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in October, 2007. He was a man who had wanted to settle in Canada because, I’m thinking, of an assumption that among other things the federal police force here would be far removed from the sometimes ominous menace of the policja in Poland. Mr. Dziekanski didn’t live long enough to find out if this was true, though, because after he’d spent ten hours sweating and confused in an airport holding room, he was tasered to death by four RCMP officers who made no effort, none at all, to speak to or reason with him, or to discover precisely what was going on.
They shot him less than 30 seconds after arriving in the holding room, with a weapon which had been conclusively shown in past episodes to be occasionally lethal. But they just shot him and then got their heads together to tidy up and mesh the strands of testimony which they were to present to a subsequent inquiry.
The results of that inquiry by the RCMP Commissioner of Public Complaints, Paul Kennedy, are now before us and they should be of concern to us all. Essentially, Kennedy says evidence from the four cops was simply not credible, particuarly when compared with bystander video which clearly showed they just walked in and opened up with the tasers. Five times they shot Dziekanski, even as he writhed in agony on the floor and even as he began to go into the cardiac arrest which killed him.
Kennedy says the RCMP response to his findings will be a “defining moment” for the force, and in my opinion he’s correct because this was by no means an isolated case. But so far, the RCMP has retreated to the bunkers, refused comment, said it would be inappropriate to speak about Dziekanski’s death before another inquiry has published its conclusions and recommendations. That won’t happen until next year, which would suggest the RCMP hopes this forthcoming analysis will be less critical than Kennedy’s, and further that maybe the current public discomfort about Dziekanski will have abated.
Now if this had been a single case of RCMP wrongdoing or ineptitude, or even one of a sparse few, then the last thing you’d see would be a critical commentary in this space. But consider the following, all within the last 15 years.
- a federal police force unable to foresee or detect a Greenpeace invasion of Parliament Hill, or to then offer an explanation of how it happened:
- cops unable to spot an intruder on the lawn and then right inside the hallways of 24 Sussex Drive, which just happens to be the residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. The PM at the time, Jean Chretien, and his wife were inside and asleep when all this was going on.
- an RCMP commissioner forced to resign because of inaccurate testimony to a House of Commons committee. That same commissioner, Guiliano Zaccardelli, had earlier been found responsible for a “fundamental breach of trust” in connection with misuse of RCMP pension funds.
On training and standards:
- four comparatively inexperienced officers, one with barely a month in uniform, shot and killed by a mentally unbalanced farmer near Mayerthorpe, Alberta:
- two young constables killed while on duty, isolated and alone with no backup in the far north:
- two more killed by a shooter in Saskatchewan:
- a 22-year-old prisoner in custody at the Houston, B.C. detachment office, shot in the back of the head during what was described as a struggle with a cop:
- another man shot to death while in the holding cells in Pincher Creek, Alberta.
None of these events is reassuring and none of them point to a police service which decides on lethal force only as a last resort. And certainly, not much in the recent history of the RCMP speaks to the slightest command concern about ensuring to the highest degree possible the safety of its officers, either by training them for situations such as Mayerthorpe or by redesigning policy for cops on remote postings where help is a very long way away.
I’ve known a lot of police officers in my time, I’ve hung out with them and had more than the occasional beer with them, and I can tell you this: the RCMP veterans, the old pros now retired and watching their beloved force descend into politcal spin, obfuscation, coverup, denial, and above all what the complaints commissioner described as a “massively inert” bureaucracy, are in utter despair.
But they won’t say anything in public, or at least very few of them will, because they’ll tell you it’d be pointless and would cause the current leadership to say well, they’re just old geezers and they don’t understand what policing is all about nowadays, and they’re just aging old timers with nothing better to do than grouse and complain about how they’d sure have done things better, and besides you have to understand that police work has changed.
I’m not arguing with that and the veterans don’t argue with it either. Theyre just saying, and I’m saying it hasn’t changed for the better.
I haven’t the slighest doubt that were he alive today, Robert Dziekanski would concur. Unless of course he’d gone back to Poland, where perhaps law enforcement isn’t so bad, after all.