Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver (Vancouver Sun)
RCMP Commissioner William Elliott should heed his own advice about the death at the hands of his officers of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport.
Contrary to what the head Mountie suggested Sunday in Kandahar, no one is making “knee-jerk” criticisms of police conduct in the Tasering of the 41-year-old Polish immigrant that ended with his death.
Canadians are losing faith in the force because evidence at the public inquiry continues to expose the four Mounties involved in this tragedy to be woefully trained, semi-competent officers or bald-faced liars.
That’s what makes Elliott’s comments so puzzling.
He acknowledges Dziekanski’s death has damaged the credibility of the iconic national agency but he doesn’t seem to get it.
He claimed most of us do not understand the pressures of policing.
“I think the expression, ‘Walk a mile in my shoes comes to mind,’” Elliott said.
Former B.C. Justice Thomas Braidwood, however, is doing exactly that — trying to understand the stress the RCMP officers faced.
And, if he hasn’t already, Elliott should watch some of the inquiry proceedings on the Internet and catch the embarrassing performance of his officers.
The slap-head testimony continued Monday.
Cpl. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, the senior officer, was as chippy in his demeanour as the three constables who responded with him that fateful night and who testified a few weeks ago.
They were interrupted Oct. 14, 2007 on their lunch break at about 1:15 a.m. by a routine dispatch that a probably intoxicated man was throwing luggage at the international arrivals area.
Robinson said that without speaking to each other or drawing up a plan, the four got into separate cars and headed out.
The 38-year-old wasn’t certified to use a Taser but was apparently authorized to tell subordinate Const. Kwesi Millington to deploy it on Dziekanski moments after they arrived — twice, no wait, maybe three times. He can’t remember.
Const. Millington told the inquiry previously he fired on his own and only heard Robinson order a second discharge.
They insist there has been no collusion, but in their notes and statements, all of the Mounties have now painted the same glaringly wrong picture of what happened, using startlingly similar language. Each has repudiated those accounts on the stand.
They had no choice: An amateur video of the fatal confrontation recorded a dramatically different event.
“I was mistaken but I was telling the truth,” Robinson conceded when confronted by the obvious contradictions between his version and the tape.
He said he “didn’t articulate it well” when he described things that didn’t happen.
“Just because I was mistaken doesn’t mean I was lying,” Robinson insisted.
The continuing portrayal by police and Elliott of this confrontation as a split-second, danger-filled encounter is misleading.
This was not a deranged gunman in a dark alley.
Dziekanski was threatening no one in a vacant, well-lighted secure area of the airport surrounded by four police officers. The Taser was deployed five times for a total of 31 seconds.
This was no momentary “split-second” bad decision — this was a series of terrible misjudgments capped by what appears to be an attempted cover-up.
Elliott wants Canadians to walk in his officers’ shoes; he should walk in the shoes of Dziekanski’s mom, Zofia Cisowski.
She tried to confront Cpl. Robinson outside the hearing room.
“Nice to meet you,” she called out twice.
He ignored her.
“I wanted him to look at me,” a trembling Cisowski said afterwards. “To see my face. My sorrow. This officer gave orders to them to Taser my son. My heart is broken for that. This officer is just like the rest. He’s not telling the truth.”
Walk in her shoes, Commissioner Elliott.
When there’s a dispute remember only one is right, ya can’t all be right folks.
Own up to it, make the changes and lets get on with it already.
Words of Wisdom
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The RCMP Commissioner’s recent comments in Afghanistan upon refusing to respond to questions about Robert Dziekanski are especially troubling. It isn’t his refusal to talk openly…I have come to expect that from bureaucrats everywhere be theirs the uniform of the military, paramilitary, or the well haberdashered corporate executive. No, it is his sense of entitlement and his hide-bound defense of the status quo I find so troubling.
If I understand correctly what he is saying it sounds like a plea or perhaps a better descriptor would be demand for Flubber-like elasticity when evaluating the acts of the force when horrible results ensue. Like the death of a confused, exhausted, abandoned Polish immigrant in the Vancouver Airport at the knees and electrodes of the RCMP.
It is difficult and maybe impossible suggests the erstwhile Commissioner for civilians to understand how quickly events can develop in front of RCMP officers. Undoubtedly true for most civilians.
It is a hard job to be an officer in the RCMP he posits. I accept that also as a wise and balanced thumbnail summary of 21st century police work in general.
So what? The thing is, no one got these guys drunk and “press ganged” them into the RCMP College in Regina and forced them to become cops, similar to how the Royal Navy once manned it’s sailing ships. As I understand it there are lineups to get into the force. These guys had to compete to be accepted. They wanted in, so spare us the crocodile tears and the violins about how tough they have it.
So it follows compellingly that it is unacceptable to imply the speed of developing situations or the degree of job difficulty entitle anyone to a free pass when they kill an airport traveler…or anyone else for that matter.
It occurs to me also that the Commissioner is about the last person I would look to as a leader of change within the force. If one truly believes the job is really tough and the civilian critics cannot possibly understand how fast things develop, why would you listen to those voices favouring change? Like for instance starting with a demand for police accountability? Like maybe in a court of law with a judge, and a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, and a jail cell if found guilty of manslaughter or murder?
The simple answer is you wouldn’t listen. What you would do is conduct a threat assessment to determine just how dangerous might be the public reaction to your publicly funded organization.
Then you would probably mount a defense commensurate with the threat assessment. And screw the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
If things looked really, really bad (like ‘Oh my God, the guy’s dead! Shit, Shit Shit!!’), chances are you would confiscate damning evidence like video of 4 heavily armed officers massively assaulting him. You might get a really sick feeling after you screened the video and wondered how the hell this could have happened. As detachment commander you sure as hell would be having one of the worst days of your career the day the videographer’s lawyer called your bluff and said you would be sued if you tried to keep the video out of circulation for a year or more.
By now you would have made sure every one of your officers could recite their version of the events in their sleep. Probably you would make sure there wouldn’t be enough daylight between their miraculously harmonious versions of events to slip in a taser electrode between the artfully penned creative writings describing the RCMP version of events. And then you would wait for Armageddon because the day the video went viral you could see the clouds in the worst storm you ever imagined.
But being a cautious and ultra conservative organization some of the things the RCMP wouldn’t do in a curious turn of events, probably sealed its fate. Like admit there is a big problem when it kills an immigrant in the airport under the “Welcome to BC…The BEST Place on Earth” sign. Or say we are sorry. Or apologize to Robert’s mother. Or promise change and actually mean it as distinct from putting up a destroyer smoke screen in front of a 7 knot convoy leisurely steaming along with the status quo.
So I have little confidence the force will change. Certainly the inquiry won’t have enough “heft” to make things much different…no matter what it finds there isn’t enough threat to the RCMP in its findings to force change. Criminal prosecution seems off the table. And public memory being what it is probably will lose interest. And goodness knows bureaucracies have learned a valuable lesson in the utility of waiting out bad press…it’s a lot easier and phenomenally less expensive than embarking on real change.
When the police lose the trust and confidence of the middle class they have lost the bulwark of the support that allows them to be a force for good in a community. How did it come to be that the RCMP transformed itself from a once widely respected organization into an organization ordinary people avoid and fear? When, and more importantly, why do the RCMP look upon the entire population as an imminent and deadly threat, when the vast majority so clearly are not? How did they forget the simple art of speaking to people (including the agitated, confused, or exhausted) in a calming tone and escalating slowly, rather than using the argot of bombast and brutal methods?
They so defeat their purpose, and us in the wash too. Mantiens Le Droit? Sadly, no.
One more thing. While public sentiment so roundly repudiates and condemns the actions of the YVR 4, would anyone honestly want to exchange places? (With the possible exception of Robert Dziekanski who unlike the YVR 4, is dead.)
It seems to me their careers are finished and any dreams of glory or promotion or heroic celebration up in smoke. Organizations have a keen sense of survival. And right now the RCMP may be expressing support, but somehow I think the controlling authorities upon whom these guys depend for pay and rations and career advancement are about as angry at the 4 who presided over Robert Dziekanski’s death, as it is possible to be. You never, and I mean never, piss in your own ammunition box and that’s exactly what these guys did…in public, on video, and with a now debunked Betty Crocker style story almost no one believes.
No, I wouldn’t want to be them now or anytime in the next 30 to 40 years. No one benefited from Robert’s death. And God Damn it we don’t even know how to learn from tragedies like this or systemically reverse the self absolving organizational thuggery that enables them.
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Good quotes admin. I would like to add one:
“In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”
Bertrand Russell
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Another RCMP officer retracts statements at Dziekanski inquiry
Module body
What’s this
By James Keller, The Canadian Press
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VANCOUVER, B.C. – Robert Dziekanski was not, as he has been portrayed in the past, the agitated man who withstood the shock from a Taser and swung a stapler at police, the most senior RCMP officer admits.
In the hours and days after Dziekanski collapsed and died on the floor of Vancouver’s airport in October 2007, the four RCMP officers involved told investigators he was an aggressive threat to public safety, even after he took the first of four shocks from an RCMP Taser.
The officers said they had to wrestle Dziekanski to the ground – evidence disputed by a witness video to Dziekanski’s dying moments.
Cpl. Benjamin Monty Robinson told a public inquiry into in Dziekanski’s death Wednesday that he made erroneous statements to those homicide investigators.
“I didn’t articulate it well,” Robinson explained during his third day of testimony at the inquiry.
“I’m blending the whole interaction,” he said. “I did the best job I could. I admit there are inaccuracies.”
Dziekanski, a Polish man who didn’t speak English, died on the floor of the arrivals area following five blasts of the Taser.
Robinson has insisted he was simply ineloquent when he gave two separate statements to investigators probing the in-custody death. The three other officers have said they gave their best recollections of a fast-paced, stressful event.
Robinson acknowledged Wednesday that Dziekanski was relatively calm when police arrived and initially followed their directions.
He also conceded that Dziekanski didn’t swing the stapler, as officers told investigators, and collapsed to the floor on his own after the first shock. Their initial accounts said he continued standing after the first hit.
All the officers have retracted parts of their statements to homicide investigators when confronted with the bystander’s video. Some of the officers’ errors – for instance, that Dziekanski had to be wrestled to the floor – were consistent among them.
The lawyer for the Polish government has offered his own theory: The officers were lying to justify their actions.
“It’s not something that should be casually blended together because it misleads the investigators,” Don Rosenbloom told Robinson.
Earlier this month, when questioning the officer who fired the Taser, Rosenbloom went further.
“I am suggesting that you and your fellow officers intentionally misled (homicide) investigators and you continue to lie under oath at this commission, do you deny that?” he asked Const. Kwesi Millington, who denied the allegation.
The inconsistencies have raised questions about the Crown’s decision last year not to charge the four officers, and prompted calls from the Polish community to re-open the case.
When announcing their decision last December, B.C.’s Criminal Justice Branch said the bystander’s video supported the officers’ accounts.
“This is so obvious, it should be re-opened, because there was no justification not to charge them,” Zygmunt Riddle, a Polish man who has sent an Internet petition to the provincial government, said outside the inquiry Wednesday.
Jurek Baltakis, a friend of Dziekanski’s mother who says he represents the Polish community in her home town of Kamloops, B.C., said he wants the investigation re-opened, but by a special prosecutor, not the RCMP.
A Crown spokesman in B.C. has said it would be up to homicide investigators to decide whether to re-open the case.
The RCMP have said that’s a decision that will have to wait until after the inquiry.
Regardless of what happens in Canada, prosecutors in Poland are conducting their own investigation, which could result in charges there.
Przemyslaw Jenke, the country’s consul in Vancouver, said Polish law allows charges to be laid for crimes committed in other countries against Polish citizens.
“The Polish penal code does provide for this kind of situation,” said Jenke, who has been attending the inquiry.
Jenke said Polish prosecutors asked Canadian officials for information related to the investigation soon after Dziekanski died, but have so far received no help.
If Polish prosecutors do decide to lay charges, Jenke said the officers could be tried in absentia.
“We do not have an extradition treaty between Poland and Canada, so (extradition) is rather unlikely,” he said.
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Sorry, I was refering to action before the Inquiry
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Quotes:
Justice is incidental to law and order.
~John Edgar Hoover
It is not a Justice System. It is just a system.
~Bob Enyart
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Law is not justice and a trial is not a scientific inquiry into truth. A trial is the resolution of a dispute.
~Edison Haines
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
~Max Stirner
Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. ~Thomas Szasz
There seems to be to much PRIDE to walk in anyone’s shoes here. It doesn’t matter what leader they choooose it would likely be the same thing.
Someone after JUSTICE would do what is right and not drag this out in an INQUIRY like this one, where the police officers are guaranteed not to be charged for their co-operation (lets make a deal attitude) in the HOPE it will all go away.
Never mind the beleagured Canadian tax payers paying for what will produce little or no changes to the force and never mind the embarassememnts – it’s just business as usual.
It’s so funny how the Complaints Against the RCMP are running at the mouth asking for more powers now that this mess is presently here to do their jobs. Who would start a complaints commission and not allow them to do a proper job against a force and also what difference have we seen in the Commissioners?
If the people have stopped believing in the force could it be they have a good reason?
Could this be a derelection of duty and a snearing disregard for public trust?
Remember we are talking about JUSTICE here and justice is not always standing behind a TASER gun…..
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