RCMP Watch

Robert Marshall (Winnipeg Sun) - He was just a kid. So how can the RCMP brass sleep at night?

Const. Douglas Scott is the newest and freshest face of law enforcement tragedy. Just out of his teens and half of a two-man detachment in the far north where problems of suicide, despair and a cultural disconnect are common place. Where feasts of Arctic bounty and celebration are losing ground to Cheezies and X-Box. Where Const. Scott was responding to a routine impaired driving call.

But in a community where alcohol is banned and subject to substantial fines, an impaired driving complaint should be anything but routine.

Inconceivably, taking that call by himself didn’t breach RCMP regulation. In fact, not calling for backup is the norm, the expectation. Because back-up means overtime and that upsets the bottom line.

And who wants to be the new kid on the block who causes trouble for the almighty bean counters — those who don’t work after dark and don’t understand that routine belongs to history.

Policy needs to recognize that the ordinary can become the extraordinary in a flash. The time it takes for an intoxicated suspect to fire a high-powered rifle. The milliseconds for the bullet to crash through the patrol unit’s window and meet its mark. The instant it took to kill Doug Scott.

The country is still recovering from that “routine” disturbance in Hay River attended by RCMP Const. John Worden. By himself. Because of the bottom line. Const. Worden was murdered on that, his last call, sparking an intense hunt for the killer who had shot the officer in the head.

How will those emotional costs affect that bottom line?

The biggest slap to the RCMP rank and file must be the force’s multi-billion dollar budget and its penchant to spend like a drunken sailor when it comes to fluff and swag for the few and chosen while balking at the cost of safety for those who form the backbone.

This is about money. Cold cash. Putting a 20-year-old kid, barely out of high school, into a situation at night with no backup, in a culture foreign to him with 12 weeks on the job, is unconscionable.

This is a shameful chapter for the RCMP. The pomp and circumstance of Tuesday’s regimental funeral did not remedy this serious blow to the upper levels. There must be more to managerial atonement than the funeral’s fine words, red serge, horses and the continent-wide representation from the blue brotherhood. Their wanton recklessness must end.

Police from across the country are shaking their heads with disbelief at the force’s primitive policy and storybook expectations. For a decade the informal body representing RCMP members have been pushing for hard and fast rules that would have prevented Const. Scott from answering his final call alone. The groundswell of support for that position must mean change.

As a policing supervisor it was my job to enforce our collective agreement and ensure that situations like the ones that claimed Constables Scott and Worden did not occur. Ever.

Don’t you just wonder about the RCMP? Full of hard and fast rules, but leave the need for backup to the discretion of a freshly minted, impressionable constable, keenly aware of the high command’s overt cash concerns.

Will that RCMP command sleep well tonight? They shouldn’t.