Les Leyne (Times Colonist, Opinion) – A reader pointed something out yesterday that needs to be acknowledged.
“The entire law enforcement community just finished burying four officers just a few hours south of here. We’re waking up to read the morning paper, hoping that it was just a bad nightmare, and find this article.”
The article he referred to was my column about the public complaints commissioner’s denunciation of the RCMP officers involved in Robert Dziekanski’s death. The column endorsed all the criticisms and amplified all the concerns. It landed on the officers involved with both feet.
The funerals he referred to, of course, were for the four Lakewood police officers shot in Tacoma by a killer who apparently ambushed them in a coffee shop. The reader said he wouldn’t argue the points in the article, “but the timing is horrible.”
He said it was a rehashed argument heard over and over for two years with no real new information.
Couldn’t it have been written some other time?
“What a shame.”
I have sympathy for all the police officers who went to the memorial service and returned home just as the latest chapter of the Dziekanski story played out.
It’s an upsetting juxtaposition of two opposites in the world of law enforcement. On the one hand, officers put their lives on the line for us every time they put on the uniform. The Lakewood four died solely because they were wearing badges. The thousands of officers who attended their memorial service celebrated everything that is heroic about police work, and they had to blink back tears as they did it.
Then they came home and were confronted with the other hand. The Dziekanski case is a dismaying example of sloppy, incompetent police work. The airport four — wearing uniforms that are a symbol of Canada known around the world — let down the entire country during that brief incident. Some gave them the benefit of the doubt and waited for the force to do the right thing in the aftermath. They waited for the RCMP to stand up and take responsibility and give a full accounting.
They waited in vain.
In their conduct during the official proceedings since that night, the four officers and their superiors have disappointed the country once again.
There are now two separate scandals: The incident and the RCMP’s conduct following it. The four officers didn’t document the incident properly, they met inappropriately with investigators and the force let major errors in the public account stand for months without correcting them.
This all became crashingly clear the same day local police honoured the Lakewood officers.
The timing is unfortunate, but it’s an illustration of the random nature of current events. Events happen in all sorts of different spheres and sometimes they coincide in unfortunate ways. Once they’re news, coverage is required. It would have been a nice gesture to sit on the commissioner’s findings for a day out of respect for the Tacoma tragedy and the B.C. officers who attended the memorial. But it would have been wrong.
It’s already taken far too long for people to get a coherent official explanation of all the problems in the RCMP’s handling of Dziekanski. When the commissioner released a report that started the process of explaining how bad it really was, people needed to hear about it immediately.
If the officers and the force had conducted themselves honourably they could have made the best of a very bad situation.
But they didn’t. There is no other conclusion when a two-year-long impartial investigation concludes: “I do not accept as accurate any versions of the events as presented by the involved members.”
Or when the head of the RCMP responds to this and other devastating findings mostly by whining about the process.
It’s unfortunate that police returning home from an emotional tribute had to be subjected to all this.
But it’s obvious that the four officers involved in Dziekanski’s death and in its disheartening aftermath have let down all their honourable brothers and sisters in uniform, along with everyone else.
As the reader noted, “What a shame.”
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