Judging the RCMP fairly.

According to William Elliot, the Commissioner of the RCMP, we should not judge the RCMP unfairly in the Robert Dziekanski affair. I agree with him fully. We should be 100% fair in our judgement. We should listen to the evidence impartially and then reach our conclusion. Only then should the RCMP be disbanded and replaced with a force that has civilian oversight of its operations.

The problem Mr. Elliot is having is that the fair facts are utterly damning of his organization. The more facts spill out in this inquiry, the more utterly damned the RCMP comes out. The force has lied, cheated and even attempted outright theft to keep these facts from coming out and, as a result, has lost any and all credibility it may once have had.

The latest (and last) of the four state-protected killers (I refuse at this point to call them "police officers" any longer) has finally given his version of events. This was the guy in charge of the goon squad that killed Robert Dziekanski and his testimony is the most risible of all, and the most inadvertantly revealing. One thing that I missed before (quite possibly because it wasn't reported) is that the four killer goons were sitting down to a meal when they got the call. I think this is an important thing to remember when reconstructing what likely really happened. He also claimed, in the most farcical portion of testimony so far (and when you consider the previous testimony about the threatening stapler position that's really saying something!), that in the ten minutes it took the goon squad to go from their meal to Dziekanski that they didn't exchange a single word. Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Let me piece together what likely happened to lead to Dziekanski's death.

1. Bureaucratic bungling beyond all reasonable (and most unreasonable) levels left Robert Dziekanski tired, confused, dehydrated and distraught stuck in a foreign country where nobody could or would speak with him.
2. He "acted up" as a result. (Anybody who feels this is not a 100% expected outcome should try it themself sometime: being confied in a tin can for twelve hours followed by ten hours of wandering around an increasingly hostile place with no food, no water and no communication.)
3. A call goes in and interrupts four hyper-macho thugs in uniform at their meal.
4. The four decide to get in, get the job done and get out in the quickest possible way. I submit the interruption of their meal predisposed them to using force and violence just out of raw anger.
5. They follow their plan (and yes, I believe they planned this).
6. Dziekanski didn't act the meek, docile sheep they wanted to see, so they tazed him multiple times as a show of power. A show of who's the sheepdog and who's the sheep, so to speak.
7. In a staggering display of callousness they don't take the time to monitor the person they've just electrocuted five times. (Were I a snide bastard I'd suggest they were planning how they were going to continue their meal.)
8. In a continuing display of said callousness they refuse to take the handcuffs off when an emergency treatment team requests it, convinced that the by-now-dead Dziekanski (who they probably thought was unconscious) posed a horrible threat to the four burly, armoured men around him.
9. Oops. He was dead already. Time for the cover-up to begin.
10. They consulted with each other to make their notes tell the same story.
11. Oops. Someone had video.
12. They confiscate the video for "the investigation".
13. The goons' superiors and the RCMP public relations weasels cook up a story that made the killers' actions sound reasonable. They increased the amount of screaming and violence from their victim from zero to a credible danger while reducing the number of officers involved from four to three.
    
14. Oops. The person with the camera isn't docile sheep and wants his video back.
15. Oops. The video makes it to the media.
16. Oops. The media does its job for a change and shows what really happened.

Now if William Elliot and the rest of the RCMP leadership were smart, they'd just 'fess up at this point and say "the officers in question screwed up, as did our training and leadership". But that's not what they do. Instead they circle the wagons and go in all out Massada mode. They pile lie on lie, prevarication on prevarication and build up a teetering, wobbly stack of shit that is now sliding down in a brown avalanche and staining the RCMP's reputation (along with the rest of the country's!) in the process.

And they're still too stupid to see that it's the end.

This is why I think it's time to disband the RCMP and replace them with a real police force with real oversight. I don't want people as stupid as the RCMP have shown themselves to be to be in charge of our national safety and security. If we're going to have criminals running things, at least, for God's sake, let them be smart criminals for a change!

Weather warning (plus the shame of Canada).

First the shame side. The Province has an interesting editorial that harmonizes with my view on that Robert Dziekanski fiasco in Vancouver. Nobody who isn't circling the wagons can look at that situation and say that everything went the way it should have. As the editorial points out, every involved agency in that sordid affair has brought changes into effect to prevent such an incident from happening again. Every agency, that is, except the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The RCMP in this matter have smeared not only their force's honour and reputation, they've smeared the reputation of the country as a whole. I know of no Canadian expats anywhere who've not had to contend with people asking questions about Robert Dziekanski and how his death was allowed to happen. Canada's image as a kind, gentle and above all humane nation was struck a serious blow by this affair and it looks like the RCMP are bound and determined to keep it that way.

The testimony of the first officer (Constable Gerry Rundel, for the record) is flatly laughable. Four burly, presumably well-trained men (they'd better be damned well trained for the price tag that force bears!) in body armour felt afraid of a solitary pudgy man with a stapler? Excuse me? If it were not an actionable piece of slander or libel (whichever applies to online communication) I would suggest that Constable Rundel has been spending just a little bit too much time in the special section of the evidence room with the funny plants if he thinks this is a plausible explanation.

This goes double for when this same "peace officer" said he was afraid of the man's combative stance. (That combative stance, for the record, as the video shows, was hands down at his side, albeit with a stapler in his hand. Pretty fierce weapon a desktop stapler. I can see why four burly, well-trained, armoured police officers were in fear for their lives!)

Finally, the flat-out lying in the testimony gets to me. Constable Rundel claims that the four "peace officers" in question didn't discuss a game plan before encountering Robert Dziekanski. That this was allowed to go unanswered in the inquiry is beyond belief. In the video of the matter – the full video, not the bowdlerized version that reached television – you can clearly hear one officer asking for clearance to taze and another giving it: both before the officers had even come on the scene, mind, to assess the situation. Not only had some planning been done beforehand (and caught on record) but that planning basically consisted of "let's taze him and call it a day".

Not the RCMP's finest hour indeed. I can't help but remember that the Airborne regiment was disbanded for similar behaviour and they, arguably, had something resembling a reason to pound that Somali kid. (Not a good reason, note, just something resembling a reason.)

OK, rant is over. On to the weather. Tomorrow is going to be a lovely day according to forecasts. A high of 0C with freezing rain and the threat of a full-blown ice storm. Given the hinky nature of infrastructure in this city, if the ice storm happens you can expect me to be incommunicado for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the severity. If I suddenly drop off the face of the planet don't worry about it. I'm probably just shivering in my home without electricity and/or Internet.

Global warming my ass.