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!

...on the other hand...

I ended off my last blog post on Sunday with a chipper thing about surprises I like. Today's blog entry is a not-so-happy one.

It starts with happy news, of course. Today marks the third year since Joan, in a weird fit or something, decided that she'd actually spend the rest of her life with me. The fact that I've been blessed with this for three years makes the rest of my life worthwhile. Lucas' addition to the family over fourteen months ago amplifies this.

The event has been overshadowed, however, by some bad news. (Indeed the event almost passed me by unnoticed.) Yesterday Lucas was at the hospital to check into something that worried Joan and her mother. It turns out I should have been worried too.

Lucas' slow development in walking is not because of normal variance in children picking up the skill. He has been diagnosed as having something called "Central Coordination Disturbance". This seems, on my digging, to be a code phrase for "Cerebral Palsy". Specifically, it seems, that the version of CP in question is "Spastic Diplegia". Caught early enough there is treatment for it that can bring it under control and give him a semblance of a normal life in terms of walking, etc. He'll never be graceful or nimble (no world-famous athlete or dancer here), but if the treatment works he'll at least be able to look somewhat normal while walking or possibly even running.

Of course treatment is open-ended and expensive (and, naturally, not at all guaranteed to be effective). How expensive? Savings-account draining expensive. The minimum cost is 4000RMB for a twenty-day course of treatment. I make 4700RMB per month. Do the math and you see bank accounts draining to zero in no time at all. (Thankfully I married someone who is good at saving or there wouldn't be a savings account to even start draining!)

This is the final nail in the coffin of my teaching. I was getting tired of dealing with the spoiled brats of China's wealthy, self-proclaimed elites already. Now I have an added incentive to leave: teaching just doesn't pay enough. It's time to go back into software for real.

Anybody who knows a friend who knows a friend who knows someone who's looking for a seasoned software developer, please feel free to pass on my email address (ttmrichter@gmail.com), my GoogleTalk address (ttmrichter@gmail.com) or my YIM address (michael_richter_1966). I'm in the market again.