[BRIEF NOTE] On the post-Dziekanski fall of the RCMP

[rfmcdonald]

The inquiry into the Robert Dziekański Taser incident is over, and the RCMP--the organizations whose police officers repeatedly tasered a disoriented Polish traveller at Vancouver International Airport in 2007, killing him--looks very bad.

The final inquiry report on the death of Robert Dziekanski has concluded the RCMP were not justified in using a Taser against the Polish immigrant and that the officers later deliberately misrepresented their actions to investigators.

The long-awaited report, by retired B.C. Court of Appeal justice Thomas Braidwood, was released Friday in Vancouver.

Braidwood was commissioned by the B.C. government to investigate the actions of the four RCMP officers who confronted and subdued Dziekanski on Oct. 14, 2007, at Vancouver International Airport.

Braidwood said the four officers involved initially acted appropriately, but the senior corporal intervened in an inappropriately aggressive manner.

[. . . The judge] concluded the officers later deliberately misrepresented what happened at the airport to justify their actions.

"I also concluded that the two other officers during their testimony before me offered patently unbelievable after-the-fact rationalizations of their notes and their statements" to the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, Braidwood said.

"I found all four officers’ claims that they wrestled Mr. Dziekanski to the ground were deliberate misrepresentations made for the purpose of justifying their actions."

"I also disbelieved the four officers’ claims there was no discussion between or among them about the incident before being questioned by IHIT investigators, although I did not conclude that they colluded to fabricate a story."

Did not formally conclude, I'm tempted at annotate.

While we were in the middle of the inquiry, the increasingly horrible revelations from the inquiry--basically, that it seemed as if everyone involved in the RCMP was lying and/or trying to cover things up--prompted me to write a [FORUM] post wondering how readers in other jurisdictions saw their police. The inquiry's conclusion is such that it even managed to seriously upset the conservative National Post's editorial board.

Officers charged uninformed into the 2007 standoff at Vancouver airport, like bouncers breaking up a barroom brawl. They made no attempt to defuse the tense situation before discharging a Taser — five times — into the obviously anguished Mr. Dziekanski as he screamed in agony on the floor of the international arrivals lounge.

To make matters worse, according to Justice Braidwood, the four concocted “unbelievable after-the-fact rationalizations.” They made “deliberate misrepresentations” about how they feared for their lives when Mr. Dziekanski grabbed a stapler from a nearby counter, just so they could “justify their action.” For instance, they all claimed the victim lunged at them, while Mr. Braidwood could find no evidence of any move toward the officers.

Higher-ups, too, attempted to cover-up the force’s possible complicity by insisting nothing had gone wrong and by preventing the release of a civilian video recording of the incident. The recording, by passerby Paul Pritchard, was eventually made public, and thankfully so. Without Mr. Pritchard’s evidence, the RCMP might have been able to sweep its members’ conduct under the rug.

The federal government pledged to adopt Justice Braidwood’s eight recommendations, including establishing a civil oversight board to monitor complaints against the Mounties, a board with broad-ranging investigative powers.

Yet the rot inside the RCMP is so great it is not clear whether the force has admitted to itself even now that anything wrong was done by the four officers present at Mr. Dziekanski’s death and those who may have attempted to conceal the truth afterwards.

In April, deputy commissioner Gary Bass apologized to Mr. Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski, and paid her an undisclosed amount of financial compensation on behalf of the force. But then Mr. Bass immediately turned around and reassured members in an internal memo, obtained through access to information requests, that the RCMP was apologizing to Ms. Cisowski for the loss of her son, not for what constables on the scene were alleged to have done. “Even though the word ‘apology’ worries some, we are not apologizing for the actions of specific members or saying anything about specific actions,” wrote Mr. Bass.

Sad days, but at least we know not to count on the RCMP any more. Long live eternal vigilance and the sort of sousveillance that let Canada see the video showing just how much the RCMP tried to cover up.