Let me make it clearer then. There are gross violations of people's human rights all over the world every day, many of them absolutely horrific and against entirely innocent men, women and children. In the context of that, as a TV viewer not exposed personally to any of it, am I supposed to get upset that a lifelong criminal got bounced around in the back of a police van and died after resisting arrest? Do I think that's the way police should act? **** no. If you want to google Robert Dzeikanzski on that other site I think I made my opinion of those cops very clear on multiple occasions.
Yeah, I know you've denounced specific incidents. But there's a bigger issue here, and I'm not sure if you're seeing it.
The reason I lost faith in the RCMP after the Dziekanski incident isn't that one cop accidentally killed one suspect. The reason I lost faith in the RCMP after the Dziekanski incident is all the stuff that happened afterward.
People are content to say "well, it's just one bad apple..." but how many bad apples were really involved in turning it into the national disgrace it became? There was Konstable Kwesi, obviously, the Tazer-enthusiast who directly caused Dziekanski's death. There's the 4 other officers who cooked up a false account of the incident that they presented to investigators who cleared Konstable Kwesi of wrongdoing. There's the investigators themselves, who whitewashed the incident, even though they were in possession of the now-famous video which proved that the account Konstable Kwesi and his colleagues gave was false. There's RCMP media spokesmen like Pierre Lamaitre and Tim Shields who went in front of the media and willfully distributed false information about the information, and distributed information defamatory to the victim in an attempt to justify the killing. There's the RCMP lawyers who went to court try to keep that now-famous video from being made public, and there's the leadership who decided that trying to prevent that video from being released was the right thing to do.
That isn't one bad apple! That's a whole heck of a lot of bad apples!
And then we got the Braidwood Inquiry, and got even more bad apples, as the RCMP got caught withholding damning emails from Judge Braidwood.
And the eventual result of all this is that Konstable Kwesi got a slap on the wrist sentence for perjury, and one RCMP lawyer lost her job. One of Kwesi's colleagues, Monty Robinson, lost his job later when he ran over a motorcyclist then ran home to drink a bottle of vodka "to calm his nerves" then returned to the scene of the crime, take his breathalyzer test (which revealed that he'd just drunk a bottle of vodka, but could no longer yield any information about how drunk Robinson was while driving, so Robinson got off with a stern finger-wagging from the judge for obstruction of justice). Propaganda officer Tim Shields is currently being investigated for sexually assaulting female officers working under his supervision. And Pierre Lemaitre committed suicide. His widow is suing the RCMP, claiming his death was a result of him being made the scapegoat for the RCMP's lying to the press over the Dziekanski affair.
On the surface, the Dziekanski incident looks like a story about an over-enthusiastic cop who accidentally killed a guy.
But it's actually about a culture with widespread rot and corruption from the root to the highest levels, and they would have got away with all of it if it hadn't been for one guy who went to court to get his cell phone back from the police.
And they still got away with almost all of it. Konstable Kwesi paid with a few months of jailtime for perjury, a lawyer lost her job. And Pierre Lemaitre paid with his conscience and ultimately his life. And I'm sure several others involved also suffered terrible punishments like Paid Administrative Leave and Mandatory Sensitivity Training.
And that's appalling. That's not "a few bad apples", that's a whole culture of sickness.
The phrase "one bad apple" isn't supposed to justify the good apples. It doesn't mean "ok, Kwesi's a bad apple, but they're mostly good," as people tend to use it. The phrase is "don't let one bad apple spoil the whole bunch", and it means that you're supposed to go through your crate and find the rotten apple and get rid of it before the rot spreads to the rest. And I think we learned from the Dziekanski incident that the rot has spread throughout the RCMP.
As for Baltimore, I am sure that many people are content to look at it as just a story of one dumb thug who died during an arrest. But that's not the whole story.
He didn't die during the arrest, or while resisting arrest. He was arrested and secured and posed no threat to anyone. The injuries weren't inflicted during a struggle of any sort, they were inflicted after the struggle. To "teach him a lesson". And maybe it's tempting to think it's still not that big a deal because the cops involved didn't mean to kill him, they just wanted to rough him up a little so that he'd be smarter next time.
But it's not the first time Baltimore PD have done something like that. The Baltimore PD "rough ride" or "nickel ride" is a tradition that goes back decades. It's not even the first time the Baltimore PD has killed people during a "rough ride". Baltimore taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars over the years settling lawsuits. You might not sympathize much with criminals who get roughed up by cops, but I know you sympathize with taxpayers who get nothing for their civic tax dollars except paying the bill for police shenanigans while the police themselves escape any and all accountability. The Baltimore PD was ordered to install video cameras inside their vans to deter this kind of thing... somehow they never got around to installing them.
None of the police involved in the death of Freddie Gray received any jail time or punishment. I believe they received a stern finger-wagging for failing to observe the Baltimore PD seat-belt policy for prisoners. Perhaps some of them received the dreaded Paid Administrative Duty or Sensitivity Training. But they're all still patrolling the streets of Baltimore.
The prosecutor could not prove that any of them deliberately inflicted injuries on Gray. They could only find a few snippets of video evidence of the van, nothing that proved it was being driven recklessly... the didn't have any conclusive proof that Gray was denied medical care when his injuries became apparent. There were specific requirements for the prosecutors to meet to obtain convictions for each of the officers involved, and none of them could be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
But the city knew that when it came to the civil lawsuit, they didn't have a chance. Gray entered the van in one piece, he exited the van with a snapped spine and a smashed up head, and everybody knows what happened in between. There might not have been enough proof to convict "beyond a reasonable doubt", but when you get to civil court and the burden changes, "there's no other plausible explanation" for what happened to Gray is easily enough to win a civil suit, and the city didn't even try to pretend otherwise, they just wrote Gray's family a cheque for $6 million dollars, knowing full well that they'd probably have to pay more if it went to court.
One think I think is very interesting about the case is that a few days after the controversy became well known and people were protesting in the streets, the police department announced there was a witness, who they said had been in the van at the same time as Gray, and who claimed he had heard Gray deliberately banging his head against the walls of the van. This was trumpeted among people on "the right" as being proof that the police were innocent and that Gray's injuries were self inflicted.
Reporters found that a 2nd passenger had indeed been put into the van, in a 2nd compartment separate from Gray, in the final few minutes of Gray's long ride. They tracked down this supposed witness and the man said that he had never heard any such thing while in the van. And this angle was quickly lost in all the other hub-bub surrounding the story.
But during the trial of the officers, we discovered that by the time this supposed witness had been put in the van, Gray's medical condition had become so severe that there was no possibility that he had done what the police said the supposed witness told them. By the time the 2nd witness was put in the van, it was medically impossible for Gray to have been banging his head against the wall. So what's up with the police saying this supposed witness told them something that couldn't have actually happened, and that he himself denies having said? This made me think, once again, of the RCMP and the lies they told during the aftermath of the Dziekanski slaying.
Is the death of Freddie Gray just an isolated incident, or is it the result of long-standing problems in a police department that actually has a long history of officers inflicting injuries on people just for laughs? I suggest that if you think it's just an isolated boo-boo you're terribly naive.
I'm sure that the officers involved in killing Gray were drinking beers and laughing about it after the last of them was acquitted. None of the $6 million came out of their pockets. And you know that when they go on the camera and wipe away tears and talk about how sad they are that Freddie died, what they mean is that they're really sad that they've been charged with his death.
However, I bet that the Baltimore PD did eventually get around to installing those cameras in their vans this time. It did take national media attention and half the city getting burned down, but I bet they finally got those cameras installed.
Remember, nobody in any job fails to make mistakes. Cops are in jobs where they're going to make mistakes. And that's particularly so when violence is involved. So a lot of people are willing to cut them some slack in most situations. Neither the Sammy Yatim case, nor the Robert Dziekanski case such situations for me. Nor is the Justine Damond case.
I understand those mistakes, during struggle or in the heat of the moment. But that's not what upsets me. What upsets me is the coverup and lies and and "blue shield" code and all of that stuff. Kwesi Millington's actions on the night Robert Dziekanski died didn't have to turn into a national disgrace. It didn't even have to be the end of Millington's career. It was the decisions made afterward that turned it into what it became.
-k