Police perform a vital and thankless job
Smartphone videos lead to demands for immediate on-scene explanations
If the policeman’s lot was never a happy one, as per Sir William Gilbert, he of Gilbert-Sullivan comic opera fame, how considerably less splendid it is now.
As one of the bystanders to the recent arrest by Hamilton police of a screaming banshee remarked, “I got this on video.”
Then, and he wasn’t whistling Dixie and he was speaking for legions, he said, “I don’t even know what the f--is going on.”
The video of the Dec. 8 arrest was posted on YouTube a few days later and went “lightly viral,” as my old pal Bill Dunphy of the Hamilton Spectator wrote, which apparently means it got hundreds of thousands of views, as opposed to millions.
It includes long minutes of the ear-splitting screams and helpful remarks from the fellow with the camera such as, “She’s only a weak girl” and “You attack a girl for what reason?” and “You know she’s a girl, you know she’s weak.”
Worth noting, this is the modern response of the modern male to what he perceives as an attack on the modern female: You diss her, diss the alleged attacker, but never put a hair of your own chinny-chin-chin in harm’s way or actually do anything but point your phone.
(The 21-year-old woman was being arrested on unspecified “domestic” charges when she decided to resist arrest and break the sound barrier. It happened outside a Source store. To borrow from the chain’s new slogan, I don’t want that.)
In any case, after constables Mark Morelli and Chantelle Wilson finally subdued the banshee and packed her off to a squad car — her last words as captured on video were, oh big surprise, about the whereabouts of her own cellphone — Const. Morelli returned to the crowd of onlookers to explain what had happened.
He was entirely reasonable, cool and polite, even apologizing to one woman that she’d had to witness the unpleasant business, which, he assured her, looked rougher than it was.
Const. Morelli is being widely praised for keeping his head about him, and rightly so, but of course inadvertently he set a terrible precedent: Now, his brothers and sisters on the job will be expected to not only subdue raging morons in an appropriately gentle manner, which is fair enough, but also explain to the dimwits filming them, and offering playby-play commentary, why they did what they did.
This is police accountability circa 2013: It must be if not immediate, then at least contemporaneous.
Consider the Toronto police shooting last Friday at the Queen St. subway station downtown. As one of my favourite stories about this event frankly began, “All the facts have yet to emerge in a police shooting at a Toronto subway station,” but nonetheless, questions already have been raised about use-of-force and the department’s ability to deal with the mentally ill and emotionally disturbed. Yes, facts, schmacts. It isn’t even known yet if the 18-year-old, who mercifully survived and remains in the hospital, was ill or disturbed, or if the officers had the opportunity to try to de-escalate things, and the probe by the province’s Special Investigations Unit, the independent agency that probes serious police shootings, is still ongoing, with the four so-called “subject officers” (those who fired their weapons) not yet interviewed.
Yet two days after the shooting, there was a small rally to demand the entire force be disarmed and one of the protesters, Sakura Saunders, already had concluded that “the police did not take time to assess the situation before firing an excessive amount of bullets.”
Quaintly, in a lovely oldschool touch, the protesters even burned “an effigy of a pig”; perhaps they are vegans as well.
Now, there will be video aplenty of what happened here I expect — both before and after the shooting — but video doesn’t necessarily put an end to the questions or even put things right.
An ongoing coroner’s in- quest in Toronto has aptly demonstrated this to brilliant if unintended effect. The inquest is examining the police shooting deaths of three people, each of whom was in the throes of a mental-health crisis.
Reyal Jardine-Douglas, just 25, died Aug. 29, 2010, after he spotted a police officer from his seat on a bus; he’d been experiencing hallucinations.
Sylvia Klibingaitis, who was 52, died Oct. 7, 2011, after she phoned 911 to crisply report “I’m about to kill people” and then in short order tore out of her home with a butcher knife in her hand at the police who had only dared set up a perimeter around the house.
And Michael Eligon, 29, died on Feb. 3, 2012, after leaving Toronto East General Hospital in a gown and black socks.
Perhaps his patience was exhausted: Mr. Eligon had been waiting 36 hours for a bed and some help. He stole scissors, stabbed the storekeeper who asked for them back and police flooded the area in response to a flurry of 911 calls.
In all three cases, there is video — with Mr. JardineDouglas, from the bus he was on; with the other two, from on-board cameras in police cars. In all three cases, from first glimpse to shooting only seconds passed. No reasonable person, seeing the video, would suggest there was time to de-escalate, yet at the inquest, lawyers representing either family or advocacy groups indulge in magical thinking and carry on as though, if only the police had used a quiet tone, it all would have been different.
The video of Ms. Klibingaitis is the most compelling, because of the unprovoked nature of her attack (the police on the scene had not confronted her), the size of the knife and the sheer clip at which she moved.
And yet her three sisters, who represent the family at the inquest, originally challenged the integrity of the video. The policeman’s real lot is that he can’t please some of the people any of the time.