What separates Forcillo from the cop who didn’t shoot?

As Winston Churchill once said about the state of his war, for Toronto police Const. James Forcillo and the state of his, the end of the beginning came Monday.

Forcillo’s appeals of his conviction for attempted murder and six-year sentence in the shooting death of a teenager on a Toronto streetcar were roundly dismissed by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Forcillo and his lawyers have but one option left — to decide whether or not to seek leave (or permission) to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Otherwise, the 35-year-old officer is out of runway.

For the moment, he remains suspended with pay, a status that started when he breached his bail last fall (by being found at his girlfriend’s apartment, when he was by the conditions of his bail supposed to be living still with his ex-wife) and was detained in a provincial jail.

But the force will now carry on with the internal disciplinary process designed to allow it to fire Forcillo, who faces two internal counts of discreditable conduct and one of unlawful or unnecessary force.

Soon, in other words, he’ll likely lose the “Constable” title.

That this must follow as night follows day makes it no less sad.

Forcillo is the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on the night of July 27, 2013.

High on Ecstasy, Yatim was armed with a switchblade when he suddenly exposed himself and swung the knife at a group of young women, narrowly missing the neck of one. Terrified passengers fled the streetcar.

Forcillo was first on the scene. He knew none of what had happened on the streetcar, only the brief information from the 911 calls that had come in.

Standing in the street, he began shouting commands; Yatim refused to drop the knife, but briefly backed away from the front doors, then, as the appeal court noted, “stepped toward the doorway,” knife in hand. Forcillo opened fire.

Yatim was mortally wounded: One bullet had struck his heart, another had severed his spine, paralyzing him; one had shattered his right arm.

Forcillo knew none of that either, only that Yatim appeared to have been hit and was lying on the floor of the streetcar.

Video showed that Yatim managed to grab his knife again, despite his injuries. Forcillo also thought he saw him getting up (video showed clearly Yatim wasn’t, and indeed, couldn’t) and fired six more shots.

The jury acquitted Forcillo of second-degree murder, but in verdicts the appeal court called “unusual, if not unique,” convicted him of attempted murder in connection with the second volley of shots.

With his usual luck, the appeal court ruling comes a week after a fellow officer, Const. Kenny Lam, successfully arrested without a lick of force the alleged van driver who mowed down 26 people on the north end of Yonge Street, killing 10.

Lam was also faced with a suspect who appeared to be armed — with one hand, the driver kept pretending to draw a supposed gun from his pocket and had a black object in the other hand — but Lam was sufficiently composed that he turned off his siren, a classic de-escalation technique, and correctly figured out that the driver didn’t have a gun.

Though the cases and officers are very different, even before news of the decision in Forcillo’s appeal, Torontonians were comparing the two.

Forcillo was 30 at the time he shot Yatim. He had less than four years on the job. He joined, in large measure, because his own unstable childhood had left him craving stability and a regular paycheque.

He had a wife and young family; he wanted to do better for them than his father had been able to do for him.

Lam is 42. He has seven years and change on the job. He joined, after a career as a computer engineer, because he wanted to do more for his community and city. What he craved was meaning and purpose.

But Forcillo was never the cowboy he was sometimes labelled. He certainly never set out to kill Sammy Yatim or anyone else. In fact, one of the few things he said that awful night was for someone to call for a sergeant with a Taser to come to the scene.

At the time, only sergeants and specialized units had Tasers, which, despite some controversy surrounding the weapons, are always less lethal than a firearm.

By the time the sergeant arrived, Forcillo had fired both his volleys, and Yatim The cases involving Const. James Forcillo, above, and Const. Kenny Lam are very different, Christie Blatchford writes, but Torontonians are comparing the two. was dead or dying.

If Forcillo had had a Taser, it is reasonable to say Yatim would still be alive, and Forcillo would not be headed for federal prison.

Less than three months after the shooting, then-Toronto Chief Bill Blair asked his police board for approval to put more Tasers into the hands of front-line officers. The board refused. Three more times since then the board refused, finally only in February approving Chief Mark Saunders’ request to equip front-line officers with the weapons. Implementation is expected to take a year.

Every other police service in Ontario has given its officers Tasers since the province first said they could in August of 2011.

Last year, Toronto police responded to 27,542 calls for what they call “persons in crisis,” people like Sammy Yatim and the van driver. The vast majority are handled without the use of any force, just as Const. Lam did.

But the police family, like the human one, has flawed and imperfect members, some of whom may be afraid.

Not every officer will be able to conduct himself as Lam did. It’s the duty of the force to give those members every chance, and every tool, to become another guy who didn’t shoot.