Media leaning too heavily on ex-police expertise
Commentator hasn’t worked on force for 27 years
It was when I saw the lovely and talented Ian Hanomansing, filling in for Peter Mansbridge on The National last Monday night, introduce Ross McLean that I truly knew the sky was falling.
The broadcast began with an excellent report on the latest twist in what has been one of the biggest stories in the country for the past month: A Toronto police officer, Const. James Forcillo, was now charged with second-degree murder in the July 27 shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim.
The 18-year-old, armed with a knife, died in a hail of nine bullets fired by Forcillo during a brief standoff on a downtown Toronto streetcar.
Yatim’s death is one of those übermodern tales with all the usual elements — witness cellphone video posted quickly on YouTube; online petitions and marches in the streets to demand “justice”; shrines and vigils and outrage fanned on airwaves and in social media.
Throughout, McLean, a mildmannered 52-year-old Torontonian, was in the eye of the media storm.
It was he, with his pleasant face and studied gravitas (“Good to be here on this important, tragic and passionate topic” is McLean’s standard opening gambit), who became the go-to guy.
Formerly a regular in the tabloid Toronto Sun and on Sun News, he was suddenly omnipresent — on CTV, Global and CBC local and national shows, private talk-radio stations in Toronto and as far west as Edmonton and quoted in the pages of the Globe and Mail.
His experience after leaving the police force is not unrelated.
McLean says he worked in private security for a leading firm at the time, then for the Bank of Canada as a technical security specialist, then for blue-chip private firms and in “close protection” for wealthy Torontonians.
But it’s his police experience that his interviewers have largely relied upon.
While he was variously identified as a security consultant and expert in policing or use of force, he was almost always described as a former Toronto officer.
It was the latter that put the bona in his fides, if you like.
The problem is, McLean hasn’t been a cop for 27 years, and he was one only for six or seven years, four or five of those — as McLean himself confirmed in a phone interview this week — spent in traffic services.
When he last would have had formal police use-of-force training, Toronto cops were still using the tonfa baton (an L-shaped one) and no one was carrying Tasers.
Now, colleagues more familiar with broadcast news than I am say that television, particularly in its 24-7 mode, is always looking for “experts” to pronounce upon stories, and that lots of them have slim resumés. The practice is part and parcel of the sausage-factory nature of TV news, apparently.
But while McLean is an amiable fellow who seems a bit surprised by the recent spike in demand for him, he is at least responsible for the words that have come out of his own mouth.
For instance, he has repeatedly said, “The big problem I see is (the lack of) de-escalation” on the shooting video.
As he told Global National on July 30, the officer should have talked to Yatim, “saying something like, ‘Hey, what’s the problem here? Did your girlfriend just leave? Did you lose your job? Why are you so upset? Let me help you. Do you want a cup of coffee?’”
Now, regular Joes may well have reached similar conclusions from their own “analysis” of the video, but McLean’s opinion, as a purported expert, carries weight.
And in the post-G20 world of Toronto policing — most damagingly to public confidence, in my view, is that during the summit three years ago, dozens and dozens of officers removed their identifying badges, an act analogous to black bloc rioters’ masking their faces — there’s a new cynicism in the air.
The public is more than ever amenable to think badly of their police force, and there are plenty of others for whom it is an article of faith that when cops are involved, one way or another the fix is in.
Some of McLean’s comments, particularly as framed by his touted expertise, feed into that.
He has repeatedly pronounced upon the weakness of the province’s Special Investigations Unit, which probes police shootings, and demanded more information from the SIU, police force and Chief Bill Blair, suggesting they are “hiding behind the legislation.”
(One doesn’t “hide” behind the law; one follows it, especially when one is the law.)
As he told Sun News host Pat Bolland on Aug. 6, “What’s happened up until this time, and this is the way it has worked, is it’s all been kept very quiet in the circumstances. The public doesn’t really hear what happened or get an explanation.”
But that’s plainly not true: When the SIU lays criminal charges, a trial follows, and it’s at the trial that the public hears the evidence in full, sometimes in distressing detail. The process takes an irritating length of time, but the one thing it isn’t is secret.
On July 31, McLean told NewsTalk 1010 radio host Jim Richards that cops now are “pulling guns all the time.”
He went on to say, “And I tell you, every policeman knows, I used to know when I’d go to calls, Jim, I was more afraid of all the other policemen coming with their guns than I was with the bad guys a lot of the times because you get in the crossfire incidents and other things.”
Thus a picture painted, from one allegedly on the inside of the blue wall, of a rogue officer from a trigger-happy force.
Still, the greater responsibility belongs with those who bring him on set as an expert and ascribe to him the insider’s special knowledge.
McLean says that producers have often asked about his credentials, and that he’s careful never to overstate them or misrepresent himself.
I’m sure that’s absolutely the case.
I do wonder, though, if any of those who throw him up as an expert have ever looked at his Facebook page. It’s called Crime Power & Politics, and in the Background section, he says he has provided “VIP protection for members of the Royal Family and Pope,” surely a grand way to cast being part of a “flying squad” of motorcycle officers assigned to escort those dignitaries, which is what he agreed the reference means.
If a bit prickly at first about being grilled about his CV, McLean was soon as agreeable as he is on the tube, quick to acknowledge it’s been a long time since he’s worn the uniform.
But in the factory of TV news, it appears, they don’t care so much if the bona fides of the sausage are antiquus, or not. It’s enough that he’s sausage.