Gaffes shouldn’t cost police chief his job
It appears to be open season on Bordeleau from inside his own force
Is Charles Bordeleau doing a good job as Ottawa’s police chief?
It’s getting harder to know. It is never a good week when, as a leader, you’re getting stabbed in the back — and the front — with words like “resign” being brazenly tossed about by the people you serve.
I don’t happen to think he should quit. We’re dealing with blunders, not scandals; errors in judgment perhaps, but not serious moral failings.
Let’s face it. Some days, it’s the worst job in the city. There’s no positive light to be shone when a fairly routine arrest turns into a fatal confrontation with a civilian, especially one of a different skin colour, and the video evidence is plentiful and alarming.
However, if there is one thing that should keep the chief up at night, it is this: The level of insubordination seems rather high at the moment and this open-season criticism is — once started — difficult to put back in the bottle.
Look where some of the sharpest stings are coming from — within his own force, the people supposedly ON his side.
Some is predictable advocacy, like the police union claiming a lack of confidence in the chief’s leadership. Now it wants the mayor to intervene and, weeks ago, the chair of the police services board to resign. Gee, anything else we can do for you?
I’m not a fan of this “happy workplace” mantra anyway. Some of the most productive newsrooms, in my experience, have been the most miserable, because demands were high and change constant. But the papers were good.
Constables are making $100,000 a year to show up and act like pros, which they invariably do.
If they’re not skipping to work, a song in their hearts, is this the public’s worry?
The chief ’s involvement in his father-in-law’s traffic ticket is sounding more and more like a stupid mistake than an effort to improperly interfere on behalf of a relative. Bordeleau had no business calling anybody connected to that matter — even the court liaison officer — and should have had the political smarts to know better.
Whatever his motive, it looks bad.
Now an outside investigation has cleared the chief. The result struck the Ottawa Police Association as “outrageous” for its lack of thoroughness. But we’re told the “never interviewed” constable in question did provide evidence in an earlier setting.
Is it not time to turn the page on this one?
The chief ’s handling of the possible hiring of a Somali police officer strikes me as clumsy, but not for reasons being frequently cited.
I may be missing something, but where is the obvious racism in the arrest of Abdirahman Abdi? Police responded to a report of groping in a coffee shop and, as is their duty, gave chase when the suspect ran away. Are we to believe a white man would have been let go?
The real issue in the arrest is whether excessive force was used — it certainly appears that way — and why?
In any case, if race was not a factor in the arrest, why is hiring more Somali police officers the correct response to an outraged community?
The chief says the hiring is not a reaction to that incident at all and has a detailed explanation as to why choosing a possibly “unqualified” Somali candidate among 19 new recruits is laudable, the timing only coincidental.
Well, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan once famously said, yet this was the defensive position the chief found himself in when he gave a series of interviews this week in which he tried to set the hiring in a broader context of creating a more diverse workforce.
But, obviously, the timing and “glitch” paperwork sideshow only create suspicion.
The police service offered the candidate a job on the same day Abdi, 37, died.
The optics — not to mention the substance — of the move so offended the background investigator that she quit. (Anyone, by the way, who thinks police hiring is a pure meritocracy is just being naive.)
The lesson? The issue could have been managed better. There could well have been a “deep breath” moment after this horrifying fatality when putting any action on hold was the right call. Instead, many are pouncing on Bordeleau’s judgment, seeing only politics where he intends progress.
There will be more trying times until 2019, when his contract ends. And Bordeleau has to hope he hasn’t lost one precious element in this pact with the people: the benefit of the doubt.