WHEN ORDINARY CITIZENS ATTACK POLICE: HOW THE LESSONS OF CANADIAN COP KILLER JUSTIN BOURQUE TAUGHT US THAT LOOKING FOR EXPLANATIONS IS A NECESSARY BUT OFTEN FUTILE EXERCISE.
Officers don’t expect ordinary citizens to attack
Police in Baton Rouge, La., held an emotional press conference Monday, just a day after an armed-to-the-teeth gunman killed three officers and wounded three others, one of whom remains in hospital in critical condition after taking a shot to the head.
As Col. Michael Edmonson of the Louisiana State Police, Sheriff Sid Gautreaux of the East Baton Rouge Parish and Chief Carl Dabadie of the Baton Rouge Police took their turns on the podium, they would then stand behind the next one at the microphone, eyes filling or blinking hard.
They looked shattered, as indeed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appeared two years ago, when a young man named Justin Bourque deliberately drew their members to a trailer park by walking down its main street, dressed in camouflage and openly carrying a rifle and a shotgun, never even pointing either at the civilians he passed.
Unwilling pawns in an ambush they couldn’t conceive, some of those civilians dutifully called 911 to report what they’d seen, just as police in Baton Rouge early Sunday morning began to receive calls about “a dude with a rifle,” as Edmonson put it. The traps were duly set. Ditto Gavin Long, the 29-year-old who killed Montrell Jackson, with his big heart, and Brad Garafola, who died trying to get to the wounded Matthew Gerald (Long shot Garafola first, killing him, and then finished off Gerald with two more).
Long wasn’t after civilians, just cops, exactly as Bourque was.
Their motivations may have been different and difficult to know, but they had that in common.
Long was killed by a SWAT team sniper who took him out with a tricky shot from more than 100 yards away, and a good thing too, Dabadie said, because “This guy was not gonna stop here, I have no doubt.” The “militarized tactics” of police so criticized of late, he snapped, “saved lives …”
Police there are left to try to make sense of Long’s social media footprint — it was substantial, if incoherent — with him appearing to have believed in holistic healing, armed resistance for black Americans, and the antigovernment “sovereign citizen movement”; in other words, he seems to have been the usual messed-up, unsuccessful, unhinged guy.
But Bourque was taken alive and well by a mixed team of Emergency Task Force members — to their collective credit, they didn’t even hurt him, and Bourque later actually complained they’d been a bit mean to him — and went on to stand trial, though he actually pleaded guilty to all charges, so the trial was effectively turned into a sentencing hearing.
Then 24, Bourque was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 75 years, the longest available one.
He survived to set the record straight about why he’d done what he did, but proved largely incapable of it: He wasn’t depressed, just a little sleep-deprived; he’d been home-schooled by religious parents and appeared to resent it, at least a little; he was an ordinary weed-smoking, vaguely unhappy-with-his-life young man, and in his video-recorded police interview, he seemed barely capable of rousing himself to much of anything.
At one point, asked how he felt after he’d taken three lives, Bourque replied, “This is going to sound really messed up, but I felt pretty accomplished.
“You see what’s happened through the centuries and see what’s happened here … it’s all about the side you choose and they (the officers) chose the wrong one.” Huh?
Looking to Long, Bourque et al for explanations is fruitless, though the exercise is a necessary part of the investigations, and always unsatisfactory.
As Dabadie said in that press conference, and this was in relation to his SWAT team but it makes sense in a broader way, too, police don’t want to ever have to employ these things.
But sometimes, he said, they have to use them.
“…We are up against a force that is not playing by the rules,” Dabadie said. “They didn’t play by the rules in Dallas (where earlier this month Micah Johnson picked off and murdered five officers) and they didn’t play by the rules here.”
I would quibble only with the use of the word “force.” I don’t think there’s any sort of force out there, of disaffected, restless young men who are going to start setting up ambushes and shooting cops.
But such people sure don’t play by the rules. Police may expect to be occasionally shot at by criminals, particularly those they corner or catch in mid-crime; they don’t expect it of ordinary citizens, and ordinary citizens don’t expect or want it, either. No one should think otherwise, either in the United States or Canada.
As then-PM Stephen Harper said at the regimental funeral for the three slain Mounties way back then, which is to say in 2014, “That is the understanding between us: Their service, and our support.”