Stephen Williams is to be commended for “Life on Nut Island” (May), in particular for drawing attention to the social costs of fateful police decisions and practices and for raising the point that bad apples are dispatched more expediently than rotten barrels. (Was it not somewhat contradictory, though, to use knowledge generated by the Mollen Commission to support his case, while objecting to the extraordinary expense of the Ipperwash Inquiry?)
Policing is an extension of the executive function of government and its capacity to act against individuals and groups for the common good. However, where interests are uncommon (outstanding native land claims, for instance), the police’s authority to act is ambiguous. Caledonia is the latest example: in the absence of a political or constitutional solution, police are the visible targets and will be criticized for the action they take.
Since Ipperwash and Oka, police have attempted to retreat as far as possible from such events, but politicians and judges would prefer that police absorb the heat in their stead. At the same time, as those who framed our system of liberal government (John Locke among them) knew, the executive sometimes takes prerogative power to act outside of the norms or rule of law, using police as the domestic instrument of that power. This power animates the occupational culture of policing, stimulating the bureaucratic double-talk we hear from police executives.
As a consequence of the tension inherent in policing, both its occupational culture and its leadership require a certain amount of justification. Enter well-paid lawyers, who defend beyond the expected limits of the law the rights of police organizations and individual police officers to persist in practices that are deemed necessary according to the logic of liberal political philosophy but aberrant to common justice.
I agree with Williams that there is a systemic problem, but I would extend his analysis. Given the reliance of our political system on what might be called original theft, it is convenient for not only police managers, bureaucrats, and unions but also politicians and captains of industry to ignore the underlying causes of “one dead Indian” and one defunct Tactical and Rescue Unit.
Willem de Lint
University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario
I applaud Stephen Williams for labouring for police reform of some sort, but I am unconvinced by the lessons he draws from Constable Ron Heinemann’s humiliations. Williams posits a gulf between the Ontario Provincial Police management’s conceptions of reputational risk and front-line officers’ conceptions of operational risk; in a nutshell, the bigwigs are playing politics while little guys like Heinemann are getting shot at. From this, Williams concludes that the force needs more and better management in the Harvard style and that Standard Operating Procedures should not be second-guessed. These suggestions, typical of the case for internal reform (and the “bad apple” inquiries Williams derides), assume that the police are generally well adapted to policing themselves and that the opp’s existing system of self-regulation is amenable to meaningful reform. They further assume that rulebooks are a relevant part of police operational culture.
In asking readers to choose between the priorities of tactically minded officers on the ground and those of strategy-minded commanders off-site, Williams is forcing the issue of police oversight into a binary. For him, tactics are rule governed and good, strategy is arbitrary and bad. However, one of the great truisms of policing is that there is a rule for just about everything, and as Heinemann’s story and forty years of policing research indicate, there is a way around every rule. This is as true for Incident Commanders as it is for line officers. In Williams’s own account, Standard Operating Procedures broke down when Heinemann delivered a personal “fuck you” to a suspect by way of a few pen strokes. A freak, bad apple moment? One wonders...
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