To Serve and Protect
Thank heavens for municipal police forces! Without them could we possibly believe in law and order? Without their presence wouldn't the criminal element go on their happily senseless sprees of crime? Without our police forces, we could be robbed, we could be murdered, we would worry incessantly about our safety and that of our children. Would we not? Well, wouldn't we? Most certainly, yes of course. So then, it's agreed every municipality should have the comfort of knowing their police force is above reproach, that its members can be relied upon to do their duty to the public, that above all, their head, the municipal Chief of Police knows what he is doing and uses all of his hard-earned policing law-and-order smarts along with his relatively newly-acquired executive intelligence to ensure that peace reigns on the land.On the other hand, what do you do when your municipal police force, seemingly despite its best efforts has a lamentably low rate of crime solving under its belt, and doesn't appear to be headed for any great improvement? The City of Ottawa appears to be rather ill served, and that's a pity. No one might wish to contest Chief Vince Bevan's honesty, integrity and commitment to "serve and protect", but despite his cordial denials to the contrary he has a long, sad track record of proven incompetence. Doubt that? the evidence is there for all to see. His spectacular failures due to sheer incompetence compels one to ask why he was considered for the post, and certainly question his fitness for the position he currently holds.
This is the same senior officer with lots of experience behind him in the policing business who headed the Oakville police force, and whose most celebrated failure was that of the Paul Bernardo rampage of rape and murder. Chief Bevan's inability to apprehend a pattern relating to the serial nature of the Bernardo pair's vile sexual depravities is legend. Had Paul Bernardo been apprehended rather than half-heartedly interrogated as a casual suspect in a number of rapes, the horror surrounding the torture and murder of two young women and that of Bernardo's sister-in-law could have been averted. At some point in his pathologically predatory career the predator turned into a murderer. Aided and abetted by his wife who shared his deviant sexual fantasies. It was Chief Bevan's imcompetence in overseeing his officers and in failing to adequately search for and examine evidence that led to the infamous deal that permitted Bernardo's wife to escape the justice due her.
There were no credible challenges from law enforcement to Bernardo's dedicated raping forays, nothing to credibly convince him he could be found out, caught and charged. After all, he had been questioned several times as a potential suspect, as someone fitting a very particular profile, then he was dismissed. That pattern was to repeat itself time and again. Two spectacularly horrible murders of two young women in the Ottawa area, several years apart, where suspects were questioned, then dismissed have added to Chief Bevan's dismal record. It would take several years in the first case and almost a year in the second murder before they were solved, and not because the police did their work, but because of blind good luck.
A young woman, bicycling in east-end Ottawa on a National Capital Commission bicycling trail disappeared during a rain storm, early on a week-end day. Her body was later found in a state of partial decomposition, and it was clear she had been violently raped and murdered. The area was cordoned off, witnesses were interviewed, and by some great good luck an astute observer described the facial features of a suspect. A police drawing was produced and published at large. Information came in from the public, "individuals of interest" were interviewed, but the interviews led to nothing concrete. Years passed, yet during that time there were several rapes which bore a strange hallmark of familiarity, and the police shrugged off any intimation they could be connected. Finally, a North Bay detective recognized a man who had moved there recently, from the police drawing, someone who had already been interviewed by the Ottawa police, and this man had been implicated in a failed rape in North Bay. Even then the Ottawa police were slow to take up the challenge. Finally, when it became impossible to continue completely ignoring the facts of the case, a man was arrested for the murder of Ardeth Wood - and just incidentally also implicated in the unsolved area rapes.
Nine months ago in south-west Ottawa a young woman, on her way home from work at night, after her workshift at a local fast food stop disappeared. Friends she had been chatting with prior to her disappearance were interviewed. Useless-to-identify photographs taken from a nearby milk store surveillance camera were later published in a vain attempt at some sort of identification when police found they were unable to move forward on the case. Police interviewed countless "individuals of interest", but found no convincing evidence to implicate anyone. The murderer, a young man who lived nearby, made a spectacle of himself by running naked down a main thoroughfare under the influence of a narcotic, all the while shouting he had murdered Jennifer Teague. He was taken into detention, and when he had sobered up, denied he'd had anything to do with the case. He was released. A short while later, he spoke with neighbours telling them he was the murderer of the young woman, asking them to inform police. And in case police still didn't get it, he went himself to the closest (off-duty) police officer he could find and turned himself in. Another victory for the hard-working, enterprising, crime-solving Ottawa police force.
That same force that officially released statistics this week on their crime-fighting performance for the year. Fully 62% of crimes of violence were solved in the past year. Wow! that also happens to be a decrease in performance of 10% over the preceding year. That, despite an increase in the force, with more police officers on call, allied with a 6% drop in the number of violent crimes.
Do we feel well served? Do we feel protected?
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 28, 2006
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