What happened in Tuktoyaktuk this last weekend should be a case study for every single police officer to memorize.
A man is very, very lucky to be alive after he repeatedly pointed a loaded firearm at RCMP officers. Police knew it was loaded because he fired a shot into the air. As a general rule of thumb, threatening the life of an on-duty cop who has a family to go home to is a guaranteed way to get yourself shot and have no one question the police’s motives.
And yet, they talked him down. Maybe he only had one bullet. Regardless, had this scene played out anywhere else on the continent, I doubt it would have ended the same way.
Reports of police overextending their authority and escalating situations until someone dies are far too common these days. The photo of the cop leaning on George Floyd’s neck is still a haunting memory for most of us. In the United States the situation has reached epidemic proportions, but Canada has also had its share of “police killing someone who didn’t need to die” stories. Absolutely zero of these incidents involve the “bad guy” pointing a loaded weapon at the police officer(s) on duty.
So the fact the Tuktoykatuk RCMP were able to de-escalate the situation without anyone getting physically hurt is absolutely amazing. If there’s an award for top-notch policing, they’ve earned it. They’ve also shown that incidents like George Floyd do not ever need to happen — if police can talk down a man with a loaded firearm here in the Delta, there is no reason unarmed “bad guys” should be ending up dead elsewhere in North America.
It’s been an interesting week for policing in the Delta. Not long after the incident in Tuktoyaktuk, a group of vigilantes in Aklavik confronted three men they believed to be a drug dealers, chasing them into the woods. A while later, the vigilantes located a package of suspected cocaine and handed it to the Aklavik RCMP.
Hopefully when they handled the suspected contraband they were wearing proper gloves, because otherwise their fingerprints are probably all over it — which means it likely won’t be admissible as evidence in the event of a trial. Frankly, I would be surprised if charges are actually laid at all. It’s hard enough for police who do a proper investigation to convince a judge and/or jury someone is guilty of a crime. I personally have been witness to many trials that ended without a conviction because the defence was able to raise enough of a doubt for the judge to not proceed. The fact police can’t say for certain where the drugs were found — just that they were given them by vigilantes who insisted they belonged to the men they just chased out of town — pretty much means case closed. Regardless of how well the people of Aklavik know who these guys are, they’re still innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law.
Good police work is slow. Frustratingly slow. But it has to be. A single miscalculation by a cop can transform other people’s lives forever. Hasty policing is how we end up with situations like George Floyd.
Careful policing is how a man in Tuktoyaktuk is still alive today.