Skip to main content

A New Kind of Zero Tolerance

Did you laugh as hard as we did at the Police Department's latest request for public assistance?

You know, the one about looking for a suspect who smashed up Decanters Restaurant & Wine Bar a couple of weeks ago.Y

ou remember.... the drunk guy who got caught trying to steal booze from behind the bar. To get away he threw bottles around, broke some windows and scapped with an employee before staff and customers could get him down.

And the owners tried to call the cops. For almost three hours. Three fricking hours fighting with a violent drunk because they couldn't get one single highly trained, armed, dedicated police officer to come and make an arrest.

Even after someone walked to the Public Safety Building and tried to convince the cops there to take the two minute walk to Decanters and help, no cops showed up. So they finally let the guy go.

Yeah, that guy. The guy cops want your help to find.

Note to police: don't hold your breath.

We thought this P.R. debacle was the icing on the cake on what the public thinks of police service in Winnipeg.

But then last week a civil jury of six topped it. They said they couldn't believe the Chief of Police when he told them the police policy on handling domestic disputes.

Now, this shouldn't have been a surprise, since the other 999,994 people in the province also knew Chief Jack Ewatski was winging it when he said the domestic violence policy didn't force officers to arrest people they knew were innocent.

And yet, we were surprised. The jury of Winnipeg citizens spoke loud and clear when they awarded a woman $46,600, including punitive damages, for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

Ewastski didn't know what he was talking about, they said. And with that, they put the problems with the police service into perfect perspective.

The problem lies with the top. The senior officer who sets the policies and sets the tone of police work in the city. And who has done little more than undermine the force throughout his tenure.

Yesterday we told you how Chief Ewatski announced the exoneration of Tom Sophonow for the 1981 murder of Barbara Stoppel. He has never explained why. And when the province called a sham inquiry into the reasons for the alleged wrongful conviction, Ewatski sat silent as his officers were vilified and blamed for railroading Sophonow. Not one word that Sophonow was more to blame than anyone for his convictions.

Ewatski was content to see the police carry the blame alone.

This past month we were reminded of the shooting of Matthew Dumas by a police officer one year ago. And how Chief Ewatski was nowhere to be found during the tense days that followed the incident. When he surfaced, it was to say he had been "consulting" with native, uh, leaders about a heretofore unknown race-based policy of having the native "community" oversee the investigation whenever an aboriginal is shot by police. We can't remember any show of support for the police officer who was forced to make the fatal decision to shoot Dumas-- as he had been trained.

And before that, there was the infamous arbitration hearing launched by six officers put on administrative leave by Ewatski. He said he had to do it because of allegations the police failed to warn gang member Kevin Tokarchuk of a plot to kill him, and that they may have broken the law by taping a meeting between a lawyer and a gang member.

And we all remember how the hearing turned out.

Shortly after the city of Winnipeg was fined $20,000 because Ewatski refused to hand over documents to the plaintiffs, a settlement was reached, amount undisclosed of course -- but paid for by the taxpayers.

Tack on the lawyers fees the city paid, and keep in mind that a Crown Attorney from Calgary who reviewed the case said charges against the officers were not recommended, and it all adds up to one very expensive lesson.

Experienced police investigators retired, careers were damaged and the morale of the homicide and gang units were devastated by Ewatski's actions.

The only people who won out, said retired Sgt. Dave Oakes, were whoever killed Tokarchuk and five Hell's Angels associates who had been charged with firebombing a police officer's home and who had the charges stayed.

Way to go Jack.

When the police are left to do their jobs, they usually come up shining.

Just look at Operation Clean Sweep, the oh-my-god-what-do-we-do-now project thrown up after innocent bystander Phillipe Haiart was killed in a gang shootout. By all accounts, its been a raging success. West end residents say they can see the changes on the streets as drug dealers, prostitutes and gang members realize the police mean business.

But if it's going so well, what does it say about what Ewatski was doing about street crime before Haiart's death forced his hand? Community activists like Rev. Harry Lehotsky had been calling for just such a quality-of-life policing policy for years, only to be dismissed.

It took a tragedy to get Ewatski's attention focused on something other than opposing his force wearing name tags.

So how has he managed to get away with it for years?

Simple. Take one look at the people who sit on City Council. And ask yourselves who and when have any one of them asked relevant questions about the direction of the police service under Jack Ewatski?

Then take a look at the Press. And ask the same thing.

It's obvious it's time for Ewatski to go. We need a zero tolerance policy on him and his decisions.

The next time the police information officers issue a request for public assistance, maybe it should be for a new Chief of Police.

We'll be at Decanters, interviewing candidates.

Popular posts from this blog

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent.  Ha ha.  Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years  bashing Christianity  as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for  a boycott of white businesses . * And with her  Marxist research partner, she's  smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the controversy over

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it. The police