The Black Rod

So you're the police chief in Murderpeg. Four years after you got the job, the city is setting a record in the number of homicides, StatsCan has named us the most violent city in Canada , and Pollyanna the Mayor is fighting with the national airline that says downtown is too dangerous to bunk its crews overnight. The murder rate would be double if it wasn't for the skill of the medical professionals who keep saving the lives of the daily victim of a shooting or stabbing. The Rock Machine is fighting the Hell's Angels while street gangs have overrun half the city. And a spree killer is still on the loose a year after he gunned down one man outside a house, one man inside a house and gut-shot a teenaged girl on the street for no reason except to see her die. (She lived.) Wouldn't you know it, the uppity politicians and public started asking what you were going to do about it. Apparently a helicopter that keeps communities awake half the night isn't en...

More than a year ago, in a blog post, retired Deputy Chief Menno Zacharias ripped back the curtain from some of the most secret inner workings of the Winnipeg Police Service. What he wrote was astonishing---and never more relevant than today, on the heels of Police Chief Keith McCaskill's much anticipated crime strategy. Perhaps shocked at breaching the blue code of silence, Zacharias later refused to give more details and never returned to the point despite our best prodding. The mainstream media ignored his comments entirely. To put his observations in context you need to know that it's been 15 years since New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his hand-picked police commissioner Bill Bratton wrote the book on fighting crime in the big city. Proving that their method wasn't a fluke, Bratton later moved right across the country to Los Angeles and recreated his success in reducing the crime rate by phenomenal amounts. Giuliani and Bratton designed ...