Pubdate: Sat, 03 Mar 2007
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2007 The Gazette, a division of Southam Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: James Mennie

RISKY GREY ZONE THAT GOES WITH POLICE WORK ESPECIALLY MURKY IN THIS CASE

"We are in a dangerous profession," says Laval police chief 
Jean-Pierre Gariepy. "And when you are in a dangerous profession, 
there are risks involved.

"You can give the training, the equipment - all the necessary tools - 
but there remains an extremely dangerous grey zone.

"And I'd place the events of this morning in that dangerous grey 
zone, despite all of the training and the tools and the equipment."

The events Gariepy's talking about exploded in a Brossard home at 
about 5 a.m. yesterday and left Laval police Constable Daniel Tessier 
dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Tessier, 42 years old and a 17-year police veteran, had been assigned 
to Laval's narcotics squad only 10 days earlier and was providing 
"physical surveillance" for yesterday's raid.

The picture of Tessier they handed out yesterday suggests perhaps why 
he had drawn that duty - his face being the kind you'd probably 
forget a minute after you'd seen it, presuming you'd noticed it all.

Just how that face wound up in the line of fire will presumably be 
revealed once an inquiry is completed into how dark and deep the grey 
zone was during yesterday's raid.

And given the troubling circumstances of Tessier's shooting, one can 
only hope it's completed quickly. Because right now, this doesn't feel right.

I have no formal education in police work. In fact, nearly everything 
I know about police operations I learned from public inquiries. But 
they were inquiries always held after someone had been shot - and 
were instructive insofar as they blew the hell out of the televised 
mythology that has grown around police techniques.

A police raid, for example, is rarely planned or carried out with the 
bank-heist like precision (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor) often 
depicted on the small screen.

This isn't because the cops don't know how to plan a raid, but 
because life in general, and criminal suspects in particular, can 
rarely be relied upon to follow a script.

Suspects sometimes unexpectedly change the routine that would 
normally take them to the spot where the cops were ready to jump.

Sometimes, a traffic jam can screw up a timetable so badly the raid's 
called off. Other times, demands for resources by an utterly 
unrelated Raid B deemed more important by police commanders sees 
essential personnel taken away from Raid A at the last minute.

And that's when the grey starts to seep in.

Cops know this, of course, which is why even though there will always 
be risk in their profession, they do their best to try to manage it. 
Thus, whenever a raid is conducted on a hard target like a house or 
store, particularly one where the details of the interior are sketchy 
or unknown, the first people to burst through the door belong to the SWAT team.

Despite the mythology surrounding what's supposed to be an elite 
unit, SWAT teams are effective because they are trained to be able to 
make a decision on when not to pull the trigger - and make it in the 
space of half a heartbeat.

There is also the pragmatic side to SWAT that doesn't involve 
gunplay: The sudden appearance of four body-armoured, heavily armed 
officers with an aggregate weight of half a tonne usually dissuading 
a suspect from even thinking about reaching for a weapon.

Residents of the street where the raid took place say they saw SWAT 
officers (who are hard not to notice) emerge from a van in in the 
area after the shooting stopped. Which isn't to say they weren't a 
part of larger contingent that was perhaps already involved in the 
raid, but this seems for the moment like another shade of grey on a 
canvas that's already getting darker.

There were also conflicting reports yesterday over just when and if 
Longueuil police (who are responsible for policing in Brossard) were 
informed of Laval's raid in their territory.

Because Tessier died during a police operation, the investigation 
into the circumstances surrounding his death has been transferred to 
the Surete du Quebec. No one from the SQ was present to take 
questions at Gariepy's briefing yesterday.

As he wound up that briefing, Gariepy compared police work with a 
coin toss where, usually, the coin turns in favour of the cops.

There's no arguing with his assessment that yesterday, the coin came 
down on the wrong side for Daniel Tessier.

But until the SQ manages to come up with some answers, the question 
is whether that coin should have been tossed at all.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman