MANY QUESTIONS REMAIN

Botched Operation: Inquiry Seems Likely

The acquittal of Basil Parasiris settles one question - what was
going on in the 42-year-old businessman's mind when he fired the
shots that killed Constable Daniel Tessier as Laval police stormed
into Parasiris's Brossard home on March 2, 2007.

But the testimony heard by the jurors during the trial brings up
other questions.

How could a police operation have gone so horribly awry? How could
armed police conducting a "dynamic entry" - a form of raid that sees
officers use battering rams to knock down doors and enter with
weapons drawn - not know where their suspect was or whether he was armed?

How did the situation become so confused - and the gunplay so chaotic
- - that within the space of 30 seconds, 18 shots were fired (some of
them into the bedroom door of Parasiris's 15-year-old son in the
mistaken impression it was the source of the gunfire) and three
people shot, one of them fatally? Why was the operation not carried
out by a SWAT team? How much intelligence was gathered by police on
Parasiris's home before the Laval officers moved in?

The day Tessier was shot, Laval police chief Jean-Pierre Gariepy
said: "We are in a dangerous profession, 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."

Which is true enough, given the daily unpredictability of police
work. But police departments know that the best way to reduce that
grey zone is to plan, to try to anticipate and to approach even the
most mundane of operations with a professional caution that can spell
the difference between life and death.

Montreal's police force learned that lesson the hard way in 1991,
after a bungled police surveillance operation left a 24-year-old man
dead from a single shot fired by a SWAT team sergeant.

A series of public inquiries determined that Marcellus Francois had
been mistaken for a suspect in an attempted murder named Kirt
Haywood. Francois was short-haired, 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed
130 pounds. Haywood, who wore braids down to his knees, was nearly 6
feet tall and weighed 160 pounds.

The fact that both men were black heightened tensions between the
city's police force and Montreal's black community.

But a coroner's inquest into Francois's death also revealed
procedural errors committed by officers working in detective offices,
the department's surveillance unit and its SWAT team.

In the end, the SWAT team officer who shot Francois was reassigned to
other duties and only two of the 20 officers involved in the
operation faced any disciplinary sanction within the force.

But after the public scrutiny, Montreal police operations, while not
always successful, have never since failed on the scale that they did
the day Francois was shot.

How much attention will be paid to the operation in which Tessier
lost his life remains to be seen. An internal probe could be ordered
by Laval police, or the conduct of officers the day of the raid might
be examined by Quebec's police ethics commission.

While such an inquiry is not certain, it seems likely. Because even
if the black and white question of Basil Parasiris's responsibility
for shooting Daniel Tessier has been answered, there remains a pall
of grey over just why Tessier had to die.