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.