HEARING 'A LOVE FEST,' SAYS LAWYER FOR VICTIMS

The lawyer who represents the three victims of the Vancouver police
beatings in Stanley Park is calling an unprecedented hearing into the
dismissals of two officers "a love fest."

Phil Rankin slammed the Vancouver Police Department's "breaching" policy,
which allows police to arrest someone who is breaching the peace without
charge and remove them from the trouble spot.

"They were using the same thing in Saskatoon when [Saskatoon police]
dropped native people off and they died of frostbite.

"I don't consider it a policy at all because there's no judicial and
civilian control over it," fumed Rankin.

"Why would the whole of Team 4 [seven officers] in District 1 [the West
End] -- the whole team -- go to Stanley Park to deal with [Grant] Wilson,
[Jason] Desjardins and [Barry] Lawrie in a paddy wagon if they weren't
planning to assault them?" he said.

"And they are now going to tell us that they were just going there as part
of their breach policy. Well, I think that I've got a bridge to sell them,"
he quipped.

Rankin criticized the hearing while defending commission counsel Dana Urban
for doing his best on a tight budget.

"The problem with this hearing is that instead of Dana Urban [being] the
cross-examiner, it's the two appellants' [counsel] who get to cross-examine.

"They are given the pleasure of asking a lot of self-serving questions to
the witnesses."

Rankin said: "It's a love fest."

He said the majority of people probably disagree with him because they
think the police should have more powers to combat criminals.

"You have that prejudiced public who can't see the obvious -- that an
attack on somebody else's civil liberties is opening an attack on their own
at some point.

"If people can be taken from the streets of Vancouver to Stanley Park and
beaten at four in the morning, then you're just a little bit better than a
tin-pot dictatorship in Argentina or Brazil where you go to the park and
you just don't come back -- they disappear."