TAPE RAISES TROUBLING QUESTIONS

It's been known since the fatal police shooting of a bat-wielding
inner-city drug dealer more than two years ago that most of the
officers on the raid were drinking earlier that evening.

But a transcript of a police tape -- tendered at an inquest yesterday
- -- raises another question that troubled Winnipeg homicide officers
who investigated the shooting.

Did the drinking continue that night in the vice division building
before the eight officers went out on the raid?

At about 10:29 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1997, the tape transcript reveals, a
police operator reached an officer identified as David Black, to
advise him that fellow officer Colleen Bellingham had just reported a
shooting at the Dufferin Avenue raid scene.

While still on the phone, and moments after asking the operator if his
colleagues needed assistance, Black is heard making a strange aside to
a colleague in the office.

"He's shot in the shoulder," the constable begins, referring to the
fatally wounded man, Abe Hiebert. Then, inexplicably, Black begins
repeated commands that suggest he is concerned about his colleagues
returning and investigating homicide officers showing up at the vice
office.

"Get rid of this shit," Black says. "Get rid of this shit. Get
(inaudible) Harry, Harry get rid of this shit right now. Just get rid
of that right now, right now. Shut, let's shut the, shut the office,
guys."

After Black tells an inquiring unidentified male in the vice division
that he's talking to the "comm. centre," Black continues: "Just check
the office, make sure things are good." Seconds later, an unidentified
male voice is heard evidently making sure things are good.

"Uh, put it, put it on my desk. I'll put it . . . Put it in my desk
and I'll lock it up, OK?"

The lawyer for Hiebert's family, Martin Pollock, raised the issue
publicly yesterday while he attempted to suggest police may have been
drinking in the vice office.

It's a suggestion that an officer who was with internal affairs at the
time of the shooting agreed yesterday is a definite possibility.

But inexplicably, inquest counsel Doug Abra, who issues subpoenas, had
previously seen no need to call Black to testify.

The vice officers' explanation for the "shit" and locking "it" up in
one of the vice cops' desks was given during a brief recess.

Pollock and Abra were in the hallway, discussing Black, when Pollock
alluded to how Black explained it.

"The shit" was cigarettes.

Or porno discs.

"It could be both," Abra told Pollock.

Pollock is unconvinced.

For your information, the officers who admitted to drinking on duty
during an Immigration Department Christmas party at The Forks that
night were disciplined with paper that will disappear from their files
in a year if they don't do it again.

So dictates the police association's collective agreement.

But if, as Pollock suspects, at least some of the officers continued
to drink when they returned to the office, a few blocks away from the
Public Safety Building, it would explain why the only cop on the raid
who gave a blood sample after the shooting was the officer who didn't
attend the party.

Fortuitously, the same officer -- pony-tailed, 20-year veteran Det.
Sgt. Len Small -- is also the officer who shot Abe Hiebert.

Small gave a blood sample that showed he was clean after speaking with
his lawyer, Hymie Weinstein.

By contrast, the three officers who have testified so far didn't take
breathalysers on the advice of their police association lawyer.

What's curious about that is the evidence so far suggests the officers
who went to the party at 5 p.m. only stayed about an hour.

They reportedly returned to the vice office just after 6
p.m.

It would be about four hours before they would leave for the raid,
more than enough time for the one or two drinks they said they had at
the party to have been flushed from their systems.

And if there couldn't have been a trace of booze in their systems, why
would they refuse to give a blood sample? That question lingers like
the other unfathomable question in this case.

Why would they sound so panicky if it was only cigarettes?