STANLEY PARK CASE LEAVES TROUBLING QUESTIONS

From a public relations point of view, Jamie Graham did a great job
with the Stanley Park Six. He was onto the issue as soon as he heard
about it. He expressed the right amount of outrage. He commended the
whistle-blower, rookie constable Troy Peters. He recommended criminal
charges be laid. And, in the history of how chiefs of police tend to
deal with matters of internal discipline, he was far more transparent
than we have been used to.

But the good stuff ends there. The process and the results still leave
us with many troubling questions.

In the best of all possible worlds, all six cops should have been
fired. Based on Peters' testimony in the evidence released by Graham
Wednesday, it was obvious the beatings were premeditated. They were
not spontaneous acts of frustration, as the cops argued before Judge
Herbert Weitzel in December.

There is a considerable difference between the "agreed statement of
facts"-the negotiated reality between Crown and accused-that Judge
Weitzel was limited to, and the shocking truth of the vigilante
actions that took place that night in Stanley Park.

According to Peters, the cops threatened the three victims with a
beating even before they were transported to the park. Once the six
cops and their victims arrived at Third Beach, it was as if they were
following a well-practised script. The cops first secured the
perimeter and searched the bushes in the area, presumably to make sure
no witnesses were present. While we heard during the court case that
the supervising officer, acting Sgt. James Kenney, played no role in
this and simply observed from several yards away, Peters' testimony
throws serious doubt on that.

It seems Kenney was part of the plot all along. According to Peters,
when the third victim was about to be released from the police wagon
to be beaten, Kenney approached Peters to suggest he may want to take
a walk because the third beating would be "the ugliest of the three."
How would he know that unless the beatings were planned in advance?

When the beatings were done, Peters recalls one of the cops, Gabriel
Kojima, turning to him and saying something like: "This is the kind of
shit you signed up for," leading one to believe it was a regular
practice at the VPD.

Back at police headquarters, it was acting Sgt. Kenny who conducted
the meeting where the cover-up was hatched.

Graham did fire two of the cops, Kojima and Duncan Gemmell, the most
thuggish during the beatings. That leaves four of the vigilantes on
the force, two of them with criminal records.

Through all of this, of course, the six have received full pay, mostly
because the feckless police board couldn't get around to exercising
its power to stop the cheques coming.

The six also cost taxpayers a small fortune in legal fees. Only the
best criminal lawyers in town pick up these gigs. If they were
provincial public servants or politicians who had been found guilty of
a criminal offence, they would be required to pay their own lawyers'
bills.

But that's not the case with Vancouver's cops, unless the board gets
up the gumption to change the policy.

And finally, there is the police policy of breaching, which lets the
cops pick up their victims without charging them and haul them off to
remote locations. The same policy allowed the cops to dump Frank
Joseph Paul's body in an alley five years ago.

On Wednesday, Deputy Chief Bob Rich said the cops have no problems
with the breaching policy. Police board chair Mayor Larry Campbell
promised to review that policy, but quite frankly, the chief has
managed to keep the board so far out of the loop on this whole matter,
I'm surprised they can do anything more than turn up once a month for
their free meal.