NOT-SO-DYNAMIC EXIT

"It was a really, really stupid thing to do," said a family friend who
lives a few streets over from where Laval morality and drug squad
officer Daniel Tessier, 42, was shot and killed March 2 during a
botched raid in an affluent area of Brossard on the South Shore. "[The
police] were looking for trouble."

Constable Tessier was part of a 13-man team attempting a pre-dawn raid
on the Rimouski Crescent home of Basile Parasiris, part of a
co-ordinated effort timed with simultaneous raids in Laval, the result
of a nine-month investigation into a drug trafficking ring. While the
exact sequence of events has yet to be made public, it is alleged that
Parasiris shot Tessier in the head after police stormed the house.
Parasiris's wife Penny and two young children - aged 6 and 15 - were
in the home at the time. She was wounded in the exchange, as was
Constable Stephane Forbes. No drugs were found.

Parasiris - whose gun was registered, albeit stored illegally (loaded)
- - has since claimed self-defence, saying that those who entered his
home did not clearly identify themselves as police.

All of which is enough to make a sane person wonder: What were 13
heavily armed police doing smashing down the door (called a "dynamic
entrance" in police parlance) of a residential home where it had to
have been known that, apart from the target, two children and a spouse
were also sleeping?

A home that was also known to have a weapon in it?

While none of us folks sounding sour notes in the growing chorus of
second-guessers with perfect 20/20 hindsight and a Favre-ish
dedication to Monday-morning pigskin passing can come close to
claiming knowledge of all the facts, it's hard not to wonder just what
the hell the people who planned this raid were thinking.

It has since been suggested that this kind of raid would have been
better handled by highly specialized SWAT, or tactical, teams rather
than regular uniforms or even members of special units, such as
Tessier's (the Laval SWAT team was assisting in the simultaneous raids
in Laval at the time). This is open to debate.

Tessier, despite being assigned to the drug squad a mere two weeks
before his death, was a 17-year veteran. Like all police officers in
Montreal now, he had very likely received extensive training in
tactical team procedures, part of basic training here since the
Polytechnique massacre where police were accused of taking too long to
engage shooter Marc Lepine.

You saw the fruits of that training at Dawson College last fall, when
regular police officers were able to "locate, isolate, neutralize," as
they are taught, gunman Kimveer Gill. And they did a heroic job, in
large part due to SWAT-inspired "active attacker" and "rapid
deployment" programs that have sprung up in police forces across North
America as a direct response to school shootings, now part of basic
training for Montreal police recruits.

Dynamic entrances, usually the turf of tactical teams, would likely be
a component of this training. (Montreal police were unable to respond
to questions relating to the use of dynamic entrance as of press
time.) But is this really what we want from our local 5-0?

Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury during the
Reagan administration and an associate editor of the Wall Street
Journal. An unapologetic Reagan conservative, he is nevertheless a
staunch opponent of the creeping militarization of local police
forces, and recently penned a scathing indictment of the use of SWAT
teams and SWAT-style police tactics titled "The Empire Turns Its Guns
on the Citizenry."

"There is no reason for SWAT teams to be used to deliver warrants to
drug users or dealers," Roberts told me in response to questions about
the Tessier shooting. (Tessier's team was not a SWAT team, but was
employing similar techniques.) "There is no reason to conduct the
raids at night while people are sleeping and police cannot be
identified... If police are concerned about delivering a warrant to a
dangerous drug dealer, they can wait until he comes outside.

If he never comes outside, they can cut off power, water and food
deliveries to the house.

"There is no excuse for SWAT teams to deliver warrants or to arrest
suspects," Roberts reiterates. "SWAT teams were formed in order to
deal with dangerous hostage situations. Their use for nighttime
arrests is simply police state behaviour."

We know that Parasiris, whatever else he was doing, was not about to
bomb a train station or gun down a classroom.

That morning he likely wasn't about to do anything more dangerous than
wake up and take a piss. But somewhere higher up the chain of command
a plan had been hatched, and now this plan would cost the life of an
experienced police officer, by all accounts a highly respected family
man and generally excellent guy. While there's no absolving the person
who pulled the trigger, let's be sure that the measure of Tessier's
sacrifice is high enough that it reaches those who put him in harm's
way in the first place.