It’s worth noting when we see police do their jobs well

How strange it is when police do their jobs and do them well. How morally worrying it is to feel gratified, to replay murderous footage as if it were a choreographed dance video.

The body cam shows a Nashville cop pulling up at an elementary school, taking his rifle out of the trunk, gathering information, shouting, “I need three!” and then “Let’s go! Let’s go!” and racing into the school without hesitation. It’s a lesson, a tonic, and not just for Republican gun fetishists.

The cop and his team raced inside and up and along at hyper-speed, shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” and quickly took down a shooter who had just slaughtered six people, including three small children. It had been 14 minutes since the 911 call.

It was just the latest such massacre of American schoolchildren in recent years, after Sandy Hook where Adam Lanza could not be stopped in time, at Parkland where cops waited fearfully outside the school, and at Uvalde, where 376 heavily armed police waited outside for over an hour while the killer massacred 19 children and two teachers.

The killers are samey, mentally distorted and evil. The Nashville police did what they trained for and what the school had rehearsed for. Yet most Americans are still braced for gunfire.

American cops show up for war, encased in massed armoured trucks, adding to the chaos, panicking, brutalizing anyone in their path and often killing for no reason. Generally, they are ill-chosen, undereducated and undertrained, overarmed, and backed by police unions whose interests do not include the public good.

But at the Capitol on Jan. 6, most of the doomed police officers did their job with immense courage and determination. New York City is girding for Donald Trump’s court appearance on Tuesday; I hope the police are immaculate.

It is indeed possible for police to be effective. In Canada they aren’t, not much. This week’s report into the Portapique mass killing of 23 people is a tolling bell of RCMP incompetence.

That’s why it’s so remarkable that Toronto’s new police chief, Myron Demkiw, has drawn attention to the case of an officer who allegedly brushed aside the pleas of a woman who told him her ex-boyfriend was going to kill her.

Three days later, on Aug. 18 last year, Dylon Dowman, 33, who was accused of stalking and terrorizing Daniella Mallia, 23, allegedly shot her to death in a Downsview parking garage. Mallia had told Const. Anson Alfonso and his partner Const. Sang Youb Lee that she feared Dowman would kill her.

According to documents filed in connection with the misconduct charges laid against Alfonso, the officers spoke to her for 39 minutes, to Dowman for three, collected no information, pressed no charges and even cautioned Mallia, although it was clear she was the victim.

Alfonso, now facing four charges, is accused of lying to a superior about Dowman’s firearms prohibition. No problem here, he said. Nothing to see. Move along. (Dowman is charged with first-degree murder.)

Demkiw met with Mallia’s family and put out a statement to the media. He did his job. His officers, it is alleged, did not. It is so rare for cops to be called to account for the job they didn’t do.

Toronto police told the Star that they have a “very clear and very direct” intimate partner violence procedure. In the same way, the Nashville police knew precisely what to do in a school shooting, formatted and taught.

Some work is amorphous, a matter of judgment, of stepping back and assessing a problem. Most jobs, however, are learned early. People are told how to do a good job at speed.

On the other hand, I watched an aggrieved garbage collector go down my street last week, smashing bins and dumping them sideways to block the sidewalk, scattering detritus, and littering the street with little green bags of dog leavings fluttering in gusts of cold wind.

I was impressed. The man hates his job. He wants the world to know it and now it does. What’s it like when a doctor or a cop or anyone is wholeheartedly bad at their job? What does it do to the rest of us?

Lovely Daniella is shown smiling, an assuredly happy person. She called the police as a last resort and they failed her. Her family will never recover, each day of their lives bringing the same agony, waking up and thinking, “Daniella is gone. How can that be?”

A murder is a stone thrown into a pond, leaving ripples that radiate across the entire surface of the still water. The ripples reach everyone. No one is untouched.

I sometimes think that Canada, a liberal-minded nation I love, has a habit of idealizing people. It didn’t work out that well in the pandemic. Americans ruin their country by overreacting to crime, to everything. Canadians underreact. When it comes to protecting citizens from violent death, we don’t prepare, teach and practise how it’s done.

We let cops get away with neglecting their work, not bothering to do it carefully and well. Nothing would please me more than rethinking the job of policing, of keeping it in good repair, staffed by thoughtful men and women we could come to admire.

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