(Prime Time Crime exclusive Jan. 26, 2005)
Police Chief walks the walk
By Leo Knight
When Jamie Graham took over as Chief Constable of the Vancouver Police Department, the rank and file weren’t holding their collective breath to see if he’d turn out to be a good leader. They had, after all, come through a very tumultuous decade.
From the spectre of a public enquiry into the actions of Chief Bill Marshall to the incredible bumbling of the first outsider hired into that office, the ‘90s weren’t very kind to the city’s police department.
After Bruce Chambers’ dramatic implosion, the department put in place a caretaker chief, the affable but not particularly dynamic, Terry Blythe. Once his retirement was announced the search started for a new chief, not so much to move forward as to put the past behind.
What emerged was Chief Superintendent Jamie Graham, fresh from commanding the country’s largest RCMP detachment in Surrey, winning out over another former Mountie and the man who would later become Mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell.
For the city cops, the prospect of having a member of the RCMP as a Chief would normally have been unpalatable; such is the competition between the “Munies” and the Mounties. But, after all they had been through, most were prepared to watch and wait before pronouncing judgment on the fledgling Chief.
Rather quickly in the game, barely four months after assuming the top job, Graham found himself at the sharp end of things after the so-called Stanley Park Six story broke with a vengeance.
While there was certainly some wrongdoing in the Stanley Park case, the media played it up using photos of one of the alleged victims showing him battered, bruised and bleeding. Unfortunately, the injuries graphically shown in the photo splashed on the front pages or the video of the TV interviews were not inflicted by the police. They were earned some three days after the events in Stanley Park in a confrontation with another street punk. But no matter, there’s no point in letting the facts wander in the way of a good story.
It was precisely this type of treatment that caused Graham to lash out on Friday, after yet another exoneration of Constable David Bruce-Thomas, the police officer who pinned the get away car after a vicious home invasion. One of the perps, Jeff Berg, tried to engage Bruce-Thomas physically. During the course of the altercation, a major artery popped ensuring that Berg would never terrorize another family again.
From the outset Julie Berg has played the media like a fiddle. Yet, as identified by Graham in a most remarkable press release on Friday, she has played a game of deceptions and half-truths from the beginning and the media, so eager to believe an attractive young lady, failed to objectively test the story spun by what it seems, is just another spotlight-seeking windbag.
Graham called a spade a shovel in language seldom heard in this politically correct world.
It’s about time.
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