The OPS Is In Crisis: WHOPPER WATCH

“(The OPS) made mistakes when we communicated key information about the tragic deaths. That is an inherent risk of the fast paced and timely communications we strive to deliver to Ottawa residents.”

Ottawa Police Service statement about their mistakes in reference to the six deaths in Barrhaven

After the Freedom Convoy fiasco caused to a large measure by the Ottawa Police Service, Ottawans came to the sobering realization, after a federal investigation into the mess, that not only were the police not very good at their jobs, some of them worked at counter-purposes to their senior officers, the will of civilian authorities and the welfare of the community.

They let their extremist politics get into the way of their work.

Our society has as one of its pillars that order and in fact freedom are based on the rule of law. The police in the convoy incident were incompetent, lazy and wrong-headed but also flew in the face of one of the tenets of democracy.

That the Ottawa police had become politicized in a law-abiding country is frightening. They are the rule of law unto themselves. We know they plant evidence. How does a law-abiding citizen protect themselves from that? That is immoral.

Now from a CBC story on the barbarous deaths of six people in Barrhaven, we find that they repeatedly had difficulty communicating basic information about the tragedy to the media and the public. The CBC was finding errors that the police had made. The police, for the most part, have a very low opinion of the media. Unfortunately, the media seemed to be better at reporting the facts than the people who had the facts. Fake news? The OPS wouldn’t know news if it was right in front of them or would get it wrong. Let’s just say their opinion of the media is faulty in light of their actions and deportment with the Barrhaven case.

In that tragedy, by The Bulldog’s estimate of the reporting by the CBC, the police made 19 basic mistakes in such easy things as spelling names. Given that the victims were part of a visible minority, one wonders how that went down in that community given that the previous OPS chief called his own service racist and misogynistic.

“That is an inherent risk of the fast paced and timely communications we strive to deliver to Ottawa residents,” the OPS statement said. Excuses. Well guess what? That media that parlays all that fake news, lived that life every day and got it right. The OPS, in the critical business of law enforcement and information, gets it wrong. Who are the hypocrites?

Now we can confirm what most Ottawans have suspected for a considerable time. The OPS is not very good. In fact, it has to look up to see bad.

And now we can also confirm something else that most Ottawans have suspected. The reason that freedom of speech is being restricted at the Ottawa Police Services Board, the buddies of the OPS, is because the police force can’t get it right so, in fine municipal form that we have come to expect at Ottawa City Hall, they try to cover it up. But the police couldn’t cover it up at the convoy because it was glaringly public and now they can’t cover it up in the Barrhaven tragedy which is less public.

The OPS has responded to their own crisis with putting lovely decals on the sides of their vehicles for better visibility. This will no doubt placate Ottawa’s teachers who don’t want OPS officers in their classrooms because they feel they are a bad influence on the students. The police don’t get it. And rather than decals for visibility, why not move your new ByWard Market office from a shopping centre to the corner of Murray and Dalhousie streets … or would that be messy, busy and inconvenient? Or not take 18 months to open your mall office to the public. That rather looks like the OPS just doesn’t want to do it. Not much of a surprise.

The OPS is not troubled. It is in crisis. The force must look up to see bad. It is politicized. It is incompetent. It’s out of control.

And unless police chief Eric Stubbs (who contributed to the mistakes in the Barrhaven case), Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, the OPSB and the glee club Ottawa City Council take this crisis seriously, something even more terrible will happen.

We’re not sure what that something might be, but we’re confident the OPS will find it and do it.

Ken Gray

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