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opinion

The Vancouver police department is barricading itself behind walls of self-praise, rather than looking critically at its performance in the Stanley Cup riot on June 15. An independent review, co-chaired by John Furlong (who ran the Winter Olympics), found last week that the police waited too long to react and failed to plan for the worst. "The police came on time. The problem was that a great many people arrived early," the review said dryly. The department, in its own study, rejects those criticisms.

If it was late on the scene – a scene filled with angry public drunkenness for hours before the riot began – it simply had no credible intelligence or forewarning. (But perhaps if an officer or two had been there?) Instead, the study praises the "meet and greet" strategy, an "award-winning tactic" that has worked before. That misses the point. By arriving too late, its officers were unable to penetrate the crowd of 155,000. They could not meet and they could not greet.

And why is the department so lacking in old-fashioned horse sense? "There was no information to suggest that more resources than were deployed for Game 5, a challenging night, or Game 6. . . would be needed to safely police Game 7." Has the department never heard that emotions build to a fever pitch in Game 7? People across the country were expecting a riot. But not the Vancouver police.

A majority of police officers surveyed as part of this study said afterward that they would have felt safer with more police deployed – but the VPD suggests they were Monday-morning quarterbacks who failed to ask in advance for more support. This is a department that simply will not hear criticism.

The department boasts that no one died. But it is apparent from countless videos that the lack of deaths bordered on the miraculous.

It's true that hundreds or thousands of drunken people, bent on mayhem, are difficult to control. It may be, as the VPD says, impossible to invite the "hooligan demographic" to street parties any more. But without the police taking a tougher, more critical look in the mirror, it's hard to know for sure if they're right, or just shouting from behind the barricades.

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