Wu family statement:

In the early morning hours of January 21, 2010, about a month and a half ago, Vancouver resident Yao Wei Wu was awakened, dragged out of his house and brutally beaten up by two men who turned out to be police officers in plain clothes. Mr. Wu and his family are completely innocent law-abiding people who had done nothing wrong. Although the perpetrators of the assault on Mr. Wu were immediately identified, no charges have been laid against them and there is no indication that they will ever be brought to justice. Therefore, in order to attempt to achieve some measure of justice, Mr. Wu and his wife have commenced a civil action this morning in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Action No. S101576, Vancouver Registry.

The details of the claim are set out in the Court documents, and they speak for themselves. It is important to note that none of the allegations in the Statement of Claim have been proved in Court, and the Defendants have not yet responded to them. The Defendants are the two alleged assailants, Vancouver Police Department constables Nicholas Florkow and Bryan London, their employer the City of Vancouver as well as the Corporation of Delta. The Corporation of Delta has been named because it is responsible for the Delta Police Department investigation of the incident, which the Wu family alleges has been negligently conducted.

The Wu family is very dissatisfied with the investigation of this matter. They feel that charges should have been laid weeks ago and that the men who beat Mr. Wu up are receiving preferential treatment because they are police officers. They don’t believe the Canadian justice system should work this way.

They were asked to file a complaint with the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, but they have no confidence with that process, because it involves police investigating police. The OPCC is staffed almost entirely with former police officers who must naturally be uncomfortable finding fault with their former colleagues.

The Wu family have full confidence that the civil court system will deal with this matter appropriately, and will have no further comment on this matter before the case comes to trial.

Own the Podium. The Best Place on Earth.

Am I the only one who finds these slogans offensive and cringes every time I hear them? Who thinks these things up?

Jingoism is rampant at the Olympic Games, so it should come as no surprise that some bureaucrat would decide that Canada would “own the podium” once taxpayers stepped up and doled out big dollars to improve Olympic performance. According to ownthepodium2010.com, the Government of Canada contributes $47 million per year to the program while the Government of British Columbia “has generously contributed $10 million”.

There’s only one taxpayer, so this year we have handed over $57 million to Roger Jackson and his gang. Generous indeed. It’s one thing for fleece us, it’s quite another for the recipients of our largesse to make boneheaded and unsportsmanlike decisions along the way. “Own the Podium” apparently means keeping other nations’ elite athletes off our soil (or ice or snow), thereby depriving our aspiring Olympians from training with and learning from the best. Nice call. And how’s that “ownership” thing working out? At this writing Canada is behind Korea in total medals and have fewer golds than tiny Switzerland…

Then there’s The Best Place on Earth. British Columbia is a nice place and it’s where I’ve chosen to live. But best place on earth? How insufferably arrogant. My vision of the best place on earth is a place where there is adequate health care for all, where homeless people don’t sleep on the streets, where aboriginal peoples are treated with dignity and respect, where the police are accountable to the citizens they serve, where people aren’t allowed to shoot grizzly bears for fun, where fish farms don’t foul the oceans and harm wild salmon, where ancient forests aren’t levelled to make toilet paper and where it doesn’t rain most of the time…

When I saw the sickening video of the fatal crash of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on Friday, my immediate reaction was, why weren’t those vertical support beams covered? By the next morning they had been,and the track speed had been reduced, although the IOC was blaming the young athlete’s inexperience for the tragedy.

An editorial in The Globe and Mail (February 14) has called for a coroner’s inquest into the matter to address the many disturbing questions that still linger. The Vancouver Sun’s Cam Cole, in a marked departure from CanWest’s Games cheerleading, listed these on Saturday:

“Why was the luge track with the record vertical drop running 20 km/h faster than it was designed to be? How could there be exposed steel posts a few feet off an outside curve where athletes are travelling 145 km/h? Was the athlete, ranked 44th in the world, expert enough to handle the dangerous course?

And, most disturbingly: might Canada, in its zeal to protect its athletes’ home- course advantage, have inadvertently contributed to the likelihood of crashes involving lower-ranked athletes who hadn’t had sufficient opportunity t train on such a wild, fast run?”

Disturbing indeed. If Canada’s “zeal” to “own the podium” played any role in this athlete’s death, that would be downright criminal.

The Globe is right: a coroner’s inquest should be called, and held, without delay.

I am. Only 17 days to go.

Columnist Ian Mulgrew doesn’t pull his punches when he writes about legal issues, and he landed an uppercut right on the button when he criticized the Crown’s “dithering” in a case arising from a fatal accident involving a member of the RCMP (“Prosecutors drag feet on whether to charge cop in biker’s death”; The Vancouver Sun, November 18, 2009). The way the criminal justice system handles fatality cases involving police officers is an affront to the bedrock principle that the system must treat everyone equally and operate without fear or favouritism.

Mulgrew’s example, the case arising from the tragic death of Orion Hutchinson in October of 2008, is not an isolated example of the interminable and unconscionable delays inherent in the investigations of fatalities involving the actions of BC police officers. Take the death of Jeff Berg, an unarmed man who died October 22, 2000 after being beaten and kicked by a Vancouver police officer. Although there was no doubt who was involved in the homicide and what had happened, Crown Counsel did not make its decision that charges would not be appropriate until December 9, 2002, more than two years later. Or how about the case of Kevin St. Arnaud, an unarmed man shot by a Mountie in Vanderhoof on December 19, 2004. After receiving the RCMP’s investigative report, the Crown decided charges were not appropriate on February 15, 2006, nearly 14 months later. Or the case of Ian Bush, the young Houston man shot in the back of the head by a Mountie in the Houston RCMP detachment office on October 29, 2005. Again, the RCMP investigated itself and the Crown finally decided on September 5, 2006 that charges were not appropriate. As if those cases don’t prove the point, there’s the case of Robert Dziekanski, whose death on October 14, 2007 was captured on the notorious videotape that’s reverberated around the world. There was no mystery as to what had occurred and who was involved. Yet it wasn’t until December 12, 2008 that Crown spokesman Stan Lowe (now the BC Police Complaint Commissioner) announced the prosecutors’ decision, widely scorned by critics, that nobody would be charged.

Had any of these cases involved just ordinary civilians, the Crown would have made charge approval decisions within a matter of hours, not months or years.

Delay is one thing, the quality of the eventual decisions is quite another. As far as I have been able to tell from my research, BC Crown Counsel (unlike those in other jurisdictions) have never prosecuted a police officer for an offence arising from a death caused by the intentional application of force. That suggests either that BC police have achieved a level of perfection not found elsewhere or that our criminal justice system is deeply flawed in the way it addresses such cases.

There is a widespread perception that BC police are above the law, that the system treats them differently than it treats ordinary citizens. The solution to this serious problem is simple and right in front of our collective noses. The public must demand that cases of death or serious injury arising from the actions of police officers are immediately investigated by trained civilians. We must also insist that prosecutorial decisions are handled by independent lawyers who do not work with the police on a routine basis. Nothing less than these two basic reforms will restore public faith in our legal system.