October 15, 2010
CALEDONIA It was a bizarre display of self-congratulation for an OPP commander whose elite squad had been publicly humiliated by a group of crudely armed native protesters only eight days before.
Instead of removing protesters from Douglas Creek Estates (DCE), members of the OPP tactical team were themselves pelted with rocks, attacked with clubs and other makeshift weapons and driven off the occupation site as television cameras rolled.
But on Feb. 28, 2006, two months after the protesters took over the subdivision, Inspector Mel Getty held a meeting to praise his troops for their handling of the volatile situation.
He declared the operation a smashing success and defied anybody to disagree with him.
“If anyone doesn’t agree, you can leave the door right now,” he stated while pointing to the exits.
According to Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford’s new book, Helpless, Getty then said something even more astonishing.
The new mission, he stated, was for the OPP to protect “natives from non-natives.”
It was the first time a superior officer had told them they should be treating people differently because of their racial background. In the months to come, they would learn that Caledonia was to be treated as a land-claim dispute, rather than a criminal matter, and they shouldn’t do anything to antagonize or provoke the occupiers.
According to Blatchford’s book — subtitled Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How The Law Failed All of Us — nobody made a move for the door after Getty’s edict.
But the grumbling among the rank-and-file had already started to percolate. Most of the complaints were directed to Ontario Provincial Police Association boss Karl Walsh, who later coined the phrase “two-tiered justice system.”
Walsh was alarmed by the scant number of charges that had been laid against the protesters, who had blocked public highways, knocked out a hydro substation, torched a rail bridge, hijacked a police vehicle and thrown a van over a bridge. They had also looted houses in full view of the police and media.
After the abortive April 20, 2006, raid, the protesters had set up checkpoints around the 40-hectare residential subdivision, issued passports to residents and imposed curfews.
Debbie Thompson, who was forced to go through the checkpoints, told Blatchford the protesters had even threatened to body search her. But they backed off when she told them to get lost.
Like a number of residents quoted in the book, Thompson said she had seen camouflage-clad protesters with rifles patrolling the area and heard gunshots at night emanating from a bridge near her home. She had considered buying a gun and taking shooting lessons to protect herself. She had already lost confidence in the OPP’s ability or willingness to protect her.
“Because the police aren’t coming and I’m not calling them. Someone comes up here and threatens me, I’ll blow them away,” she told Blatchford. Her husband talked her out of getting the gun.
Dave Hartless, a Hamilton police officer and former soldier whose house backs onto the subdivision, became one of the biggest critics of the OPP after being subjected to constant taunts, harassment and death threats. On two occasions, somebody loosened the wheel nuts on his wife’s minivan, creating a potentially fatal situation.
Frustrated by the OPP’s tepid response to resident complaints, he organized a kind of mutual assistance program in the neighbourhood. When somebody’s home was under threat, the residents would rally to their side to offer moral support and record the incident.
In her book, Blatchford describes a clash between Hartless’s neighbours and the protesters that became known as the Night of the Rocks.
The incident started at the home of 90-year-old war veteran Jack Dancey, whose unfenced back yard had been invaded a group of natives on all-terrain vehicles.
When neighbours came to help, an angry mob on DCE property pelted them with fist-sized rocks hurled with lacrosse sticks. In a Monty Python-esque response, a resident started driving golf balls back at them.
A band of OPP officers arrived in full riot gear, but refused to do anything.
Their sergeant suggested: “If you guys just leave, they’ll get bored and go away.”
As a police officer, Hartless believes in the broken window theory of policing.
“When you allow things to occur, broken windows in your neighbourhood, you end up taking a few steps back and, before you know it, you’ve got a complete (mess) that you’re living in, and that’s what the OPP did here,” he was quoted as saying in Helpless.
Or in Blatchford’s own words, “The police, by their inaction, were enabling and encouraging the occupiers into increasingly extreme behaviour.”
The 258-page work — published by Doubleday Canada — will be officially launched and available in bookstores Oct. 26.