Canada’s conservative national newspaper cites your humble Agitator in an editorial a couple of weeks ago denouncing militaristic police raids for nonviolent crimes. It’s a terrific editorial. Gave me a goosebump or two.

The piece focuses on the case of Basile Parasiris, the Quebec man facing murder charges for killing a raiding police officer. One update: Since the initial reports, police claim to have found three backs of a “white, powdery substance” in Parasiris’ home. That was two weeks ago. I’ve seen no subsequent reports on whether or not the substance tested positive for cocaine. Of course, even it was dope, it doesn’t excuse the raid, nor does it mean Parasiris is guilty of knowingly killing a police office. The fact that during the raid his son was on the phone with 911 reporting a criminal break-in suggests that Parasiris believed he was defending his home.

The text of the editorial–which is no longer available online–after the break.

At just past 5 a.m. on the morning of March 1, police broke down the door of the Brossard, Que., home of Basile “Billy” Parasiris, an apparent suspect in a cocaine ring who is the co-owner of a virtual driving range in Dorval. The police say they tried to identify themselves, but the family of four inside the home was fast asleep. Parasiris’s defence lawyer says that when his client awoke to the sound of his front door caving in, his first thought was that he was being targeted for a home-invasion robbery; the area has suffered from a serious outbreak of them lately. Mr. Parasiris reached for a firearm — a lawfully registered and owned one, though his defence lawyer admits it was illegally loaded — and in the ensuing firefight, Constable Daniel Tessier became the second Laval, Que., officer to die in the line of duty within 15 months. Mr. Parasiris’s wife was seriously wounded in the battle, and another officer was slightly injured.

Our Canadian peace-and-order instincts rightly lead us to condole with the police in a situation like this. Const. Tessier was the father of two young children. But reason comes before instinct, and with Mr. Parasiris facing a first degree murder charge, it must be said that it would be all the more unfortunate if Const. Tessier’s death were used as the occasion to unjustly deprive two other children of a father. Which is not to mention what else they might have lost in the botched raid: One of them dialed 911 in an adjoining room while their father exchanged gunfire with the police.

It is extremely difficult to imagine a justification for the use of what police call a “dynamic entrance” to arrest a suspect in a suburban family home with children inside — even if the house did contain drugs or evidence of ill-gotten gains. As it happens, the police have produced no such evidence and have not even laid charges against Mr. Parasiris for unlawful firearms storage, let alone drug crimes.

Paramilitary-style “dynamic entrances” or “forced-entry raids” — the euphemisms vary from place to place–have come under criticism lately in the United States. South of the border, police tactical units are busier and a homeowner is more likely to be armed in self-defence; there is, consequently, more American experience with the errors and abuses that can result from such raids. Journalist Radley Balko has chronicled hundreds of disasters ranging from attacks on mistaken addresses to deaths of bystanders from stray police bullets; the list online at cato.org/ raidmap is only the tip of the iceberg. For any premises that is not demonstrably some sort of fortified drug lab or gang clubhouse, the tactic must be considered discredited. But apparently the memo hadn’t yet reached Laval.

Let’s hope they study it when it arrives. According to Thursday’s Gazette, the Federation of Municipal Police Officers is denouncing television news producers for airing footage of the bloodstained room in which the firefight took place, even though the footage was aired specifically in order to provide a comparison of the physical evidence with Mr. Parasiris’s account of events. We doubt whether they will be any happier with Thursday’s story in the Gazette that features quotes from policemen horrified at the use of a “dynamic entrance” in these circumstances. “Why the hell did they need to take the door down,” one asks, “especially with [Parasiris's] wife and kids in the house?”

One cannot expect a straight answer to this profound question soon: It is the fashion of the day for police to refuse comment on “matters before the courts” when it suits them (though that somehow did not stop unsupported accounts of the evidence against Mr. Parasiris in the drug case from reaching journalists’ desks on the day of the shootout).

In the meantime, we would recommend a policy of caution about commenting too quickly on incidents of violence to at least one person: Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who tossed off a press release the day after the firefight that called Const. Tessier’s death “a reminder of the dangers our police officers face while protecting us from those who have no respect for the lives of others.” If Mr. Day and other politicians want to protect the lives of police officers, they should start by investigating the tactics they use to confront criminal suspects.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 11:03 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.