William "Bubbles"* Elliott, the Commissioner of the RCMP, warms us up for the second act of the Braidwood Inquiry, set to resume tomorrow.People just don't understand, he said today from the relative safety of Kandahar. Our officers are under pressure. They react when they feel threatened. Walk a mile in their shoes.
And here's the money-quote:
"The whole notion of looking at a video in slow motion or frame by frame is completely contrary to how a real human being perceives things when they are in the midst of a situation."
In other words, don't believe your lying eyes. Because they'll deliver quite a different tale from the single story--erroneous in all of its particulars--that the three officers who have testified so far wrote in their notebooks and swore under oath.
Four heavily-armed and flak-jacketed officers felt "threatened" by a fellow with an open stapler who hadn't "brandished" it, and who did not approach the officers screaming, and....We are asked to believe that in real time all three experienced identical hallucinations, brought on, no doubt, by "pressure."
To hear the Commissioner tell it, these guys don't need Tasers--they need fainting-couches. More tomorrow.
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*His nick in law school.
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