Vancouver Province
for July 2, 1999

I’ve searched my soul, to say nothing of my thesaurus, for the right word to describe the firing of Police Chief Bruce Chambers and it’s clearly pusillanimous. That’s one of those words that you often read, especially in connection with politicians, but seldom ever hear. For those who, like me, need dictionaries for words of more than one syllable, it means, according to the Concise English Dictionary, "destitute of courage, firmness, or strength of mind, fainthearted".

Why was Mr Chambers hired in the first place?

Because after an exhaustive search he was deemed the best person to accomplish two things – bring policing closer to the community and lower the crime rate. But to do it, he had to shake things up and in doing that, he trod on the toes of the "old guard".

Chief Chambers claims that from the outset he was told, much by anonymous mail (one might fairly assume from his future officers) that his failure was pre-ordained. That he was brought in from the outside caused considerable resentment amongst senior officers – why, the man had the temerity to be from Thunder Bay, for goodness sakes.

I believe two things to be clearly evident – first, the senior officers were out to get Chambers from the outset and second, the majority of the rank and file and nearly all of the public affected supported him and what he was doing.

Why then did the Police Board fire him?

Mayor Philip Owen says "[Chambers] did a lot of good things – there’s no question about it … he was pushing on community based policing, he was pushing on reorganization and he was pushing the crime stats down". Those words, if given in a letter of recommendation, would be glowing praise indeed.

Well, then, what did he do wrong? The best Mayor Owen can do is state that there were criticisms of his "leadership style". Good Lord! The City of Vancouver must pay out $140,000 plus, one assumes more after Chambers’ lawyers get done, plus pay another chief’s salary for the year because the mayor has heard criticisms of the man’s leadership style! A leadership style which clearly got done precisely what the Police Board demanded he do as a condition of employment!

Of course I’m not privy to all the evidence but because the Mayor divulges no hard evidence upon which to fire Bruce Chambers I’m going to assume there was none – which puts you, me and the mayor on the same footing. All we have going for us is the tittle-tattle we hear. If the mayor and his board found Mr Chambers work unsatisfactory they should have told him in timely fashion and they ought to be able to point out his shortcomings now.

The tittle tattle I hear is that Mr Chambers paid no mind to the old guard, who didn’t want him to do what he was hired to do, who threw sand in his gears at every opportunity and who bad-mouthed him to a fare-thee-well, especially to members of the media who were, over the years, close to the "boys" at the cop shop. I also hear that the rank and file liked what he was doing for two reasons – he was not one of the "old boy network" and never would be and he subscribed to the younger constables’ more modern ideas of policing.

There is, of course, the well known incident of the Chief having been stopped in a roadblock. It was embarrassing, no doubt. Let every policeman in the City of Vancouver who has never driven having had a drink now stand up please. What’s truly disgraceful is that the incident was deliberately leaked to the "police" media, who get their inside stories by schmoozing policemen, as part of an obvious effort to discredit their chief. It only proves that Chambers was right – he was a marked man from the start.

What Mayor Owen and his anonymous Police Board have demonstrated beyond question is that they don’t have the guts to sustain a police chief who doesn’t meet with the approval of ‘the boys". The next chief if he’s not appointed from within, should know that the motto of the Vancouver police chief, as sanctified by Mayor Owen and his board, is the advice the crafty old Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn used to tell new congressmen - "to get along, you must go along."

Good word, pusillanimous – and so apt, don’t you think?