The incident in Langford Saturday could have so easily turned out differently, but because police officers did their job — and did it well — a dangerous situation was resolved with no one getting hurt.
West Shore RCMP got a report at about 5:20 p.m. Saturday of an agitated man with a gun along the road near the intersection of Veterans Memorial Parkway and Langford Parkway. When officers arrived, the man fired two shots with a pistol.
It would be hard to criticize officers if they had fired back. There was a serious threat to the lives of the police officers and to many civilians at a busy intersection at a busy time of the day. It was a tense situation.
Yet the officers handled it with patience. Despite the man’s highly agitated state, despite the fact that he set the gun down and picked it up several times, waving it around, officers waited him out. Instead of shooting him, they talked to him. They answered his agitation with calmness and it paid off. He gave himself up about 8 p.m.
Police-involved shootings are in the news with distressing regularity these days, but the Langford incident won’t make headlines outside of the region. Move on, folks, nothing to see here.
But in reality, there was something to see: commendable professionalism and remarkable restraint.
Witnesses, some of whom were trapped in their cars as police stopped traffic for understandable reasons, noted how calm the police were, not an easy task in such a high-pressure situation. Officers had to weigh the welfare of the man with the gun with the safety of the public — the lives of innocent people were at risk.
It was a situation for which police are trained, but one that most officers hope they never confront.
Sometimes police get it wrong — they are human, after all. And among those wearing uniforms are a few bad apples, just as there are in any segment of the population, but they are the aberration, not the norm.
The trouble is, the aberrations get most of the attention, and then the public starts to believe that the aberration is the norm. It doesn’t help that there are people willing to use these aberrations to fan the flames of a rising anti-cop sentiment.
Except for a very few exceptions, no police officer wants to shoot another person. It’s a traumatic experience from which recovery takes a long, long time. It’s a life-changing experience, and not for the better.
Police come under intense scrutiny when they use lethal force, and there’s no shortage of armchair critics who know unequivocally how a situation could have been better handled. But police are frequently called on to make decisions in situations most of us will never have to face, and they often must make those decisions in a split second.
When someone dies or is seriously injured in an encounter with police, investigations result, with the aim of learning what to do or not to do when such situations arise. Sometimes, blame is assigned.
Saturday’s incident in Langford should be subjected to the same scrutiny — not to lay blame but to assign credit, not to ascertain what wrong, but to show what went right, and why.
