Tweet
************************************************** ******************
This Message Is Reprinted Under The FAIR USE
Doctrine Of International Copyright Law:
_http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html_
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html)
************************************************** ******************
FROM: _http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2007.05-law-life-on-nut-island/_
(http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/...on-nut-island/)
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output
started at /home/7784/domains/walrusmagazine.com/html/printerFriendly.php:10)
in /home/7784/domains/walrusmagazine.com/html/include/permissionGate.php on
line 20
(http://www.walrusmagazine.com/) Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Life on Nut Island
With four strokes of a pen on a Chippewa reserve, Ontario police officer Ron
Heinemann set in motion the disbandment of an elite crime-fighting unit. Was
he a villain, or the scapegoat for a corrupted police culture?
by Stephen Williams
Illustration by Josh Cochran
____________________________________
It was 4:35 a.m. on January 12, 2004, four below zero, with blowing snow and
treacherous roads, when the twelve members of the Ontario Provincial Police´
s Barrie Tactical and Rescue Unit (tru) set off in two unmarked Suburbans,
two gun trucks, a bomb truck, and an unmarked van. It took six hours to get
from Barrie to the Chippewa of the Thames reserve, thirty kilometres southwest
of London. When not spelling off the driver, Ron Heinemann positioned himself
over the axle in the bomb truck´s windowless cube van, cleaned his weapons,
put on his hostage rescue kit, and prepared charges for explosive forced
entries.
With the truck´s non-existent suspension, twice when it hit bumps, Heinemann´
s handiwork threatened to obliterate his crew. Heinemann wasn´t new to the
game. He´d been on the Barrie tru for almost a decade, was acting head of bomb
tech for the province, and, as the most senior constable on the Barrie team,
sometimes led training and field ops.
When they arrived on the scene, tru members would go immediately to the
front line, but, as in all such deployments, a senior officer known as the
Incident Commander (IC), holed up in a command centre away from the action, would
call the shots. Particularly since the Ipperwash Provincial Park occupation
in 1995, when native protester Dudley George was shot and killed by Heinemann´
s teammate Ken Deane, ICs had become increasingly gun-shy, ignoring crucial
tru Standard Operating Procedures (sops) that senior command thought too
provocative for reserves.
The opp does not generally have jurisdiction on First Nations land and must
usually be invited to an incident by a chief or band council. But the Barrie
tru had been receiving more calls than usual in recent months, and one thing
was clear: they were not welcome there.
Heinemann had been thinking about his recent sergeant´s exam and the course
textbook, Harvard Business Review on Culture and Change. While most police
forces followed the more prosaic program set out by the Ontario Police College
near Aylmer, the opp fancied itself a cut above and conceived its own exam.
Half of the 100 multiple-choice questions were based on Culture and Change´s
eight chapters, one of which had caught Heinemann´s attention.
"The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong" is about a team of some
eighty people who operated the Nut Island sewage treatment plant in Quincy,
Massachusetts, from the late 1960s until the plant was decommissioned in 1997.
Like a tru, the Nut Island team was dedicated, innovative, and
self-governing. They had esprit de corps, watched each other´s backs, and even dug into
their own pockets for spare parts and other necessities. There was one problem:
their dedication and self-sufficiency set the stage for catastrophic failure.
During a six-month period in 1982, this competent and experienced staff
released 3.4 billion tonnes of raw sewage into Boston Harbor.
The study describes the psychopathology that afflicts organizations when
communication between managers and the managed breaks down. As the chapter
describes, in most cases, the Nut Island Effect "features a similar set of
antagonists-a dedicated, cohesive team and distracted senior managers-whose
conflict follows a predictable behavioral pattern." The team develops an outsider
mentality, both heroic and isolated. Eventually, communications become so
strained that the workers feel taken for granted, and both sides lose focus on the
job at hand. Senior management turns a blind eye to operational dysfunction
until catastrophe hits. At that point someone becomes the fall guy and all
bets are off.
This resonated with Heinemann because it seemed to map his and other officers
´ experience with the opp since Ipperwash: eight years later, the force was
definitely in the throes of the Nut Island Effect.
The opp formed its first tru team in 1975 in the wake of the Los Angeles
Police Department´s creation of Special Weapons and Tactics units. The first
swat team emerged in the late 1960s following the Watts Riots and the emergence
of heavily armed domestic groups, notably the Black Panthers, which taught
the lapd that the standard snub-nosed .38-calibre pistol in the hand of an
average cop just didn´t cut it in the face of home-grown terrorism. By 2004,
virtually every decent-sized police force in North America had a tactical team.
Today, the opp has three tru teams with twelve members apiece. Based in
Orillia, London, and Odessa (near Kingston), each costs upwards of $5 million to
form and, with additional equipment, maintenance, and training, millions more
every year to maintain. As with other swat teams, the tru mandate includes
dealing with barricaded subjects, hostage crises, high-risk warrants, dog
tracking, witness protection, court security, and prisoner escorts. Gaining
membership is a tough slog. Heinemann and his fellow candidates underwent a
two-week selection process that required them to be in tip-top shape and included
sleep deprivation and psychological testing. Those who made the grade then
went through a five-week training course on the principles of site containment
followed by another five-week course on clearing and a three-week course on
how to advance on a site. Specialists did additional training-bomb technicians
for another nine weeks, rappel masters four, and snipers three. Only a
fraction of those who applied made the cut, but once on board they became part of
an elite fighting force accorded considerable respect among the rank and
file. Heinemann had always been proud he had "the right stuff."
Heinemann was edgy and dog-tired that early January morning. For the past
month, the Barrie tru had been putting in extremely long days, every day of the
week. To make things worse, Heinemann´s two young sons were restless and
irritable, and he and his wife, Toni, were hard-pressed to get even three hours
of uninterrupted sleep. Heinemann had just returned home after a forty-hour
stint, part of which was spent supervising the clear of a massive marijuana
grow op in the abandoned Molson brewery building south of Barrie. He had just
fallen into a deep sleep when his pager went off.
Chippewa conjured up the bête noire of recent opp history. Located in the
southwest corner of the province and only seventy kilometres northwest of the
Chippewa of the Thames reserve, Ipperwash had been one of Heinemann´s first
calls as a tru team member. In September 1995, after years of futile
negotiations with the government to recover land the Chippewa claimed as their own, a
group of about thirty natives from the Kettle and Stony Point reserves
occupied a piece of land that had been incorporated into the park. On September 5,
the press reported that the government was about to seek an injunction to have
the native protesters removed, but they refused to budge. More than 250 opp
officers, including two tru teams, descended on the park. By the time the
smoke cleared, Dudley George was dead.
It could have been any one of the twenty-four tru members on-site, including
Heinemann, who killed George, but Ken Deane was the triggerman, and
therefore the perfect scapegoat. Deane was charged with negligence causing death.
The brotherhood rallied to his defence. An annual hockey tournament was
established in his name; groups of cops sold T-shirts, stick pins, and other
trinkets to raise money; and, most impressively, the membership successfully
petitioned the union to add a surcharge to every cop´s monthly dues to help with
Deane´s defence. This initiative alone raised almost $1.5 million.
In the criminal trial, Deane was successfully prosecuted. He then pleaded
guilty to discreditable conduct following a Professional Standards Bureau (psb)
investigation and resigned from the force. It was a classic application of
the "bad apple" approach to problem-solving, and the sacrificing of Ken Deane
exacerbated deep divisions within the opp.
Publicly vilified, in cop culture Deane was a hero. He also walked away from
the ordeal with an estimated million-dollar settlement package and an
excellent job in the private sector. The more Heinemann learned of Deane´s true
fate, the more he thought that Deane ended up doing all right for himself, but
that policing was no better off for the ordeal.
In 2003, Ontario´s newly elected Liberal government ordered a formal inquiry
into Ipperwash, and it had convened just two months before Heinemann and his
crew set off for Chippewa of the Thames. Although it would be July 2004
before the first witnesses were called, the stated rationale for the inquiry-to
look into the events surrounding Dudley George´s death and to "make
recommendations on avoiding violence in similar circumstances in the future"-made the
opp brass more paranoid and hyper-vigilant than usual. To cops like
Heinemann and his teammates, who had been involved in many "similar circumstances,"
this was ludicrous: to avoid "similar circumstances" all the opp had to do
was follow sops in confrontations with First Nations people. The Ipperwash
inquiry followed tru cops like Joe Btfsplk´s black cloud. Although Al Capp´s
lovable cartoon character meant well, he was a jinx, and now the Barrie tru
was heading toward another confrontation on a native reserve.
The hostile at Chippewa of the Thames was a twenty-one-year-old, cop-hating,
dangerous pain in the *** named Aaron Deleary. He had an extensive criminal
record and an outstanding warrant on weapons charges. He was also known to be
associated with warrior societies, in which shadowy criminal elements had
become embedded on numerous native reserves throughout southern Ontario and
northern New York.
In the midst of his rampage, Deleary had a phone conversation with First
Nations Constable Dan Riley. Peppering his talk with racist slurs and invectives
against cops, Deleary said that he was an avenging spirit sent to clean up
the reserve. In reality, he and a cohort, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle
gang, were trying to kill another low-life named Joey Albert, who Deleary
claimed was a crack dealer. This, in Deleary´s view, justified shooting up Albert´
s house and van in broad daylight-not to mention the house of old Mrs.
Goldsack. (Collateral damage, Deleary said.) Police saw a wack job trying to
rectify a drug deal gone bad.
With four women, Deleary and his accomplice barricaded themselves in a
modest house at 788 Switzer near a busy convenience store. Band police aren´t
equipped to take on active shooters, and Constable Riley followed protocol by
calling the band chief, who in turn called the opp.
It took twelve hours to get Aaron Deleary out-hours not without drama,
including a high-speed chase. This distracting and exceedingly dangerous incident
could have been avoided had Heinemann´s request to shoot out the tires of the
vehicles parked at the target residence-in his view, an sop-not been
rebuffed by the Incident Commander, Inspector Kent Skinner, who told Heinemann he
would not authorize the discharge of any weapons by the tru on First Nations
territory.
This was Skinner´s first call as an IC, though he was an old warhorse who
had been Acting Staff Sergeant in charge of one of the tru teams at Ipperwash.
He knew as well as anyone that tactical teams across North America follow a
stringent set of sops. When it came to deploying heavily armed and dangerous
swat teams in life-and-death situations, these procedures maximize safety and
minimize risk for all concerned. But in order to avoid offending local
communities, they are often modified when teams are deployed to Ontario reserves.
As the hours wore on, Heinemann and his team became increasingly frustrated.
They received reports from Skinner of people entering the bush lines behind
the target residence. Typical of reserves, there was dead ground between
houses, and the members of the team tasked with surrounding the house were forced
to rotate continuously to cover their backs.
Bystanders were congregating at the roadblocks the opp had set up, which,
contrary to sops, Skinner refused to move out of sight of the target residence.
Heinemann made repeated requests that the roadblocks be moved, to no avail. A
roadblock in full view of tru ground operations around a barricaded active
shooter with hostages was not simply ill-advised, it was stupid. Worse still,
Skinner was letting civilians through the roadblocks to go to the convenience
store.
As time went by, the residents at the roadblocks, using cellphones and CBs,
began advising Deleary about tru movements. At one point, Skinner ordered
his alpha team to risk the dead ground and deliver a land line to the target
residence to facilitate communication with Deleary. Heinemann watched as Deleary
stuck his head out the back window and looked right at the alpha team.
Deleary could easily have shot and killed any of the officers before being gunned
down. A cop was killed at Grassy Narrows and another at Oka, but few even
remembered their names. Heinemann wondered how another dead aboriginal
malcontent would play at the Ipperwash inquiry.
cont...
This Message Is Reprinted Under The FAIR USE
Doctrine Of International Copyright Law:
_http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html_
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html)
************************************************** ******************
FROM: _http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2007.05-law-life-on-nut-island/_
(http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/...on-nut-island/)
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output
started at /home/7784/domains/walrusmagazine.com/html/printerFriendly.php:10)
in /home/7784/domains/walrusmagazine.com/html/include/permissionGate.php on
line 20
(http://www.walrusmagazine.com/) Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Life on Nut Island
With four strokes of a pen on a Chippewa reserve, Ontario police officer Ron
Heinemann set in motion the disbandment of an elite crime-fighting unit. Was
he a villain, or the scapegoat for a corrupted police culture?
by Stephen Williams
Illustration by Josh Cochran
____________________________________
It was 4:35 a.m. on January 12, 2004, four below zero, with blowing snow and
treacherous roads, when the twelve members of the Ontario Provincial Police´
s Barrie Tactical and Rescue Unit (tru) set off in two unmarked Suburbans,
two gun trucks, a bomb truck, and an unmarked van. It took six hours to get
from Barrie to the Chippewa of the Thames reserve, thirty kilometres southwest
of London. When not spelling off the driver, Ron Heinemann positioned himself
over the axle in the bomb truck´s windowless cube van, cleaned his weapons,
put on his hostage rescue kit, and prepared charges for explosive forced
entries.
With the truck´s non-existent suspension, twice when it hit bumps, Heinemann´
s handiwork threatened to obliterate his crew. Heinemann wasn´t new to the
game. He´d been on the Barrie tru for almost a decade, was acting head of bomb
tech for the province, and, as the most senior constable on the Barrie team,
sometimes led training and field ops.
When they arrived on the scene, tru members would go immediately to the
front line, but, as in all such deployments, a senior officer known as the
Incident Commander (IC), holed up in a command centre away from the action, would
call the shots. Particularly since the Ipperwash Provincial Park occupation
in 1995, when native protester Dudley George was shot and killed by Heinemann´
s teammate Ken Deane, ICs had become increasingly gun-shy, ignoring crucial
tru Standard Operating Procedures (sops) that senior command thought too
provocative for reserves.
The opp does not generally have jurisdiction on First Nations land and must
usually be invited to an incident by a chief or band council. But the Barrie
tru had been receiving more calls than usual in recent months, and one thing
was clear: they were not welcome there.
Heinemann had been thinking about his recent sergeant´s exam and the course
textbook, Harvard Business Review on Culture and Change. While most police
forces followed the more prosaic program set out by the Ontario Police College
near Aylmer, the opp fancied itself a cut above and conceived its own exam.
Half of the 100 multiple-choice questions were based on Culture and Change´s
eight chapters, one of which had caught Heinemann´s attention.
"The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong" is about a team of some
eighty people who operated the Nut Island sewage treatment plant in Quincy,
Massachusetts, from the late 1960s until the plant was decommissioned in 1997.
Like a tru, the Nut Island team was dedicated, innovative, and
self-governing. They had esprit de corps, watched each other´s backs, and even dug into
their own pockets for spare parts and other necessities. There was one problem:
their dedication and self-sufficiency set the stage for catastrophic failure.
During a six-month period in 1982, this competent and experienced staff
released 3.4 billion tonnes of raw sewage into Boston Harbor.
The study describes the psychopathology that afflicts organizations when
communication between managers and the managed breaks down. As the chapter
describes, in most cases, the Nut Island Effect "features a similar set of
antagonists-a dedicated, cohesive team and distracted senior managers-whose
conflict follows a predictable behavioral pattern." The team develops an outsider
mentality, both heroic and isolated. Eventually, communications become so
strained that the workers feel taken for granted, and both sides lose focus on the
job at hand. Senior management turns a blind eye to operational dysfunction
until catastrophe hits. At that point someone becomes the fall guy and all
bets are off.
This resonated with Heinemann because it seemed to map his and other officers
´ experience with the opp since Ipperwash: eight years later, the force was
definitely in the throes of the Nut Island Effect.
The opp formed its first tru team in 1975 in the wake of the Los Angeles
Police Department´s creation of Special Weapons and Tactics units. The first
swat team emerged in the late 1960s following the Watts Riots and the emergence
of heavily armed domestic groups, notably the Black Panthers, which taught
the lapd that the standard snub-nosed .38-calibre pistol in the hand of an
average cop just didn´t cut it in the face of home-grown terrorism. By 2004,
virtually every decent-sized police force in North America had a tactical team.
Today, the opp has three tru teams with twelve members apiece. Based in
Orillia, London, and Odessa (near Kingston), each costs upwards of $5 million to
form and, with additional equipment, maintenance, and training, millions more
every year to maintain. As with other swat teams, the tru mandate includes
dealing with barricaded subjects, hostage crises, high-risk warrants, dog
tracking, witness protection, court security, and prisoner escorts. Gaining
membership is a tough slog. Heinemann and his fellow candidates underwent a
two-week selection process that required them to be in tip-top shape and included
sleep deprivation and psychological testing. Those who made the grade then
went through a five-week training course on the principles of site containment
followed by another five-week course on clearing and a three-week course on
how to advance on a site. Specialists did additional training-bomb technicians
for another nine weeks, rappel masters four, and snipers three. Only a
fraction of those who applied made the cut, but once on board they became part of
an elite fighting force accorded considerable respect among the rank and
file. Heinemann had always been proud he had "the right stuff."
Heinemann was edgy and dog-tired that early January morning. For the past
month, the Barrie tru had been putting in extremely long days, every day of the
week. To make things worse, Heinemann´s two young sons were restless and
irritable, and he and his wife, Toni, were hard-pressed to get even three hours
of uninterrupted sleep. Heinemann had just returned home after a forty-hour
stint, part of which was spent supervising the clear of a massive marijuana
grow op in the abandoned Molson brewery building south of Barrie. He had just
fallen into a deep sleep when his pager went off.
Chippewa conjured up the bête noire of recent opp history. Located in the
southwest corner of the province and only seventy kilometres northwest of the
Chippewa of the Thames reserve, Ipperwash had been one of Heinemann´s first
calls as a tru team member. In September 1995, after years of futile
negotiations with the government to recover land the Chippewa claimed as their own, a
group of about thirty natives from the Kettle and Stony Point reserves
occupied a piece of land that had been incorporated into the park. On September 5,
the press reported that the government was about to seek an injunction to have
the native protesters removed, but they refused to budge. More than 250 opp
officers, including two tru teams, descended on the park. By the time the
smoke cleared, Dudley George was dead.
It could have been any one of the twenty-four tru members on-site, including
Heinemann, who killed George, but Ken Deane was the triggerman, and
therefore the perfect scapegoat. Deane was charged with negligence causing death.
The brotherhood rallied to his defence. An annual hockey tournament was
established in his name; groups of cops sold T-shirts, stick pins, and other
trinkets to raise money; and, most impressively, the membership successfully
petitioned the union to add a surcharge to every cop´s monthly dues to help with
Deane´s defence. This initiative alone raised almost $1.5 million.
In the criminal trial, Deane was successfully prosecuted. He then pleaded
guilty to discreditable conduct following a Professional Standards Bureau (psb)
investigation and resigned from the force. It was a classic application of
the "bad apple" approach to problem-solving, and the sacrificing of Ken Deane
exacerbated deep divisions within the opp.
Publicly vilified, in cop culture Deane was a hero. He also walked away from
the ordeal with an estimated million-dollar settlement package and an
excellent job in the private sector. The more Heinemann learned of Deane´s true
fate, the more he thought that Deane ended up doing all right for himself, but
that policing was no better off for the ordeal.
In 2003, Ontario´s newly elected Liberal government ordered a formal inquiry
into Ipperwash, and it had convened just two months before Heinemann and his
crew set off for Chippewa of the Thames. Although it would be July 2004
before the first witnesses were called, the stated rationale for the inquiry-to
look into the events surrounding Dudley George´s death and to "make
recommendations on avoiding violence in similar circumstances in the future"-made the
opp brass more paranoid and hyper-vigilant than usual. To cops like
Heinemann and his teammates, who had been involved in many "similar circumstances,"
this was ludicrous: to avoid "similar circumstances" all the opp had to do
was follow sops in confrontations with First Nations people. The Ipperwash
inquiry followed tru cops like Joe Btfsplk´s black cloud. Although Al Capp´s
lovable cartoon character meant well, he was a jinx, and now the Barrie tru
was heading toward another confrontation on a native reserve.
The hostile at Chippewa of the Thames was a twenty-one-year-old, cop-hating,
dangerous pain in the *** named Aaron Deleary. He had an extensive criminal
record and an outstanding warrant on weapons charges. He was also known to be
associated with warrior societies, in which shadowy criminal elements had
become embedded on numerous native reserves throughout southern Ontario and
northern New York.
In the midst of his rampage, Deleary had a phone conversation with First
Nations Constable Dan Riley. Peppering his talk with racist slurs and invectives
against cops, Deleary said that he was an avenging spirit sent to clean up
the reserve. In reality, he and a cohort, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle
gang, were trying to kill another low-life named Joey Albert, who Deleary
claimed was a crack dealer. This, in Deleary´s view, justified shooting up Albert´
s house and van in broad daylight-not to mention the house of old Mrs.
Goldsack. (Collateral damage, Deleary said.) Police saw a wack job trying to
rectify a drug deal gone bad.
With four women, Deleary and his accomplice barricaded themselves in a
modest house at 788 Switzer near a busy convenience store. Band police aren´t
equipped to take on active shooters, and Constable Riley followed protocol by
calling the band chief, who in turn called the opp.
It took twelve hours to get Aaron Deleary out-hours not without drama,
including a high-speed chase. This distracting and exceedingly dangerous incident
could have been avoided had Heinemann´s request to shoot out the tires of the
vehicles parked at the target residence-in his view, an sop-not been
rebuffed by the Incident Commander, Inspector Kent Skinner, who told Heinemann he
would not authorize the discharge of any weapons by the tru on First Nations
territory.
This was Skinner´s first call as an IC, though he was an old warhorse who
had been Acting Staff Sergeant in charge of one of the tru teams at Ipperwash.
He knew as well as anyone that tactical teams across North America follow a
stringent set of sops. When it came to deploying heavily armed and dangerous
swat teams in life-and-death situations, these procedures maximize safety and
minimize risk for all concerned. But in order to avoid offending local
communities, they are often modified when teams are deployed to Ontario reserves.
As the hours wore on, Heinemann and his team became increasingly frustrated.
They received reports from Skinner of people entering the bush lines behind
the target residence. Typical of reserves, there was dead ground between
houses, and the members of the team tasked with surrounding the house were forced
to rotate continuously to cover their backs.
Bystanders were congregating at the roadblocks the opp had set up, which,
contrary to sops, Skinner refused to move out of sight of the target residence.
Heinemann made repeated requests that the roadblocks be moved, to no avail. A
roadblock in full view of tru ground operations around a barricaded active
shooter with hostages was not simply ill-advised, it was stupid. Worse still,
Skinner was letting civilians through the roadblocks to go to the convenience
store.
As time went by, the residents at the roadblocks, using cellphones and CBs,
began advising Deleary about tru movements. At one point, Skinner ordered
his alpha team to risk the dead ground and deliver a land line to the target
residence to facilitate communication with Deleary. Heinemann watched as Deleary
stuck his head out the back window and looked right at the alpha team.
Deleary could easily have shot and killed any of the officers before being gunned
down. A cop was killed at Grassy Narrows and another at Oka, but few even
remembered their names. Heinemann wondered how another dead aboriginal
malcontent would play at the Ipperwash inquiry.
cont...
Comment