Chief pulls plug just as he’s getting started

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2016 (3665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Devon Clunis’s shockingly short stint as Winnipeg police chief is ending just as as it began. In controversy.

I’m not just referring to Clunis choosing to announce his retirement the day before a police budget that could reportedly see as many as 80 job losses and denying his decision to leave had anything to do with that.

Of course, the rank-and-file are unlikely to believe that, anymore than I do. But that’s how it’s ending.

Much as it began in October 2012 with another surprise and an issue Clunis could have avoided with better decision-making.

Mere days after he was promoted to chief, the then-48-year-old police veteran granted an interview to Winnipeg-based Christian Week in which he told them he believed God had chosen him for the job, when it was really a demigod of sorts — then-city CAO Phil Sheegl, with the blessing of pal and the mayor at the time, Sam Katz.

That’s not what turned Clunis’s debut interview with Christian Week into a media-storm disaster, though. It was what he added after he naively said he was tired of the city being labelled the murder capital of Canada.

“What would happen if we all just truly — I’m talking about all religious stripes here — started praying for the peace of this city and then started putting some action behind that? I believe something phenomenal is going to happen in out city. I truly believe it is coming.”

Clunis never backed down from what he said, but he quickly backed away from the religious part of it, and the controversy faded. Yet, the message of community caring and involvement would become a centrepiece of his mission to deal with crime and the social conditions that often create it.

Still, Clunis seemed to have learned a lesson from it, which also defined how he handled the job. Be careful about being too open and honest with the media.

The most obvious example of Clunis saying he was transparent, but not acting it, involved a police-involved tragedy. It was the case of the Westwood mother dealing with postpartum depression who drowned her two children in a bathtub, then drowned herself in the Assiniboine River. That was in July 2013, less than a year into his job. But by August, the Free Press reported what Clunis and the police service hadn’t. That, after the mother called 911, and two officers arrived, the cops hadn’t found the children in the upstairs bathroom. It was the grandmother who later searched for her grandchildren and found them.

“Yes, there was a delay,” Clunis acknowledged, without being able to say whether the children could have been saved if police had searched and found them.

The irony was the other delay in the case. The five months it took for Clunis to do what he should have done when it happened.

I remember, as he walked into the police media briefing room to have that confessional interview, his remarking that there were those who thought he shouldn’t be doing it. My sense of that was it represented the advice of his office’s legal adviser. But Clunis finally made the right decision.

Over his term doing what I’ve long said is the hardest job in the city, Clunis undoubtedly made many more good decisions than questionable ones.

His biggest and most obvious asset was the way he reached out to the community, the people of the street and the neighbourhoods. The way he listened may have been his greatest gift. And the way he truly and demonstrably cared. But Clunis didn’t merely listen and care, he tried to do something about it.

I recall doing some street work and listening of my own in the crime-plagued West End and asking people if things had improved in recent years. They said it had and they credited police being more involved. Imagine if Clunis had taken a couple of reporters with him to those same streets and asked the same question, and how that would have gone over with the public and police. Instead, he held those stiff community forums and dropped by elementary school classrooms, usually without the media knowing.

To his credit, though, Clunis seemed to connect with and care deeply about the indigenous community, particularly the missing and murdered file and most notably with the resources and backing he and Deputy Chief Danny Smyth gave the Tina Fontaine homicide investigation.

But it ended as it began. In controversy. With the WPS acknowledging the RCMP has interviewed “several” unnamed Winnipeg police officers around alleged civic corruption involving the construction of the new police headquarters, and the Mounties relying on information from two police informants to whom Clunis’s investigators appear not to have given much credence or time.

One might fairly wonder whether the scandal and the RCMP probe had anything to do with the decision by Clunis to leave his post so soon.

But on Thursday, Clunis wasn’t answering questions about how his officers handled the whistleblowers the Mounties took seriously.

It ended as it began in another way, too. With Clunis saying what he had said when he was appointed.

That he wanted to make a difference. And he did.

The police service is better than when he inherited it. Unfortunately for Winnipeg, Clunis was just getting started.

When he stopped.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca