A long record of doing the right thing

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/04/2016 (3450 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I guess you could call this a letter of reference for a job because basically, that’s what it is.

Not that anyone has asked me who should be the next Winnipeg police chief. Least of all Danny Smyth, who really doesn’t need my endorsement, but who’s getting it anyway. There hasn’t been much public chatter about naming a successor to Devon Clunis, but Smyth, as deputy chief of investigative services, is the most obvious internal candidate. And while he hasn’t said he’s interested in the job, at least not publicly, I will be shocked if he doesn’t apply.

I say that in part because several months ago, before Clunis surprisingly announced he was resigning, I casually asked Smyth if he was thinking about retiring in this, his 30th year on the job. I don’t recall his exact words, but here’s what it sounded like.

“No way.”

Most of you know Danny Smyth as the news conference face and voice of the Winnipeg Police Service during a series of high-profile and highly sensitive criminal investigations, foremost among them the Tina Fontaine case. You may have your own impression of Smyth as a man who wasn’t afraid to show how upset he was about how a pair of officers — one of them a supervisor — failed to take the 15-year-old Child and Family Services runaway into custody when they came across her on a traffic stop just days before she disappeared. Or you may have sensed he’s someone who tries to answer as directly and honestly as he’s able given the constraints of an ongoing investigation. That’s the way I got to know Smyth long ago. As direct and honest.

On Wednesday, by way of refreshing my memory — as cops often say to judges when they ask for permission to consult their notes — I turned to Cowboys and Indians, the book I wrote that’s centred on the March 9, 1988, police shooting of aboriginal leader J.J. Harper. The event ended tragically in both Harper’s death and, ultimately, the post-traumatic-stress-induced death of Robert Cross, the haunted police constable who shot him.

I found what I was looking for about Danny Gerald Smyth on page 111 of the book, beginning with these words from a chapter about the inquest that preceded the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry:

“He was the first cop to talk to Cross after the shooting, and the last officer to testify on day five of the inquest. Smyth was the most junior officer at the shooting scene, the son of the police armament officer, and a university graduate. When he took the stand that spring afternoon, a month after the shooting, it became rapidly apparent that the tone of his testimony was different from the rest… ”

The rest were the three constables who had testified before Smyth, all of whom had responded to the early morning shooting scene on Logan Avenue but taken little in the way of notes. One of them — Smyth’s partner at the scene — would later confess at the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry he rewrote his notebook and gave false evidence at the inquest. Which brings us to the contrasting testimony, as I described it in the book.

“Smyth’s answers were direct and detailed and there was nothing defensive about his demeanour. Maybe it was because he was a relative rookie who hadn’t been conditioned or socialized to be one of the boys. Maybe it was because he had worked only in the downtown district and he had never met Cross before. Maybe it was his education and upbringing. Whatever it was there were no ‘I don’t knows,’ from Smyth, the way there had been from the other three constables that day.”

There’s more about Smyth’s testimony and a mention that suggests Smyth’s character in another way. How he and another constable tried to stem the bleeding from Harper’s chest, and how Smyth climbed into the ambulance with the mortally wounded man and tried to comfort him. And urged him to hang on.

Over the years, I’ve bumped into Danny on duty or received a call from him about a story he thought could help the police service, or simply asked him direct questions and received direct answers. Which is not to imply we’ve been close, only that it’s been a mostly friendly and respectful relationship. Along the way, Smyth has received a master’s degree in organizational management and seemingly touched almost every important rung in the ladder to the top of the WPS. All, that is, but the one at the very top.

Here’s the most important part: Smyth did that even though as a young officer, at what arguably turned out to be the most historic turning point in the service’s history, he chose to resist the cultural pressure to do the wrong thing.

And simply did his job.

There is no better reference for a police chief.

Or better lesson for a recruit class to learn.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca