Was politics at play when police outed Coun. Eadie as a supposed abusive drunk?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2015 (3678 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The who, what, when and where we basically know.

It’s the “why” that’s giving me a problem, although not the kind of personal discomfort it’s giving Winnipeg city councillor Ross Eadie as a weekend police drop-off at the city’s foremost drunk tank.

The Free Press, in fact, broke that story Monday and posed “why” police would report what happened to Mayor Brian Bowman in this front-page headline. “Why did they call the boss?”

Indeed, that is the fuller question, especially given that Eadie was never charged with anything.

Eadie has since acknowledged and apologized for his own central part in a story which begins with what amounts to a binge-drinking episode in The Exchange Friday night, the boozing part of which ended when — as Eadie sort of remembers it — a friend put the legally blind and by then drunk politician in a taxi early Saturday morning. Apparently Eadie passed out in the cab. Whereupon police and first responders were summoned, and Eadie was transported to the Main Street Project to sleep it off. Maybe it would have ended quietly right there if Eadie had gone quietly while being assisted.

But, according to a Free Press source who tipped the paper on the incident, Eadie was verbally abusive to police.

Eadie himself told the Free Press: “Someone from the mayor’s office called me and said that I assaulted somebody or something, a paramedic or something.”

As mentioned, he wasn’t charged. But it was that behaviour, we are led to believe, that justified a senior police officer reporting the incident to Mayor Brian Bowman. If Eadie’s behaviour is supposedly the answer to why the Winnipeg Police Service chose to call his “boss,” it doesn’t answer it for him. And it didn’t make any difference to the mayor, who to his credit dismissed it as a “personal” not a personnel matter.

Regardless, on Monday Eadie issued a written public apology to the police, the paramedics and the taxi driver involved and thanked others who had helped him. Among them a homeless man who “guided me to my office to pick up my brief case before going home.” He also referred to the “great job” done by the Main Street Project, and also acknowledged that police did the right think by taking him somewhere safe.

“I live alone.”

Eadie also made this poignant point as part of his apology: “My personal life is not my public life in my mind, but there are certain times of the year I struggle with depression. None of this activity has an effect on my doing the job as a city councillor…”

Again, though, what Eadie still doesn’t understand is why police chose to call his “boss,” who really isn’t his boss. The voters of Mynarski ward are the real boss. He might also be wondering why cops who routinely handle verbally abusive drunks without calling their “boss” decided they needed to report him to the City of Winnipeg’s Big Boss.

But there are some other aspects of this story that are disturbing, at least they are to me. Eadie is a member of the city’s police board, which oversees such pivotal police matters as budget and staffing numbers. Did that have anything to do with the police service’s decision to out Eadie as an abusive drunk, and inevitably publicly embarrass him in the media? The thinking behind the call to Bowman probably didn’t go that deep. But it adds an uncomfortable political aspect for all concerned.

Then there’s the privacy issue.

The mayor, of course, was a lawyer in his previous career who specialized in privacy, so I gather he would know what’s “personal” and what’s not.

Yet, when I asked his office Monday whether there would be a review conducted to determine if police breached Eadie’s privacy, the answer was “no.”

As for police, when I referred to a possible breach of Eadie’s privacy, whether Chief Devon Clunis approved reporting the incident to the mayor, and “why” it was done, this was the response: “This is a private matter and the Winnipeg Police Service will not be providing any comments.”

A private matter?

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How ironic.

The chief of police may not have to be open and transparent with the media, but Ross Eadie himself can ask those questions at the next police board meeting. Where police can’t as easily and dismissively duck the question from the person who is the subject of this “private matter” that became so public.

If I were Ross Eadie, I’d start with “who” approved it, and end with the most troubling unanswered question: why did they call the boss?

He probably won’t ask though because there is an important take away in all of this for Eadie and his colleagues at city hall. Politicians may have power over the Winnipeg Police Service, their budgets and membership numbers. But police have power, too. As if every politician in the city and province doesn’t have that uneasy feeling already.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca