It's May 4th, which is commonly dubbed "Star Wars Day", which means it's now been two years since the disgusting and disgraceful performance by Lethbridge Police. What did I say at the time? Oh, right:
This is 50,000 shades of insanity. As Kate McMillan says, the first thing we need to do is publicly expose and shame the 911 callers. At bare minimum the transcript of the calls must be released so we can determine exactly what information was provided to police.
Secondly, and this is the key: Somebody on the Lethbridge Police Service needs to be fired over this. There can be no wiggle room. A person currently on their payroll needs to be unemployed.
Later that year we learned there would be no criminal charge. Last summer we learned that the officers involved would not be in any way punished for their conduct. The Police Chief at the time, Scott Woods, was only an interim chief and in July of 2020 new Chief Shahin Mehdizadeh took over, and in that time made...exactly zero changes. At no point has he made any amends on the key issue which was that if the officer conduct was according to policy than that policy needed changing.
Mehdizadeh has been completely useless on that front and needs to be made to answer the question: why hasn't policy been changed to prevent this reoccurring? If officers can be demoted for making fun of people in emails, surely policies can be changed to allow demotion for pointing guns at a girl in a cosplay outfit.
The provincial government also has to shoulder some blame: then-Justice Minister Kaycee Madu demanded Lethbridge Police reform their broken system, yet it was entirely over "MemeGate" and a police database search against an NDP cabinet minister rather than the far more serious incident on May 4th 2020.
