It was a short long weekend for a 26-year-old aboriginal man and the Winnipeg police officer who fatally shot him early Saturday morning.
The young native man went to a hospital morgue. The cop went home on administrative leave.
That's routine for police officers who've been involved in traumatic events.
Not that police shooting aboriginals in Winnipeg is routine, but I think it's fair to say there is a perception that police shootings of aboriginal people have been happening with alarming regularity.
Recently, it seems, police have been killing young aboriginal men most often when they are "brandishing" knives.
What separates last weekend's fatal shooting from the rest, of course, is who died. Craig McDougall was native leader J. J. Harper's nephew.
Twenty years ago, the unnecessary police shooting death of the 36-year-old Harper on a Winnipeg street forced the provincial government to call a sweeping inquiry into how the justice system treats aboriginals.
Now his nephew has died in a similar way and I'm being asked by CBC TV what we've learned since the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry reported in 1991.
Not much, I would suggest.
The situation on the street is actually worse, both for aboriginals and police. Gangs have grown from an embryonic state when Harper was shot to the lifestyle of choice for many aboriginal kids.
But it's not just gangs that have proliferated. It's guns.
Yet, for the most part, Winnipeg police aren't shooting and killing people with guns.
As I was saying, it's knives. Or, in one case, a screwdriver.
And not necessarily knives that are being used to attack police. Most often it's the sight of knives that's perceived to be enough of a threat to officer safety that they shoot to kill.
The "brandishing" of knives.
In Saturday's incident, police said Craig McDougall refused their orders to drop a knife before he was shot.
We'll have to wait for the police to finish their investigation -- and an inquest -- for all the details. The problem is, the aboriginal community will never trust the police service to do a thorough investigation of one of their own. Nor should they.
As the AJI suggested, there will always be a perceived bias when a police service investigates itself. Sometimes more than perceived.
In the Harper case, for example, the two commissioners found that some of the Winnipeg police officers who testified before them were "less than truthful" -- that at least one officer's notebook was rewritten, and an "official version" of what happened appeared to have been created to protect the officer who shot Harper as well as the police department.
The judges phrased it even more pointedly. They said there was a prevailing attitude in the police department at the time, "which viewed the public image of the police department and the interest of one of its officers as more important than finding out the truth about the death of a citizen."
None of that should surprise anyone who's been following the Taman inquiry, where the Winnipeg police service's methods of investigating its own are being laid bare again.
After the Harper inquiry, the AJI recommended a special investigation unit to take charge of police-related shootings and alleged wrong-doing.
That was in August 1991 and we're still waiting.
Chances are the Taman inquiry report will make a similar recommendation.
The difference is that the Taman case isn't about police shooting an aboriginal.
It's about an off-duty Winnipeg cop who spent all night at a drinking party, seemingly getting special police treatment after he plowed into and killed a 40-year-old woman on her way to work.
This time the public gets it. And this time our political leaders had better get it, too.
gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
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