Sanctimony To Share All Around

"No senior management at the VDP [Vancouver Police Department], RCMP E Division Major Crime Section, Coquitlam RCMP, or Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit took on this leadership role and asserted ongoing responsibility for the case."
Commissioner Wally Oppal, Pickton Enquiry

All of those disparate policing and public security agencies and not one iota of collaboration between them.  When one unit was in possession of vital information it was kept within that unit, never to be shared with any of the others, making it difficult to match and compare, to connect the incriminating dots to arrive at any useful conclusions that might have spared the lives of too many vulnerable women.

When evidence and credible hearsay was brought forward, virtually shouted from the rooftops, no one was really interested.  The families of the missing women from the notorious Vancouver Downtown Eastside were really interested.  But these were women who were missed only by those who loved them. 

Their absence was of no account whatever to society, because they were mostly aboriginal women.  They were sex-trade workers.  Outside the pale of polite society.  They were drug users and abusers.  They were unsheltered, living on the mean streets.  No one cared.  They were the results of poverty and addiction.

Society likes to talk in hushed tones about prostitutes, drug-addiction, squalor, crime, and total lack of social decency.  But of course a lack of social decency can be found elsewhere, where society shuns the need to be responsible for those who are incapable of being responsible to and for themselves, the detritus of nice society.

We talk about housing the homeless, about providing shelter and health care, and concern about the welfare of those who never quite made it to become part of normalcy.  A huge swack of any population anywhere in the world can be thought of as sociopaths, as mentally disturbed, as socially averse people.  Many of them get on with life.

Many more do not.  And perhaps it's the true reflection of any society to determine the manner in which it looks after the welfare of those who cannot see to their own. 

It's less expensive and far more humane to use tax dollars more wisely; to allocate and spend it on permanent shelters, to provide ongoing health care and advice, training for employment, and encouragement to those needing it than for emergency hospital visits, policing, and clean-ups post-disaster.

The notorious pig farm that was operated by a man who is known to have murdered up to 65 women, and was put on trial for the murder of a mere handful, hosted the remains of women whose families still don't know what became of them.  For them there will never be anything remotely resembling an end to their grief.

In his final report on the findings of the Missing Women Commission in Vancouver, Wally Oppal found that three "overarching faulty risk assessments" were not corrected by police over time, irrespective of increasing evidence to the contrary accumulating; 1) that the women had been murdered; 2) that a serial killer was involved; 3) that victim numbers would increase.

"The three main flawed risk assessments were at the epicentre of the police failures in these overlapping investigations.  Police decision makers discounted the known risks to violence and murder this group of vulnerable women faced and continued to mistakenly believe the women were transient, despite clear evidence to the contrary."

They weren't missing of their own accord.  They hadn't casually drifted elsewhere, not informing anyone of their whereabouts as authorities claimed to have assumed.  They were slaughtered by a man accustomed to slaughtering pigs.  And then their bodies were disposed of in a like manner to that of a slaughterhouse.

Witnesses whose testimony at first-hand was dismissed by those who should have paid close attention, claimed to have seen direct and conclusive evidence of dreadful events occurring at that farm.  The question looms large: how could it be that Robert Pickton's family members - his brother primarily - noticed nothing, knew nothing, was responsible for nothing?

Why did Commissioner Oppal never explore this?  Why did the Commissioner fail to seek the direct testimony of those who had much to add to the enquiry and who awaited a call to appear, in vain?