Who really killed Hubbard?

Vancouver Police Sgt Mark Tonner has a column in today's Province about the shooting death of Michael Vann Hubbard, that says what many of us are probably thinking but may be drowned out in the hysteria of the media to attack the police and the rush to judgment (and headlines) of the anti-police "advocates" on the Downtown East Side. Mark's argument goes like this:

• man is stopped on suspicion of breaking into a vehicle
• man pulls knife from backpack
• man refuses to drop knife when told
• man is shot

Of course, the victim's family has now surfaced (recall that this man was homeless while alive) along with the head of an advocacy group that claims to serve the people on the Downtown East Side, planning to sue the police for wrongful death. But did the police really kill Michael Vann Hubbard?

At Gospel Mission, we see all sorts of activity going on in the Hastings and Carrall area, and we hear a lot of chatter about how the police are "hassling" the homeless. It's also been in the papers and on the air. The advent of the winter Olympics is the latest "hook" for this sort of talk -- that the police are going to be turning up the heat on the poor and destitute so that the area looks good in time for us to "welcome the world". (I do recall that, during the 2006 World Junior Hockey Championships, there was a sign taped to the dashboard of the shuttle vehicles that took media and officials from the Westin Bayshore to Pacific Coliseum, reminding drivers NOT to go via Hastings and Main. They had to go over the Georgia Viaduct, take Prior/Venables to Victoria and then cut down to Hastings and out to the PNE.)

One hot rumour has the homeless being invited to a "free lunch", then herded onto buses and, before you can say "concentration camp", whisked away to an undisclosed location in the Interior.

"They're ticketing people for jaywalking! They're hassling people for loitering!" That's the kind of shrill warning we get from the Pivot Legal Society and its activist lawyers, taking a quantum leap of logic to show it's proof that the police are targeting "the homeless". Well, this just in: jaywalking and loitering are illegal. So is possession of stolen property -- which includes shopping carts, and seeing the number of shopping carts being pushed around the DTES tells me the cops are not exactly enforcing the letter of the law on that one (I can only imagine the screams from PLS and its ilk if they did!).

Want to know how to keep from being hassled by police? Don't break the law. What's more, the Word of God tells us we have to obey the law, no matter how unjust we think it is (I Peter 2:13-23), and God will bless us for it.

But the activists on the DTES have an agenda that isn't necessarily to bless the poor and homeless: they'd rather fight "the man" than Behold The Man. With all their ravings, is it any wonder that people in the area don't trust the police and that someone challenged by police officers would be so paranoid that he would pull a knife rather than comply?

Who really killed Michael Vann Hubbard? The police officer who pulled the trigger? Or whoever planted the seeds of paranoia?