Media far from fair in kidnapping coverage

Maybe Randall Hopley really will turn out to be every parent’s worst nightmare - a scary, creepy predator who snatches children from their beds in the night.

That rough-looking mug shot of Hopley certainly seems to confirm the image. And how about all the news reports about him being a convicted sex offender? Surely he’s the guy.

Unless he’s not. What’s striking about all the media coverage around Hopley and the kidnapping/return of little Kienan Hebert this past week is that other than police saying so, no evidence has been put forward connecting Hopley to any of it.

I’m stunned by how roundly ignored that fact has been in the reporting of this story. Police have offered no detailed explanation for why they’re convinced that it’s him. Yet we’re all just so certain.

Hopley has been the featured bogeyman in every news story from the moment three-year-old Kienan Hebert’s disappearance went public. His unkempt mug is now known around the world. The make of his vehicle and licence plate number are public information.

All this on the basis of police comments. Innocent until proven guilty? Forget it.

The media coverage of Hopley has been downright inflammatory.

One story quoted a former classmate recalling 46-year-old Hopley as “the dirty, creepy guy who always rode his bike around.” The little boy’s dad lashed out in the national media at “the system” for not doing more to stop a dangerous, damaged guy like Hopley. His conjectures were left to hang there like facts.

No small wonder that at Hopley’s first court appearance Wednesday, picketers outside were calling for the death penalty.

And yes, Hopley could be the bad guy. But it’s way too soon to say, let alone assert it as fact in the media.

Hopley is routinely referred to as a convicted sex offender in news coverage, a phrase that brings all kinds of horrifying images to mind when a child goes missing.

But Hopley’s conviction involves a sex assault from 25 years ago on someone of unknown age, with no suggestions that he has done anything similar since. He got a two-year sentence.

He’s also been reported as having “at least one brush with the law involving a child.” That refers to an incident in which Hopley says he was trying to take a 10-year-old away from a foster home on behalf of the boy’s parents. The charge was stayed for lack of evidence.

Hopley’s criminal record - at least for the eight years of it available in the newly public provincial court database - doesn’t mark him as an obvious child predator. His crimes have been more likely to be break-and-enters and breaches. (He does appear to be fresh out of jail, though, having been sentenced in June to two months for assault.)

Police do what they need to do. I don’t blame them for the tone of the media coverage.

I imagine it makes sense when you’re the police to identify someone like Hopley - he’s well-known to them, after all, and constantly in trouble - in hopes of enlisting the entire country in finding him. If he turns out to be the wrong guy, that’s a problem for another day.

But media have a different duty. They’re expected to be fair and accurate in their reporting of the news. That’s particularly true when reporting on crimes, because you can ruin a person’s life and reputation with a single story that gets things wrong.

Perhaps the news outlets chasing the kidnapping story each made a thoughtful decision that obliterating the rights of a possibly innocent man was worth it given that a child was missing. My fear is that they didn’t even think twice about it.

One observer noted before Hopley’s arrest Tuesday that his image was so high-profile he was virtually “a caught man walking” in terms of public recognition.

In fact, he could have ended up a dead man walking. Imagine if an intense dad had been the first to spot Hopley and acted on the presumption he’d found the sick pervert who grabbed the little Sparwood boy.

If Hopley did it and is competent to stand trial, then may the misery of a lifetime in prison rain down on him. Kidnapping a child is unconscionable, regardless of whether this particular story had a happy ending.

But right now, we don’t know anything. News media have a responsibility to remember that. 

A fine editorial in today's Times Colonist on the dreadful things happening to people with developmental disabilities in B.C. these days.
Government obviously hoped this announcement of "new" money - a third of it is money that was always supposed to go to Community Living B.C. but had been withheld by the province up until now - would make its critics ease up. That scares me, because it strikes me that government must genuinely have no idea of the scope of the problems in the way we're supporting British Columbians with mental handicaps these days.
Developmental disability is forever. Someone in the system obviously has to focus on cost efficiencies, but not to the point where the exhausted families and advocates of people who will need quality care and support for a lifetime are left to struggle for the most basic services.

What shall we make of the mysteriously wonderful return of little Kienan Hebert?  The stories I've read so far made the alleged kidnapper sound like an unsophisticated fellow with a mental handicap, yet during a period when there was a national manhunt on for him and police everywhere, he sneaked back into the house where Kienan lived to return the boy safe and sound.
At any rate, I will quell the skeptic in me for now, because this really is an incredibly good outcome to the whole sad scenario. But the police certainly haven't made Randall Hopley out to be the kind of clever - and clearly empathetic - man who would do something like this.
I wouldn't have thought it easy for anyone to break into a closed crime scene at 3 a.m., let alone the alleged kidnapper. But perhaps police had let their guard down in the presumption that Kienan's home would be just about the last place that Hopley would return to.
Still, I hope someone's out there digging on this one. The pieces just don't fit. And really, Hopley's life hangs in the balance, because he's exactly the kind of guy to end up gunned down in a confused standoff with police.
But for now, let's just celebrate a genuine happy ending.

Campbell honour puts political taint to awards

**Note: North Vancouver blogger Norm Farrell pointed out an error in my column around Luigi Aquilini's donation, so that has now been corrected. Thanks, Norm!

You have to feel for all the other 2011 recipients of the Order of B.C., whose many accomplishments have been overshadowed in the public eye by all the din around former premier Gordon Campbell getting the award.

We’ll presume from the time stamp on the government’s news release - late afternoon on a Friday before a long weekend - that it knew from the outset that people wouldn’t be happy that Campbell and three other high-profile B.C. Liberal stalwarts made the list.

That’s a great time to send out a news release if the sender hopes to slide something by unnoticed.  The time-tested government communications strategy makes it much less likely that media will be able to find the sources they need to build a big story or have the resources to go after it.

 But there’s no hiding an incendiary list like the one government sent out last Friday announcing that Campbell would be honoured with the Order of B.C. And there’s no hiding the growing prowess of B.C.’s political bloggers, who never sleep. Word spread fast.

Campbell’s government wove politics into everything B.C. did during their time in office. So I guess it’s naive to think that the Order of B.C. would somehow remain exempt from all that.

Still, I think there must be people inside the selection process who are very, very unhappy with the way things went this year. The annual awards haven’t really had a political feel up until now. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true.

I mean, think about it. A committee is tasked with selecting 14 fine citizens to be honoured for their hard work, passion and dedication. That’s all, just 14, out of the whole province. You really have to be exemplary to be picked for an honour like that.

But this year, we’re supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence that four of the 14 recipients happen to be very tightly connected to the B.C. Liberals. They want us to buy that a guy who British Columbians hounded from office because they were so unhappy with his leadership is one of the 14 most exemplary people of 2011.

Could it really be just one of those unfortunate coincidences? Maybe the selection committee concluded completely independently that Gordon Campbell, his former deputy Ken Dobell, fellow politician and Campbell “star” David Emerson, and Liberal Party donor Luigi Aquilini - who has given more than $500,000 to the party - all deserved to be honoured in 2011.

Or not. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s now a taint to an award that up until now had none.

Live long enough and you’re bound to accumulate a few skeletons, so maybe it’s no big deal that someone busted for drunk driving while premier gets named to the Order of B.C.  If you had to be a saint to qualify, we’d have run out of eligible nominees long before now.

But having the selection committee declare Campbell a “visionary” whose efforts have made B.C. a better place - well, that’s a bit harder to take. Says who?

Under his leadership, we slashed needed community services, sold off public forest lands for a song, increased poverty, politicized every government decision and greatly enriched the salaries of MLAs and senior government. What’s visionary about that?

And it’s downright disrespectful to have Campbell and his friends shoved at us all at once at a time when so many of us are still fuming about the guy.

The selection committee even appears to have broken its own rules to allow his nomination. No sitting politician is eligible for the award, but Campbell had five days left in his term when nominations closed. So did they stretch the deadline to accommodate him, or ignore the rule about sitting politicians?

If the process really has been neutral up until now, these must be sad days for any non-partisan staff and committee members involved with the Order of B.C. Perhaps it’s just another odd coincidence that last week’s news release was nowhere to be found on the order’s own Web site until late Tuesday afternoon, but I’m choosing to interpret it as a sign that they’re red-faced with shame and protesting in their own small way.

My sympathy to the other recipients of the 2011 order, who really are a very select group picked for all the right reasons. Special congratulations to Crystal Dunahee, a tireless community-builder and fundraiser in our region. Find out more about these worthy recipients here: http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/downloads/OrderofBC2011_Backgrounder.pdf

How sad that the Order of B.C. has been revealed to be politically influenced. The awards body has done an exceptional job at keeping itself above the political fray, but has clearly thrown that all away with this latest round of nominations, which honour a strangely predictable list of clubby B.C. Liberals and hangers-on including Gordon Campbell, Ken Dobell and David Emerson.
Campbell was even a sitting politician when he was nominated, which ought to put him out of the running right then and there. But no. He's in, and only the second B.C. premier ever to get the award. (Bill Bennett was the other, but only in 2007 -  21 years after leaving office.)
I know Campbell has his fans, but really, what is the "exemplary" behaviour he exhibited that has distinguished him as worthy of the honour? He did great things for all his friends, but little for the rest of us. I'm sure Dobell and Emerson are competent, caring people in their own way, but I suspect their tight ties to the Campbell government played more of a role in their nomination than their actual service to B.C., seeing as many fine civil servants who have done great work on behalf of the province have never received the honour.
The toll his government took on social services will take generations, if ever, to repair. He tore up valid union contracts and privatized health-care support services, and I don't think it's coincidental that food quality and cleanliness plummeted in B.C. hospitals after that. He has created a virtual kleptocracy in government, where senior civil servants make buckets of money and are paid bonuses for cutting public services. He got caught driving drunk while in office, a crime that was suffcient to get Steve Fonyo stripped of his Order of Canada.
Obviously, his award has generated just a little controversy, including an online petition through Facebook that has already garnered almost 3,000 of the 5,000 signatures the organizers are trying for. I'm waiting with eager anticipation to hear what the good folks at the Order of BC have to say about all of this - the story broke over the Labour Day weekend, so none of the stories thus far have had any comment from the office.
Unfortunately, the brouhaha over Campbell's award has overshadowed news coverage of some of the truly worthy recipients, like Crystal Dunahee. Here's the news release issued late Friday by government, which lists all 14 recipients of the 2011 award.
Interesting that the Order of B.C. Web site doesn't have a news release posted, or any listing of the 2011 recipients. Hmmm - could it be there are some people inside that office cringing at Campbell getting the award?