No Easy Ride: Reflections on My Life in the RCMP (2 page)

Outside of his stint in Ottawa, most of Ian Parsons’s career was spent in rural detachments where RCMP members were most often a respected part of a close community. The diversity of his postings brought him in touch with all aspects of policing, including highway patrol, provincial issues and First Nations law enforcement. For his final posting, he was the operational officer and assistant officer commanding on Vancouver Island, a component of the single most complex division in the RCMP.

By the time he retired with the rank of inspector, Parsons had a policeman’s trunk full of colourful stories, insightful observations and amusing yarns that he now shares in this memoir. They provide an entertaining backdrop for his candid assessment of things gone wrong in the Force.

In retirement, Parsons has remained active amongst his peers but also independent in his thinking. In recent years, as his beloved Force has faced crisis after crisis Ian Parsons has built his own thesis on how to fix things. He is now willing to speak out and try to help fix what so many Canadians feel is broken. For this ex-Mountie, it is more than gender issues, bad judgements and use of excessive force, unwieldy discipline procedures and low morale. It is about a structure and a mandate far too complex and fundamentally unfixable. Now distant enough from the inside to see both the trees and the forest, Inspector I.T. Parsons (Retired) offers a solution.

Rodger Touchie

The man who lived in my house—my father—had a thundering voice and seemed six foot seventeen. He was a fabled law-enforcement officer and a survivor of gunfights. I was raised in an RCMP family and will forever carry great affection for the Royal Red; it is part of my DNA. My earliest memories are of a forest of high brown boots, the sound of men’s voices and the smell of tobacco and occasionally beer wafting through our home. My father was at the core of this boisterous regiment, an alpha male among men who were held in high esteem in the communities where we lived. Police cars, firearms, police dogs, uniforms—these awe-inspiring and intimidating tools and trappings of law enforcement were a part of the everyday routine of family life. Even when my father’s lofty height seemed to diminish as I became a rebellious teenager, his stature as a hero never faded. He left an indelible impression on me and inspired me to follow my own career in the RCMP.

Over 33 years with the RCMP, I served from sea to sea, including postings in several provinces. While all the events I recount in these pages are authentic, they are viewed through perceptions and opinions acquired over a lifetime. In telling my story, I have changed the names of some people and places for reasons of confidentiality, and on rare occasions I have altered incidents or fictionalized characters to enhance the flow of the work. Some incidents are composites of several separate scenarios and as such cannot be attributed to specific individuals. The reader will hear a recruit, an investigator, a researcher, a manager and perhaps even a philosopher as I progress through the stages of my law-enforcement career.

Much of my story occurred prior to the 1970s, a decade when a maelstrom of change descended upon not just the RCMP, but our entire world. Many RCMP veterans define the period from the inception of the Force in 1873 to the late 1960s as “the Golden Era.” The “golden” aspect most probably alludes to the impeccable external reputation of the Force, seemingly untarnished by assorted mischief committed by those inside the organization during those halcyon years. Symbolic of the end of this era, equitation was removed from RCMP training in 1966. The Regina stables were closed and all things equine moved to “N” Division Rockcliffe, in Ottawa, Ontario. The demise of equitation training coincided with the beginning of an amazing organizational transformation. The RCMP has had to cope with sweeping changes, including new technology, compensation for overtime work, women in policing, acquisition of support staff and the right to challenge management through representation. As is often the case, even these positive changes have been disruptive and frequently unwelcome.

My reasons for writing this book are twofold. While I hope my story entertains readers and provides a window into the everyday challenges that faced RCMP members during the past few decades, I also wish to share my concerns for the future of the Force. The RCMP evolved from a small band of men in 1873 into a viable police organization during the early part of the 20th century. Initial frontier police duties demanded little sophistication, but the Force acquired expertise as it grew and assumed responsibility for almost all policing functions in the dominion of Canada. As demands on the RCMP increased, it was unable to stay abreast of this astounding growth, largely due to its high recruiting standards and limited training facilities. The philosophy of the RCMP has always been “never say no.” This inability to decline a request is at the root of many of the organization’s problems. I strongly believe that the Force must shed some of its numerous and varied burdens if it hopes to survive as the charismatic institution beloved by so many Canadians.

THERE IS LITTLE
chance that my career in the RCMP would ever have happened without my father’s example. Like many young immigrants of his era, he sought a new life in Canada and worked through adversity to build a successful career. But his story is also a snapshot of the RCMP during the years it grew to become a four-tiered organization. It happened during Canada’s adolescence as a country, when it was largely populated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Catholics. With the exception of Quebec, Canada’s laws and mores were almost exclusively British.

In 1922 my father, 16-year-old Joseph Thomas Parsons, embarked on an arduous ocean voyage across the Atlantic. His long journey by sea and over land concluded in Regina, Saskatchewan. His elder brother, who had already immigrated to Canada, had told him of an employment opportunity with a grain farmer. Joseph left Cornwall, England, and the oppression of stern Methodist parents and set out to seek his fortune in Canada. He arrived in a prosperous new land, finding ample work as a farm labourer and earning good money. He dreamed of buying land for his own farm, and, acting on advice, he invested all of his earnings in the stock market. The future looked extremely promising until he lost his nest egg in the 1929 worldwide stock market crash. With few options available to him, he learned the RCMP was hiring able-bodied young men to police the Canadian west. He applied and was accepted in 1930. Upon completion of his training, he was posted to Kelvington, a small farming community in Saskatchewan.

After only two years’ service, Joseph became involved in an investigation and manhunt that would set his destiny in the Force. The account of the incident below is based on an article by Henry M. Savage that was originally published in the Regina
Leader Post
in 1944 and later reprinted in the
RCMP Quarterly
.

In June and July of 1932, a crime wave occurred in the Yorkton, Saskatchewan, area. Someone was robbing hardware stores and gas stations in small towns in the region, and the RCMP was having no luck in finding the culprits. It was particularly troubling since the thieves had stolen firearms and large quantities of ammunition in several of these burglaries. The only clue was the presence of a blue sedan in the area of several of the offences.

On the night of July 4, Constable M.V. Novakowski of the RCMP detachment at Yorkton was patrolling the rainy highway about 20 miles west of Yorkton, stopping vehicles and questioning occupants. As he stood on the road and tried to wave down an approaching dark blue sedan, it accelerated, forcing him to jump out of the way, and sped off. Novakowski got into his police car and took off in pursuit of the fleeing vehicle. They sped along for miles, through the little town of Theodore and beyond. At one point the fleeing vehicle’s door opened and Novakowski thought he heard a bullet whistle past his car window. After chasing the car unsuccessfully for 20 miles, Novakowski abandoned the chase at Sheho and phoned ahead to Foam Lake, the next police detachment.

Constable Novakowski spoke with Corporal Leonard Victor Ralls and explained that the suspect car was heading his way. Ralls assured Novakowski that he would attempt to intercept it. A short time later, west of Foam Lake, a series of explosions near the farm home of Mr. and Mrs. Alex Baird awakened the couple. Alex looked out and saw a car driving away to the east and heard two more explosions. He also heard a weak call for help and hurried outside to find Corporal Ralls mortally wounded. Ralls died en route to the doctor. The Yorkton RCMP detachment was told of the murder, and an all-points bulletin went out across the province. In less than an hour 40, RCMP members rallied to block all highways in the district. A private aircraft was also launched for the search.

At the murder scene, Corporal Ralls’s police car was found in the ditch with the ignition wires severed. There were tire tracks from another vehicle that appeared to be equipped with Goodyear tires. Not far from the police car, Ralls’s .45 calibre police revolver was found with two live and two discharged shells. The offending vehicle had turned off the highway east of Foam Lake and seemed to be heading north through very rough country. Members gave chase, but it had rained steadily for three days and their cars became mired up to the fender wells with mud. Nevertheless, they moved steadily northward through the thick bush country as dawn broke.

At about noon, near the village of Lintlaw and 90 miles north of Foam Lake, police found a blue Plymouth abandoned and covered with mud. The windshield and rear windows were missing, and four bullets had struck the car in the hood area. The vehicle had been stolen from a garage in Zealandia on the night of June 12. Mounted policemen travelling by horse, railway jiggers and car continued the hunt through the next night. Early Wednesday morning, they received word that three men, one carrying a rifle, had visited a local farm the previous evening. They had demanded a meal and left in a westerly direction through the bush. Later that day, some school children saw them running across a road. More tips came in, but it seemed the RCMP were always minutes behind the trio.

The next morning, the three men stopped at a farm and again demanded a meal. They then fled with four horses, apparently heading for the Greenwater Lake timber reserve, where it would become extremely difficult to track and capture them. A command centre was established at Kelvington, a small farming community with a two-man detachment. The junior man was my father, Constable Joe Parsons, who had barely two years’ service. Up to this point, his law-enforcement experience consisted of investigating minor thefts, the odd family squabble and the occasional disturbance initiated by too much liquor. Now conscripted into the manhunt for the killers of a police officer, his level of anxiety was palpable. More than 30 police officers and over 200 armed civilians were now focused on capturing the fugitives and were traversing muskeg and bog, felling trees and moving through mud holes. Many cars became damaged beyond repair. As night fell again, paranoia ruled and isolated residents took refuge with neighbours.

About noon on Thursday, while a blazing sun shone overhead, my father and town constable Wilson Hayes of Wadena walked into a clearing in the bush and discovered three horses tethered to a tree. A short distance away was a farmhouse. It immediately occurred to my father that the killers had stopped once again for a meal. The two policemen moved back into the bush and waited for the men to appear. Soon a man wearing overalls, a smock and a cap came out of the house and walked toward them. When he neared, my father leapt out, levelled his .45 Colt revolver at the stranger and commanded, “Freeze!” For an instant, the stranger stared at the policeman in astonishment. Then, wheeling about to cry in alarm, he ran for the house. He had not gone far when my father overtook him, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. The man struggled and tried to warn his partners, so my father knocked him unconscious to quiet him. He then turned his prisoner over to Hayes and told him to take the man into the bush while he faced the other two gunmen alone. The other two had heard the disturbance and dashed from the dwelling in the direction of the horses. They gasped in surprise when they spotted my father, who again shouted, “Freeze!” The men drew revolvers and a volley of shots was exchanged before the pair rushed into the heavy brush in different directions. It was later determined that one of them had been severely wounded by my father’s return fire.