Several hours of surveillance footage recorded at Vancouver airport the night Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was Tasered and died were inadvertently erased by the Canada Border Services Agency a week after his death, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

The CBSA is claiming the deletion was unintentional — a result of “confusion over how long the footage would be stored before being erased.” If this is true, then the CBSA is criminally incompetent. I sure hope it’s true, because the alternative is that the CBSA deliberately deleted footage of their own misdeeds. But the authorities would never mislead us about something like that, right?

Either way, the results are the same: Robert Dziekanski was murdered by bureaucratic incompetence and police brutality.

Fortunately, the cops aren’t worried about it:

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is investigating Dziekanski’s death, said Thursday it wasn’t aware the CBSA’s original footage had been erased.

However, IHIT spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr said the team is not worried because one of its investigators reviewed the complete footage before it was erased and was confident all clips of Dziekanski are on the DVD.

“What? They destroyed evidence that might have been crucial to our investigation? This is the first we’ve heard of it. Hey, Jim, you watched all that footage, right? Do you think we might be missing anything important?”

“Gee, Lieutenant, I don’t know. I only watched it that one time, and that was just a few days after the guy died.”

“Before he had that unfortunate reaction to a 50,000-volt shock, you mean.”

“Uh, right. And it was a lot of footage, too — six hours of it! And boy, was it boring.”

“That’s why you made this videotape of all the important parts, right?”

“Well, yeah, but if I’d known they were gonna delete the tapes on us, I would have been a lot more careful about — ”

“You’re not saying you might have … missed something, are you?”

“I sure hope not, Lieutenant.”

“Right. See, folks? Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.”

So about an hour ago, I was waiting for a bus on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver, on my way home from dinner with some friends. A cop car drove by, then turned around in the nearest alley and pulled up to the curb maybe ten feet down from the bus stop. There was a homeless guy sitting outside the 7-11 there, quietly asking for change; the cop in the passenger seat rolled down his window and called the homeless guy over.

Being a civil libertarian, I watched the conversation with interest. (I didn’t get too close, though — those guys are dangerous.)

After exchanging a few words, the cops handed the guy a piece of paper and told him to get lost. He grabbed his backpack and stormed off angrily down Granville Street. I caught up to him afterwards and asked him if they had given him a ticket, and indeed they had. BC has a law which, among other things, prohibits panhandlers from asking for change within 5 metres of a bank machine. There was an ATM inside the 7-11, and even though the homeless guy was more than 5 metres away from it, he was close enough for Vancouver’s finest.

The penalty? A $115 fine. Which, if you’re sitting on the street asking for money, is obviously way more than you can afford.

Naturally the cops were grinning at each other as they drove off.