The only human face that emerged as the agitated [Robert Dziekanski] strode through his Kafka-esque nightmare, perhaps desperately needing food and water and cigarettes, brandishing chairs and at one point throwing a computer at the thick glass walls, was that of a compassionate bystander, Sima Ashrafinia, let her name shine amid the ethical smog. She tried to make calming gestures. She told a CBC reporter that she didn't think Dziekanski was a threat.

Some B.C. citizens, too impatient to wait for a coroner's inquest set for May, have since characterized Dziekanski's death as second-degree murder. (Though, to be sure, here and there some open-line callers have defended the police or insisted that judgment be suspended until the inquest and inquiries are complete -- do I hear the mills of the damage control factories furiously whirring at this very moment?) The usually pretty sound Lorne Gunter wrote an apology for the police in the National Post, and Vancouver Province columnist and sometime CKNW host Michael Smyth made an unconvincing case for the cops based on imagined "what ifs."

I believe there will be another permanent loss, a loss of faith in our once-cherished Mounties. Because there can be no doubt: Without [Paul Pritchard]'s videotape, this would have been just another they said/he said issue with its 15 minutes of contested fame, in which most Canadians would tend to accept the police version -- the fight that didn't happen, the fight that continued even after Dziekanski was Tasered, and other stuff resembling what the shovels pick up after the famed Musical Ride.