Just the (important) facts ma'am

I have just read the article “G20 officer tight-lipped at SIU appearance” from today’s Toronto Star and feel the need to comment. Do I have strong feelings about the recent G20 Summit in Toronto? Are charges of police brutality on my mind? Am I especially interested in the SIU? No, what prompts me to comment are the incredibly odd choices made by the reporter when writing this story.

Whatever do I mean?

The story starts out with a reasonable lead:

The police officer charged with assault in connection with a G20 summit protest looked somber but said nothing Wednesday morning when he arrived at Special Investigations Unit headquarters.

Somber…unspeaking…seems reasonable to me, especially with those tight-lips of his.

But here’s where it gets strange:

Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani, wearing a grey suit, pulled up in a Ford SUV with his lawyer.

A grey suit. A Ford SUV.

What exactly is the importance of the colour of his suit or that he wore a suit at all? Why does it matter what he was driving when he arrived? I would think that unless the officer arrived wearing a Santa Claus suit while riding on the back of a fire truck, these details do nothing to tell the reader what they need to know.

There’s more.

The officer buttoned up his suit jacket over his blue shirt and blue tie as he got out of the SUV, wearing sunglasses on his head and a wedding band.

(Horrified gasp).

He didn’t!

What kind of an officer being investigated by the SIU would do such a thing? And he had sunglasses on his head and a wedding band??? The man is obviously deranged! How was he allowed to work the G20 Summit?

Again, why does any of this matter? When someone is wearing a perfectly normal outfit and doing perfectly normal things I don’t need to know about it. If the officer had jumped out the window of the still moving SUV, wearing a werewolf mask, screaming “where the hell are my sunglasses?” then I would think that needs to be included in the story.

Twenty minutes after he arrived, Andalib-Goortani and his lawyer left the hearing and departed in the SUV.

Perhaps I’m nitpicking now, but how else were they going to depart? “The officer and his lawyer were picked up by what appeared to be a UFO, surprising everyone as the (Ford) SUV had only minutes to go before the meter expired” is detail that would need to be included, not this.

In an unfortunate turn of events, the victim in the G20 story is a person named Adam Nobody and his name creates near comic moments throughout the story.

The arrest came less than a month after the SIU had concluded its investigation into Nobody’s injuries.

Seems like a waste of Everybody’s time.

While the police watchdog said in November that excessive force was probably used in Nobody’s case…

Hmm, then why are we talking about this?

Blair later apologized to Nobody.

That’s cold Blair. Cold.

On Dec. 7, the Star ran a story about newly obtained video footage showing the officer’s face peering through a raised visor after he appeared to wield his baton during the takedown of Nobody.

Wielding his baton and taking down Nobody huh? Well that’s just crazy.

Thank God his visor was raised.