Stu Seib pleaded guilty to breach of trust in Kelowna court on Feb. 12. We didn’t report it in our Feb. 14 issue. Two reasons:
1. Because Feb. 11 had been a holiday, we had already laid out the paper and we didn’t want to tear it apart and rebuild it; and
2. Running the guilty plea story would have meant putting it in the same issue as the story about Clearwater RCMP getting an award for the successful arrest of a suspected murderer. We figured that, with all the bad news the RCMP has been getting lately, the local detachment deserved at least one moment of praise.
All of us need to remember that being a police officer isn’t like other jobs.
I had a friend whose dream all the way through school had been to be a RCMP officer. As I recall, he lasted about three years. He said the turning point came for him when a little girl died on the hood of his car following an automobile crash. He had placed her there to try to keep her warm.
The police are the people we call when things go wrong – when our car goes off the road, when our house gets broken into, when someone scams us out of our life savings.
They get to deal with, on an everyday basis, situations and people that the rest of us would just as soon not deal with ever.
The constant stress has got to tell. Fortunately, 99 per cent of the police seem to successfully cope with the stress 99 per cent of the time.
Not all of them do all of the time, however. Stu Seib seems to have been one of the exceptions.
Seib was NCO-in-charge of Clearwater RCMP for about eight years.
During that period he did a lot of good things for the community.
The general consensus was that he was one of the best (and certainly one of the nicest) RCMP officers this area has seen. It therefore was a shock when he stepped forward and admitted stealing cocaine from an evidence locker.
He then apologized to the community in a letter to the Times.
All of us make mistakes. We look back, sometimes, and ask ourselves, “What the heck was I thinking of when I did that?”
Stu Seib seems to be in that position. He made his mistake, owned up to it, apologized, pleaded guilty, and now is awaiting sentencing by the court.
How he will redeem himself with the community is the next question, one that only he can answer.
We are sure that he will try, however, and we hope that the community will give him the opportunity to do so.