Get out the rubber gloves and the heavy-duty cleaner. If there's truth to the allegations swirling this week about harassment and bullying in the West Vancouver Police Department, there will soon be a need to scrub a lot of muck from the walls.
Revelations this week are an eyeopener where policing in normally quiet West Vancouver is concerned. Police get high ratings from their citizens in the municipality. And why wouldn't they? West Van consistently boasts one of the lowest crime rates in the province.
But as the results of an internal survey have revealed, all is not sunshine and roses among West Van's boys and girls in blue.
Results point to plummeting morale, deep divisions and widespread dissatisfaction with the way rank and file are treated by senior management.
Those results make it difficult to dismiss the more serious allegations of harassment as sour grapes of former employees.
West Vancouver isn't the first police department and it won't be the last to face these kinds of allegations.
We agree with West Vancouver Mayor Michael Smith that there must be no tolerance for any such behaviour. Dealing with systemic problems in West Van had been one of the tasks of former police chief Kash Heed - before he abandoned that in favour of provincial politics.
Change is always difficult and often resisted. Let's hope by the time WVPD moves into its new public safety building, it will have a clean house - literally and figuratively.
