I'm writing this in my backyard, as the afternoon descends into late-summer stillness. My dog lies next to me, stretched out in a puddle of light. Perhaps it's just the weather, but I feel I've hit a wall lately. I've had my fill of news stories about elected liars, perverts on foreign sex tours and a serial killer who magically eluded police for years, like some kind of knife-wielding leprechaun. But one news item in particular keeps returning to my thoughts.

Some time ago, I scribbled down a quote from writer C.S. Lewis: "The surest path to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." I thought back to Lewis's line while pondering the video clip from last month of three cops striding down Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and one pushing a passerby with cerebral palsy to the ground.

This altercation on East Hastings Street was caught on a surveillance camera at the Pivot Legal Society's office. The Vancouver Police Department held a press conference shortly after the video was uploaded to the Internet, saying the officer responsible reported the incident to his superiors, and had apologized to the victim for his actions. But the optics are still way off. The fact that the cop in question could immediately return to his Downtown Eastside beat after the media release of the film clip, and on full duty pending the outcome of an investigation, may be an indication of how far we've travelled down Lewis's gentle, sloping path.

If this was just an isolated case of police misbehaviour, we could regard it as an anomaly. But it's not, as anyone who's been paying attention knows in our post-Dziekanski province. It goes without saying there are plenty of responsible, honourable police working in the Lower Mainland. I've met a few myself. But when we start having trouble telling apart gangsterism from law enforcement, it's time to pay attention.

I know it's already an old news story (in this business, anything past a month is truly stale), but in the waning days of summer, this clip returns to haunt my thoughts. Surveying other news from Vancouver and beyond, I yo-yo between qualified hope and compartmentalized despair. I'm not sure if I can stomach downer dispatches much more than my readers. Sometimes I feel like a guy with lactose intolerance driving an ice cream truck through a neighbourhood of hypoglycemics.

But back to Lewis's quote about gentle transitions, and the bigger picture. In the 19th century, there was a debate in geology circles between the gradualists and the catastrophists. The gradualists believed slow, incremental changes like erosion were responsible for Earth's appearance. The catastrophists believed that short-lived, violent events were responsible for its scarred features.

Today the catastrophists have the upper hand in almost every area, from astronomy to climatology to economics. Even small changes can result in huge, non-linear transformations, say complexity theory scientists. In the popular press, Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" has been pitched as the explanation of everything from changing crime rates to the rise and decline of running shoe brands.

But sometimes change is not so sudden and transformative. It arrives on cat's paws, silently in the night. Hopefully we weren't seeing the outline of this beast in that grainy footage from the Pivot Legal Society's office, when our city's nominal protectors left a small, shambling woman lying on the ground, and local newscasters moved onto the next item with barely a twitch.

In an essay on Counterpunch.org, former Reagan administration member Paul Craig Roberts speculates on where the ongoing economic collapse in the U.S. might take the republic. He foresees an insolvent federal government, and state governments that exist in name only. Into this vacuum, other forms of order will rush: local police and security forces, and "other clans organized around families and individuals who possess stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition." The U.S. will have its tribal warlords, he prophesizes, just like the former Yugoslavia in the '90s, Darfur today, or Afghanistan since forever. But in America, they will include the obverse face of law enforcement.

Not a scenario imaginable for our beautiful West Coast of Canada, of course. Unless it comes in increments, as we shamble along C.S. Lewis's sloping path, doing nothing more than repeat the mantra, "it could never happen here."

www.geoffolson.com