I don't spend a lot of time thinking about policing. If you're like me you tend to take it for granted.

But cops have been on my own radar a lot in the last few weeks. In the newsroom, we're hearing about policing contracts for communities such as Wasaga Beach and Collingwood.

But two things got to me this week: the image of six Toronto officers outside a Toronto courtroom after charges against them were stayed and the CTV network broadcast of To Serve and Protect: Tragedy at Mayerthrope.

The case against the six Toronto cops was described as the largest police corruption scandal in Canadian history and yet the men really didn't get their day in court. In a 54-page ruling, Justice Ian Nordheimer blamed the Crown for ineptitude in handling the prosecution and suspended the charges last week.

It has taken the best part of a decade to get to this.

Either these men are innocent and deserve to have their names unequivocally cleared or they are guilty and should be prosecuted. No matter which side you want to be on, justice has not been served.

In fact, the lawyer for the officers says about 200 cases the men were involved in were tossed out. Assuming most of  those cases were solid, there's a lot of criminals right back at it.

More than a few things about his case were fishy.

An independent task force investigating the six officers spent $3 million accumulating nearly a million pages of evidence.

It is alleged that deliberate leaks of information from that task force put a fair trial in jeopardy.

The head of the task force wrote to the attorney general expressing the concern that the prosecuters were dragging their feet on reviewing the case materials.

Now the finger-pointing is about who should be the subject of an inquiry: the prosecutors, the task force or the six cops.

Perhaps the correct answer is all three. Because if we can't trust the system to clear the innocents and convict the guilty, what kind of justice system do we really have?

Admittedly the televised dramatization of a true story has its perils. But differences in this story of the four Mounties shot by James Roszco at a Mayerthorpe, Alberta farm and the final report of the RCMP are almost imperceptible.

Roszco, who took his own life at the end of the siege, was portrayed as nothing more than a schoolyard bully with adult resources at his disposal. The story portrayed his ability to stymie law enforcement, threaten officers and their families and, most of all, his ability to thwart the court process by terrorizing anyone who got in his way.

His list of offences included sexual assaults on children, attempted abduction and a myriad of charges. But witnesses had a habit of vapourizing whenever he was in court.

It seems to me that local police were so accustomed to Roszco's sinister behaviour that they underestimated the level of threat he posed to the community and themselves. And four young officers walked naively into a trap at his property.

All of this raises questions about the federal government focus on tougher sentences for violent crime.

When police, prosecutors and courts can't meaningfully administer justice, it erodes the whole system. So why tout tougher sentencing when you have difficulty getting to that point in the first place?

Adding more beat cops to our local police forces is only a deterrent and a benefit to the community when the courts and prisons have some clout of their own.

There are times when a full public inquiry seems like a complete waste of money. This isn't one of them.