Before the bizarre death of Ryan Russell, almost nine years had passed over Toronto without a police officer being killed.

In that same time, more than fifty-one women (statistics are only available back to 2005) were killed by their domestic partners.

How many of their funerals did we watch?

To be honest, I would have declined to, even if I'd been invited—just as I stayed away from Russell's, to which I never was.

I avoided the procession. I avoided, in particular, news coverage of the procession. And I avoided, especially, radical lefty friends' reactions to the procession. Funerary False Dichotomy Funtime ("The police are magical heroes!" "The police are a band of thugs!") is my third least-favourite game in the world.

I'll admit to itching briefly to join the smarm parade. "Anyone ask all those demonstrators clogging Front Street for their IDs?" (Get it? Because we had no protection against unwarranted search and seizure during the G20! Hilarious.) By good fortune I found the good taste to keep from putting that one on Twitter. But later I and others ventured some careful comments online, suggesting that maybe it was time for someone in the my-name's-on-the-pebbled-glass-window-in-the-door set to check and see if anything else was going on in Toronto.

This was not out of callousness, but respect. It's true, those pictures of Russell's two-year-old son, Nolan, are arresting. But how is anyone helped by focusing in pornographic detail on the tragedy of a boy so young he'll soon forget knowing the father he lost?

Backlash was predictable. "How could you make this about your political agenda? It's about a man's death." No, the funeral was about a man's death. A family's private, unknowable pain over a heart-rending loss is about a man's death. The gluttonous reportage was about something else.

Repulsion from voyeurism was counterbalanced by a tiny hope: maybe such a very un-Toronto display could set a precedent for paying respects to all public servants for sacrifices made. But, let's be honest: do you remember the TTC collector who died of a stroke, or only the TTC collector who was caught sleeping? They're the same person. Does it matter that garbage collection is one of the most dangerous jobs, or only that the "garbage strike" made it impossible to avoid how much waste we produce?

It feels impossible to separate people's stated desire to mourn a man from people's demonstrated willingness to worship the badge—or the press's desire to make a buck by selling our emotions back to us five-fold, even if they know we know it's not good for us.

And if there are people making the funeral about more than Russell's death, that's because it already was.

"[The funeral] has caused people to pause and take a second look and think, or rethink," Alok Mukherjee, Chair of the Police Services Board, told the Globe and Mail. "I’ve heard some of the journalists who have been highly critical, and today they were acknowledging that."

See that? You all saw that. He brought the G20 up first.

So let's remember everyone who braved the summit "security" operation, moved precisely by children like Nolan losing their dads daily to poverty (enforced by neoliberal economic policy) or war (likely waged with weapons manufactured by G8-based countries). Many such protesters were repaid for their compassion with vicious attacks. Among those who flooded downtown's streets on Tuesday with official sanction were their attackers—whose pain, the papers seem to suggest, is the only pain in which we are allowed to collectively share. Nevermind that those with broken limbs and new nightmares are each someone's child as well.

But then, the pain of that brutal dance may have haunted Tuesday's production in ways more subtle than the cynical calculus to which Mukherjee gestured.

I don't mean the presence of punters locked in a culture war with the metal-faces (hinted at halfway through Peter Kuitenbrouwer's story on the procession). I mean I'm not sure such a passion play would have been possible in a city that felt uniformly secure in love for the police. Public discourse since the summer has only hinted clumsily at it, but it's called "betrayal trauma," you didn't need to experience police violence to feel it, and it's probably more widespread than we care to admit. Many people need to feel they can trust authority again, and it's not hard to imagine that need poured in to the vessel of a fallen hero, to be thereby consecrated.

Mourning a lone figure who fought for good, we can face our fears about where we're headed, without facing our knowledge of where we are (and have recently been), or our vague awareness of an unsettling truth: that on balance we've come to accept a ghastly violence in the way we accept bad weather.

The beauty of pain is that it's perpendicular: it cuts across divisions to suddenly connect us to others, even if the connection isn't one we can articulate. So what of all those senseless deaths we sense, nonetheless, at the periphery of our lives: the children of poverty, the poverty of childhood, the soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the civilians killed by their comrades? What of the broken man who broke Russell's body? What of those fifty-one women? Did we invite them along, unknown?

For so-cautious Toronto to grieve so publicly was beautiful. But if we are moved by Russell's death, then we're called on to to do more than lionize his job. We're called on to work toward a world in which his job—and his sacrifice—is unnecessary. Let's need no more heroes. Otherwise we will just put more and more Ryan Russells in harm's way. And they'll go—though on some level it sometimes seems we'll only truly respect them once they've gone for good.

Photo of a police officer snapping a photo of the crowd around him at Sgt. Ryan Russell's funeral by A&T PHOTOGRAPHY, from OpenFile Toronto's Flickr pool.