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OKOTOKS, Alta. — When the Mounties showed up at Edouard Maurice’s home just outside the town of Okotoks one morning last February, he figured they would tell him they’d caught the thieves he’d called them about, the ones he’d seen breaking into his vehicle earlier that morning. Perhaps they would help him search his place, to make sure the intruders hadn’t stuck around after he’d fired his rifle to warn them away.

He certainly didn’t expect the officers to arrive with their guns drawn, arrest him and lay charges against him.

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To his fellow rural Albertans, the story Eddie Maurice tells about that morning seems to confirm their worst fears: that crime is out of control, that police are unable to do anything about it, and that, should they try to defend themselves, their family or their property, those same cops will drag them off in cuffs.

Maurice has become one of the foremost symbols of the deepening misgivings so many westerners have about the state of rural justice. When he phoned the RCMP that day in February, it was just weeks after a jury in Battleford, Sask. had acquitted farmer Gerald Stanley in the 2016 shooting death of Colten Boushie, a resident of the nearby Cree Red Pheasant First Nation. While Boushie’s death and Stanley’s trial commanded national headlines for the racial tensions they highlighted, for some they also spoke to questions about the reliability of policing outside the West’s cities and towns.