There are no longer heroes in North America. Small children used to look up to police in their uniforms and want to emulate them. Now they fear them. And it is the fault of the police themselves. The police have placed themselves beyond our reach. They have made a sham of the controls society should have over them. They protect each other and they defy the rest of society.
And they are unnecessarily killing people.
The killing goes on both in the north and south of the Unites States and in Canada too. The police are out of control. Just have a white police officer kill a black person in America and you can have race riots in that jurisdiction for the next year. The only persons who seem to survive the melee are the police officers who did the killing.
In Canada, we have police abusing their position in society to target the racially sensitive with ‘stop and question’ tactics that can inflame racial tensions. And when told to stop the practice, the police ignore the order.
But the answer by law makers in America is to provide military equipment to local police forces. American police today are dressed and equipped more like storm troops than your friendly neighbourhood cop.
Even in Canada, we had the experience of police gathering from across the country to practice the art of “Kettling.” When they did it at the G-20 in Toronto in 2010, the police destroyed a hundred years of good community relations. This was not policing but the unnecessary strong-arming of innocent civilians. And when it came to blaming someone for the tactic, they picked a mid-level supervisor who must have pissed off his fellow white-shirts. Mind you he was finally slapped on the wrist and lost a few days pay.
The guy really responsible for that example of bad policing might have had to finally retire from the force but he found a new sinecure. He is now the Member of Parliament for Scarborough-Southwest.
But nobody is doing anything about the problems behind this loss of innocence in policing. In Canada, we have failed to ensure that there is proper civilian review of police actions. We have police service boards who think they are some form of super police. They are allowing themselves to be co-opted by the people they are supposed to supervise. They have to stop working for the police and realize they are responsible to their fellow civilians.
It is one hell of a note when people are not protected from their own damn police.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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