One of the most important classes you attend in the reality school of politics is that of the public protest. You have to learn your lessons fast. You learn how people can organize and lead and maximize the media value. You also learn to find the other guy’s organizer and how to neutralize the person or persons. These are lessons of the streets and the solutions are often harsh.
These concerns are in response to a recent column by Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn. He was writing about the School Resource Officer (SRO) programs run by the Toronto school boards and the objections voiced by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) group in Toronto.
BLM is a group of trouble makers who seem to represent nobody but themselves. They are a growing embarrassment to the Toronto black community. They have used the name of a group that came about in the U.S. because of the ongoing tragedy of American police shooting black citizens.
It would be foolish to suggest Canadian police are perfect but there are different circumstances in this country. Our police might suffer from some bad training and inept management but they are hardly the out-of-control cowboys such as you can find in some U.S. communities.
Nor is Canada militarizing the police such as has been happening over the past decade in the U.S. Supplying the police with battle-field type weapons and armoured carriers is a formula for finding the bad guys to be arming themselves accordingly. It just spreads conflicts and adds collateral damage.
The reverse of this course is what we are doing in the Toronto area in providing a police presence in schools under the SRO program. This is proving beneficial in humanizing contact with police for students and changing attitudes.
But ignorant, self important groups such as Black Lives Matter are resisting this in schools. BLM has already soured the relationship between the Gay Pride Parade organizers and the police and they now want to destroy a good program for our children. We should go to the trouble of finding out what these fools really want. They are not helping anyone with the direction they are headed now.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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