Nobody is above the law — especially those with a badge
Thursday, February 12, 2009
I remember being told at a very young age the police were my friends.
If I ever needed help, find a police officer. Call 911.
They were there to protect me.
That was a long time ago, and I wonder how many parents are still teaching their children the police are their friends.
I find myself spending more time explaining to my kids — young teenagers who are questioning all they see in the world around them — why the police who tasered Robert Dziekanski won’t be charged in his death.
I’ve had to listen to a senior RCMP officer in Kamloops tear a strip off me because I questioned the wisdom of assigning a couple of bulky cops, dressed in their “gang squad” leathers, to parade through local bars and look intimidating.
I’ve had to listen to a mother cry, distraught because she’d reported her teenaged daughter missing and, two days later, had yet to have an officer show up at her house to get some information.
I calmed a friend who had complained to the local RCMP about how it treated her son — only to have the officer who arrested the young man approach her in a store and take her picture with his cellphone.
He smirked and walked away.
I’ve had street friends complain about being continually harassed by local police, from just general rousting to one I found most distasteful, when an officer continually called a transgendered friend, who has chosen to be a woman, by her former male name.
Funny how it always seems to be the same cops they each name, privately, because they just don’t want to do anything to see the hassling and harassment notched up.
Such is the life of the marginalized in our society.
If you need any more examples, just consider the sudden death of Ian Bush up in Houston two years ago.
Do you think the Bush family continues to have any faith in their police — or the justice system?
There is something fundamentally wrong with the policing system in British Columbia — and it has to stop.
One of the first steps that should be taken is every single police detachment in the province should take a long, hard look at its members.
Listen to what they say.
Watch how they interact with others.
Maybe pay attention to public complaints about improper behaviour.
Perhaps that way, they could weed out the kind of police who might confront a newspaper carrier and throw out racial slurs.
Maybe they’d identify the ones who think that a badge and a gun — and let’s not forget the ever-present taser — give them permission to drive home drunk, put the boots to someone or throw an addict out into the frigid winter night to freeze to death.
The next step would be to quit moving these officers from detachment to detachment.
It’s an awful lot like the Catholic Church used to do with its pedophile priests, shunting them off to different parishes when their current flock started to get an idea something was wrong.
The location changes, but where’s the guarantee the behaviour, the attitude, change as well?
It isn’t easy being a police officer.
They put their lives on the line.
For that, they get to carry a gun and other weapons for protection.
It doesn’t give them the right to think they can flash their badge and be forgiven for their transgressions.
It doesn’t give them the right to shoot first and think later.
And it certainly doesn’t give them the right to think they’re above the law.
dale@kamloopsthisweek.com
Constable Kwezi (sounds like Crazy) Millington should be tasered five times to see how he reacts. That'll stop him dead in his tracks -- in more ways than one, perhaps.
A