Street Level

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

Posted by Dale at 7:49 p.m. Comments

Note: I was honoured to have this column read at Anne's funeral. Even now, after having written it, read it many times and seen it published, it makes me cry to realize that such a vital light in our world has been extinguished. But every time I look at Sean, I see the child Anne saw, the one with the potential yet to be realized -- and I thank whoever it is up there for bringing this incredible woman into our lives.





The voyage through the world that is autism is much like visiting an unknown country.

Sure, there are guidebooks that can tell you what you may see, what landmarks you may encounter, some of the problems you’ll face as you travel through — but they are just words.

Reading about the chance you may encounter a bridge that’s difficult to cross as you travel isn’t the same as trying to make your way across the rickety connector.

And so it is that, when finding oneself in a strange land, we tend to look for a person, someone who has been there before and can help us savour the happy moments and prepare for the challenging ones.

In my voyage through autism, there have been several such guides, but none like Anne Simmons.

I met Anne as I’ve met all those who have been there as my youngest has worked his way from diagnosis of autism to confident high-school student.

Another of my “tour guides,” Patti Pernitsky, told me of the incredible Child Development Centre and how the staff there work with special-needs children. So, when Sean had outgrown Patti’s nursery school, we moved him to the CDC.

And we found Anne, a woman who, with a calm, even voice and an arm around my shoulders, assured me my youngest would be fine there.

I didn’t need to worry, Anne told me. She’d be there to help him learn.

It was scary. At that time, still a pre-schooler and challenged with communicating to others — including his family — Sean would struggle.

He’d become frustrated and angry and, as with many who live with autism, would shut down.

Sometimes, he’d lash out.

His play was solitary, choosing to get out the blocks or a puzzle and do them alongside someone rather than with one of his day-care mates.

As the days went by, I continued researching autism, reading about treatments, symptoms, characteristics — doing all those things parents do when their child has been given a diagnosis that is both foreign and frightening.

But, through it all, there was Anne.

She’d be there in the morning to give Sean a hug and help him get settled.

She’d be there when I came to pick him up, always with a positive story about how he had done that day.

She was there when he started interacting with other children.

Anne was there when my son started to play with his peers outside in the centre’s incredible yard.

She was there when I needed to understand how the theory I had been absorbing was being put into practice by my baby.

And this incredible woman was there when Sean, by now in kindergarten, made the monumental step of being able to take the HandiDart bus from Stuart Wood elementary each school day over to the CDC building for the afternoons.

She watched as he went from a five-year-old who needed the driver to help him off the bus to a confident student who could wave goodbye to his driver and get off himself, coming into the day care, heading to his cubby, putting his coat away and finding his room — and his friends.

Now, Anne didn’t do all this alone — no, there were so many other staff there who all played a part in helping Sean break through the isolation of autism and interact with his world.

And they each contributed to making him who he is today, a teenager who towers over his mother, who has chosen drama for a major, who is on a bowling team and — despite once being told by a specialist he would likely not talk — who rarely shuts up.

Through the years, I stayed in touch with Anne, showing her photos of my kid as he grew and progressed.

It wasn’t just politeness — I wanted her to see how the work she did with him at the beginning resonates even today.

My friend , Anne, unfortunately left us last Sunday.

And, while it’s almost a hackneyed phrase to say, in her case, it is true — she has left such a massive hole in the fabric of the CDC, its staff and families.

For more than three decades, she cared for children — really cared for them.

And I’m so fortunate that one of them was my son.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

Posted by Dale at 4:21 p.m. Comments

The province’s attorney general, Wally Oppal, wants all of us to start holding our judicial system accountable.

He wants us to let him know — as the top judge in B.C. — when we think all those legal beagles who work for him are doing things with which we don’t agree.

So, here’s my contribution to the list Oppal is no doubt creating about instances of justice delayed being justice denied.

Back on Aug. 22, 2008, KTW photographer Dave Eagles captured an altercation between retired RCMP officer Pete Backus and John Gibbons, a — at the time — wheelchair-occupying marginalized man living in a rooming house in downtown Kamloops.

Gibbons complained to police, who began an investigation.

That took months to complete, but a file eventually made its way over to Crown counsel’s office, a document one would assume would lay out all the evidence and would have the police recommendation about pursuing charges against either man.

And there it sits, still waiting for someone to take action — 160 days later.

People in this city have been arrested, tried, convicted and jailed in that time.

Everyone involved on the justice side, from the police to the lawyers, have all insisted the time lag isn’t to give one of their own — albeit a retired one — an easy ride.

They’re not moving slowly because of the “blue code.”

Nope, they have to look at the totality of the situation, not just the dozens and dozens of photographs Eagles took or the statements by the two KTW reporters who were also at the scene.

And that’s a good thing, because — as we’ve learned from the inquiry into the Robert Dziekanski death at Vancouver International Airport — we want our police to not act recklessly, not prejudge a situation, not not ask questions.

But, at the same time, the judicial side of our criminal-justice system knows there are problems.

They know people are losing faith in their ability to protect us.

They know we sigh, roll our eyes or perhaps even utter some expletives when someone with a lengthy record gets a slap-on-the-wrist sentence.

They know — because Oppal has told them — the court system in B.C. moves too slowly as lawyers play their delaying games, judges allow them to do it, accused people join in on the games sometimes and nothing happens.

In fact, some people accused of crimes have figured out it’s smart to stay in custody, drag the case out and then get that double credit for time already spent incarcerated if — when — they’re convicted.

For that matter, why is a day spent in jail waiting for a trial worth two days spent in prison after conviction?

I’ve never been able to understand that logic.

Lawyers out there, please feel free to explain it to me.

It’s not easy being a judge or lawyer.

It’s mind-boggling the amount of data they have to have in their grey cells, the swiftness with which their minds must operate, the way they work the system they’re dedicated to uphold as they make their cases.

But, as they do all this — as they make judgment calls on what to do or say and when to do or say it — the rest of us simply see a system that’s not moving.

We see situations like the one people in Langley have been dealing with as the same criminal — arrested and released over and over again — continued to break into their businesses and restaurants.

In fact, that specific statistic for the central Fraser Valley city saw an increase of 20 per cent, with 690 break-and-enters in businesses in 2008.

That’s almost two a day.

There’s something wrong here.

Even Oppal knows it.

I wonder how long he’ll take to fix it.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

Posted by Dale at 5:03 p.m. Comments

Etiquette dictates I not post on my newspaper website, but you ask an interesting question that deserves an answer.

So here's why I don't run for office, even though as recently as last month, there was a strong effort to get me to do so.

I'm not a politician. I'm a reporter. I write about issues and hope to influence in some way the people who can make decisions on them.

To run for office would also mean quitting my job. A reporter loses objectivity if she is a member of council, even if she takes a leave of absence. It's that simple. I know others in Kamloops disagree, but it's an age-old journalistic truth.

There are other ways to make changes that we, as reporters at KTW, can do -- and are doing.

All of my colleagues gathered together gifts, money and ideas for fundraising to help the youth safehouse run by the Interior Community Services. It provides shelter to a segment of the homeless many people forget about -- those between the ages of 13 and 19. We supplied about four dozen gift bags, enough food for them to be sick of leftovers for several days, bedding -- they hadn't been able to buy new bedding for more than a decade.

Some of us organized a fundraiser for the Kamloops Food Bank and will be doing two more in 2009.

So, Ross, I'll be staying behind my Mac at work. It's where I should be.

Posted by Dale at 9:44 a.m. Comments

I’ve given this a lot of thought.

It happens as you pass the half-century mark — did that a while ago — and your hubby starts to talk seriously about things like pensions and RRIFs.

So here it is: my living will.

I know it won’t have much legal validity, but if some of you out there remember this — and circumstances have arisen that may require it be implemented — feel free to remind my children of my wishes.

Basically, it’s quite simple.

No matter how incapacitated I may be, I want to be kept going for the equivalent of five full-term pregnancies.

Yup, one for each of the kids.

In fact, add three more weeks, since my daughter was two weeks late and the oldest son was a week past his due date.

But I don’t want hospital staff to be saddled with this chore.

Nope, it’s payback time for the kids, so I’m expecting them to look after me, from feeding through to — well, you know, the equivalent of changing their diapers.

I’d like them to sing to me, as well. Doesn’t have to be fancy — but please, no Nirvana, the only music that would lull the second-youngest to sleep in his infancy.

Every.

Single.

Night.

Should have known then the kid would grow up to be a rocker.

Smells like Teen Spirit?

Don’t think so, at least not when he was a baby.

They’ll know what I mean.

And none of that Brahm’s Lullaby stuff, either. Lord knows, after at least one year per child of having to listen to that song in mobiles, musical toys and the like, I never want to hear it again.

One song that would be acceptable would be the Sharon, Lois and Bram recording of I Am Slowly Going Crazy.

For some reason, I remember way too many nights when I felt it would be the most appropriate music to play while rocking — and rocking — the infants to sleep.

There are days, even today — with the brood now either teenagers still at home or young adults coping with all the challenges the 20-something generation faces — when I find myself doing the slow count to 10 and then mentally breaking into a rousing chorus of “Crazy going slowly am I, six, five, four, three, two, one, switch.”

You moms out there know what I mean, right?

I’ve always sort of identified the children by how diligent a mother I was.

The daughter, firstborn and now a mother herself, was the cloth-diapers-homemade-baby-food-only-glass-bottles-eventually kid.

Her brother was the cloth-diapers-Gerber’s-not-bad-glass-bottles-are-fine-but-those-baggie-bottles-are-easier kid.

Next younger brother was the cloth-diapers-at-night-only-Gerber-and-Heinz-are-lifesavers one.

Can’t remember what kind of bottles we used.

Second-youngest? Well, let’s just say I’d discovered disposable diapers by then, had no idea where the much-used food mill of the first child’s babyhood had been stored and considered buying stock in Heinz.

When the fifth one arrived — well, heck, he had those older siblings who needed to learn how to care for a baby, right?

Good life skills to have.

Now, with the youngest officially a teenager and that aura of omniscient invincibility moms are supposed to have being challenged regularly by all five of them, I’ve sort of been feeling a bit put upon.

A bit unappreciated.

A bit like it would be oh-so-much-fun to hug the teenager in front of his buddies.

My husband and I have often joked we have five kids to guarantee a place to live when we do retire.

Two months per kid and two months to camp at the lake — near a golf course — for just us, to recover from the 10 months of living with the kids.

They don’t like that idea too much.

Think I’ll send them each a copy of this column and see how they feel about it after they read it.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

Posted by Dale at 1:07 p.m. Comments