Northman's Fury

It's little wonder Stephane Dion can't get any leadership cred. When he does do something praiseworthy, nobody seems to take notice.

Calling it a gesture "in the name of justice and simple humanity," Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion wrote a letter on Thursday to the governor of Montana, seeking clemency for a Canadian citizen on death row there.

Dion raised the subject of Ronald Allen Smith in the House of Commons during Question Period on Thursday, saying Smith — convicted of two 1982 murders — should have his death sentence commuted because he is a Canadian citizen.

"Canadians are against the death penalty," Dion said in the House, challenging the Conservative party to intervene in Smith's case and uphold Canada's reputation on the world stage as a progressive nation.

Dion is doing what our Conservative government should be doing if they didn't want to bring the death penalty back in Canada.

Davis's remarks were in response to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's announcement this month that Canada would no longer seek clemency for Canadians sentenced to death in democratic countries where the individual will receive a fair trial.

Harper also said Canada would no longer co-sponsor a UN resolution opposing the use of the death penalty around the world.

So Dion is standing up for Canadians and for what most of us believe in. It's too bad not more people are paying attention.

Ottawa announced Wednesday it is acting to protect two large swaths of boreal forest and tundra in the Northwest Territories from development.

The two areas, which cover close to 10 million hectares, include tracts of wilderness in a 15,000-square-kilometre area along the Arctic Circle called the Ramparts River and Wetlands, and a section of the East Arm of Great Slave Lake.

I'm sure I'll find something else they've done to bitch about in the near future, but credit where credit is due. This is a good decision.

Stockwell Day, making fence posts look like geniuses:

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says he wishes Canadians were as outraged over impaired driving deaths as they are over the death of a Polish immigrant shot with a Taser by police.

Perhaps our illustrious Public Safety Minister can let us all know how he’s decided that drunk drivers should be allowed to walk around after killing people rather than the current practice of throwing them into jail.  And while he’s at it, maybe he can explain the Conservative’s government plan to put these drunken killers on the payroll for the task of protecting us!

I mean, think about this for a moment.  Our government is telling us that we should view the actions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in exactly the same light as we would view the actions of a group of convicted felons.

Apparently, the Conservative Party thinks that the RCMP is no better than a pack of criminal thugs and we shouldn’t get so upset when they act like it.  So much for their “law and order” agenda.

Canadians think quite a bit higher of the RCMP, which is why we’re so upset that they’re not living up to those expectations.

I guess this explains their reluctance to release the video.

A wave of public anger about the death of Robert Dziekanski is washing over the RCMP in the Lower Mainland, with upset Canadians berating officers at the airport and at the nearby Richmond detachment – and even throwing eggs at one police cruiser.

Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, commanding officer for the RCMP in British Columbia, told The Globe and Mail that members of the public have been acting “very aggressively” toward officers since Mr. Dziekanski's death a month ago.

William Lind’s On War article this week was titled “Cops Who Think”. The thrust of the article is that, given the trend towards non-state forces like gangs and terror organizations being our greatest threats, it is the police and not the military that will find itself on the front lines.

The reason for this is in large part because our military forces are mainly designed to fight other military forces. Move beyond that and, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, they don’t perform nearly as well. Just think for a moment if the tactics our forces were using in Afghanistan were a common occurrence in Calgary or Toronto.

Defeating non-state forces requires local cooperation and intelligence. And particularly in domestic situations, it is the police who have the ability to fill those requirements.

From Lind:

Prevention can only be done by police, because only police, not the military, are sufficiently integrated with society to get the "tips" prevention usually requires. The need for such integration in turn explains why police should never allow themselves to be militarized, despite most cops' enthusiasm for military gear. Militarization automatically separates police from civil society, which leaves them blind and deaf.

And that brings me to a post by Boris at The Galloping Beaver, where, somewhat unfortunately given the above, he talks about how our police forces are evolving:

My father was a policeman during the 1960s and would often go out on patrol without his service revolver. Never once did he have to draw his weapon or beat someone to make an arrest. Indeed, he once, unarmed and alone, successfully disarmed and arrested a man with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in his wife’s leg. He did this with a calm voice and discussion.

Somewhere between his day, and now, there seems to have been something lost in the human side of policing.

. . .

Somewhere in the past 10 or 15 or 40 years, I suspect something changed in North American policing. Police stopped wearing light-blue linen shirts, and began to appear in monotone navy or black outfits, with armour, looking much closer to a infanteer than someone who is meant to professionally and courteously interact with the public.

. . .

Offensive gadgetry from taser and mace to firearms replaces politeness, brains, and communication skills. The cruiser replaces the footpatrol. I think it’s a trickle down effect of military-industrial complex. We have air-support so we’ll bomb the hut.

. . .

What the police appear to miss is that not everyone cowers when confronted with power and threats. Some people push back. Even innocent, unarmed ones. Granted, the police should be able to protect themselves, but not at the expense of the public. Ultimately, this harms the police as public trust is eroded, and the public begins to fear the people meant to protect them. Policing then becomes a version of a protection racket.

Much like our military, the byword for the police now seems to be "force protection". As the incident with Mr. Dzeikanski showed, the RCMP are far too willing to use force, even possibly lethal force, rather than chance any unpleasantness by trying to resolve the situation peacefully. (And this incident is hardly better.)

Rather than working to integrate themselves within their communities, our police forces are erecting barriers between themselves and the public they're nominally supposed to be protecting.

"blind and deaf".

It bodes poorly for the future.

This sort of stunt completely misses the point.

An Ottawa police officer was zapped with up to 50,000 volts of electricity in front of CBC reporters Thursday in an attempt to demonstrate that the Taser that delivered the jolt is safe when used properly.

Staff Sgt. Mike Maloney, who was kneeling as his colleague Sgt. Mark Barclay shot him with the device, stiffened suddenly and fell forward silently with his knees still partly bent, twitching slightly for a few seconds

When asked moments later how he was, he responded: "I'm fine. Do you want me to get up and run?"

See!  Totally safe!  No need to get upset about police using tasers on people!

Further down in the story, the officer makes this statement:

A key to safe use, he said, is to teach officers that the device is a substitute for other weapons such as batons, not a substitute for talking.

It is not a key, but the key for understanding why what happened to Robert Dziekanski was excessive use of force and brutality on the part of the four RCMP officers.

I was an amateur boxer in my teens, and so I can say from experience that it is perfectly “safe” to pummel someone to the head and body in the exact same way its “safe” to taser someone.  I’ve seen guys take tremendous blows to the head and fall to the mat, to bounce right back ready for more within a few seconds, just like our friend Sgt. Maloney claimed he was capable of.

Do you think the defenses the RCMP are using to claim their use of tasers was legitimate would stand up if the action taken was two baton chops to the skull instead of two taser shots to the body? Because as Sgt. Barclay says, the taser is a substitute for the baton, and the use of one to force submission is as legitimate as the other.  Batons just make it more clear what's being done.

The fact that tasers are "safe", meaning that they don't normally kill the people you shoot with them, is entirely beside the point. Its their use when they need not be used that's the point. We give these guys guns and authorize them to shoot people when its justified. We'd make quite a bit of noise if the police starting shooting people when it wasn't necessary. We shouldn't be any less angry over excessive use of force in any other instances.

The continued use of demonstrations like the one above to give the impression, both to people and particularly to police, that tasers are somehow a less violent solution contributes directly to cops like those four RCMP officers thinking its acceptable to use them as a matter of course.

Update:

When I finished writing this post, I came upon this bit of information via Boris at the Galloping Beaver:

In the end, the continued use of TASER® remains one of public perception and risk-benefit analysis. Law enforcement and the general public must understand that the term non-lethal, as defined by the US Marine Corps and used by TASER International, does not imply lack of ability to kill, but rather an intent that the weapon system "incapacitate personnel or material, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment"

[3]. The TASER® system should be viewed more accurately as less-lethal, rather than non-lethal or less-than-lethal.

From CalgaryGrit

There was a great 22 Minutes skit after the Airbus settlement. When asked to explain the 2 million dollars that were "wasted", the "mounties" answered "when I think about the look in the eyes of the average Canadian at the thought that maybe, just maybe, Brian Mulroney would be going to jail - well, you just can't put a price tag on that kind of happiness."

For all the talk of Bush and Clinton derangement syndromes south of the border, they're mostly outflows of partisan dislike. Mulroney was universally despised when he left power; single-digit approval ratings and the utter destruction of his party as a federal force as his legacy. I'm sure now that the Airbus scandal has resurfaced, a lot of Canadians are getting that old gleam back in their eyes again.