Chagal4's Blog

It’s impossible to know, really what happens when a man with a gun…and permission, encounters a boy with a knife…and resistance. That used to be the case…Only those who were there saw and even then they never seem to remember exactly what they saw . That was before cell phone videos…that was before that most notorious Rodney King video…

A few days ago in Toronto a seventeen year old boy commandeered a bus…ordered passengers off at knifepoint, took no hostages and when several police  arrived, he refused to immediately put down his knife when ordered to. The whole sequence was recorded by cell phone videos…and with sound…so it’s almost as if you were there. Horribly there. In the aftermath the police union rep stepped in front of the microphones to defend the cops…saying that we shouldn’t judge anything because we didn’t have the full story. I’m sorry…we have plenty. In the video sequence we hear the shouting police…we see him shoot the kid three times. We see the kid dropped to the floor…We then see the cop shoot the kid six more times. And just to make sure, another cop runs around to the side door of the bus…boards it…runs to the front drawing his taser…and tazes the bullet riddled kid…on the floor. Now the police union rep is right up to a point. We don’t have the full story. We don’t know what the kid had for breakfast…we don’t know why he had a knife or why he exposed himself on a bus…We don’t know why several cops, one of which clearly had a tazer….didn’t use it first instead of last. We don’t know why three shots weren’t enough…we don’t know about steroid use among police officers in Toronto…we don’t know if the kid was using drugs either. So yes there’s a lot that we don’t know. But we know that this could have ended without a dead kid. We can see that.

It was a tragedy. The court of public opinion will debate the “what-ifs” for the coming weeks. There will be an investigation. The weight of authority will lean toward the cop feeling threatened…and justified in using deadly force. The politics of  the whole situation are a tangled web of vested interests. I expect that there will be some publicity friendly recommendations about additional training for police forces but that the official position will be to declare this an unfortunate isolated incident…that the kid should have dropped the knife when ordered to.

This week in Montreal, a seventy one year old man ordered utility workers off his property at gun point and barricaded himself in his house. It was said early in the reporting that the man was a retired university professor. It was also known that the old guy was cantankerous, aggressive, hostile and generally obnoxious…full time. Oh and he was a gun collector…known to have permits for one hundred and eighty two guns. Police arrived…with all of the necessary tactical equipment. It’s a nice neighbourhood…cleared out the neighbours…tried to talk to the guy. Apparently he shot a cop in the foot. They used a tank vehicle to batter down his door…smashed through some internal walls and finally they shot the guy with rubber bullets. He was wheeled off to hospital on a stretcher and they’ll charge him with attempting to kill a police officer…His lawyer will argue that it was just intent to wound…but he’ll be tied up in jurisprudence for some time.  Did I mention …one hundred and eighty two guns?…and he gets shot with rubber bullets!

Hhh-mmm…

The Point? It’s this. We are a complex culture with a society increasingly stressed by an unbelievable range of issues and concerns. There are designer  drugs available to bend minds like pretzels. There are economic pressures to flip out whole families. There are immigrants from countries where the horrific atrocities of tribal warfare shred bodies and spirits. There are victims of broken health care institutions thrown onto the street. There are aging populations feeling increasingly vulnerable, surrounded by younger populations they don’t understand. We have natural and man made disasters that are never completely fixed. We have governments so totally absorbed in partisan polarization that they spend more time obstructing and devouring each other than they do serving the people.  I mentioned steroids and police earlier…That wasn’t an accident. Recently some Ottawa City police officers were caught bringing steroids over the border from the U.S. Personal use? No doubt, but the quantity suggested an organized program of steroid use among police officers. The whole deal went away fairly quickly. There was probably an internal disciplinary result but the much larger issue remains. What’s going on here?

The tragedy in Toronto and the crazy old fart in Montreal are not isolated cases. They are part of an increasingly frequent dilemma facing police. There are countless complex situations that we never hear about but which are common currency among police forces. At the same time, public administrations are facing tougher budget constraints from shrinking tax bases and reluctant cooperations from federal or provincial (state) governments. Those budget constraints hit police forces too, so developing costly innovative training programs and policy shifts are unlikely. It would be reasonable for cops to adopt a siege mentality, to see themselves as “apart” from society. They are a quasi para-miltary force. It’s reflected in the uniforms and the equipment they wear. See any picture of “riot-police” or “SWAT” police. They’re soldiers. It is no wonder that they feel like they need to “bulk-up” in the gym and with steroids. Not all cops….O.K. Not all cops. But enough that we need to look at the  prognosis. This isn’t getting better by itself…and standing in the street screaming into the face mask of an armed and armoured  cop only convinces him that you’re wrong and he’s right…whatever right and wrong are these days.

As for the public…we’re split. On one hand we too feel threatened by the changing world around us and we want to know that the cops are there. On the other hand  we are getting the idea increasingly that these are guard dogs that occasionally slip the leash…and that scares us as much as the crack head down the street.

Nine bullets in a seventeen year old kid…weren’t put there by a guard dog. It was a man given a gun and the authority to use it…and it’s the whole army that he belongs to that needs to be examined.

August 1 2013