Saturday, November 27, 2010

Canadian Police as Judge, Jury, & Executioner

Police are necessary. But a police force that takes "the law" into its own hands and assaults innocent people is not just not necessary, it is a blight on a people.

Here is just one of an on-going series of "disclosures" of police brutality.



How can this happen? This is symptomatic of a society that does not hold its police to a high standard, a society that does not separate policing the police from the hands of the police, and a society that blindly worships "authority" as if it could never go wrong.

This latest incident proves once again that there needs to be an independent watchdog over all police forces in Canada, especially the RCMP. And that watchdog needs teeth.

I would suggest that video cameras be installed in all police stations and all police cruisers and that access to those videotapes be restricted to the independent oversight agency to ensure that the police don't "lose" or destroy vital evidence of wrong-doing. (Remember the Air India bombing that killed 329 people and where CSIS "just happened" to destroy all of its surveillance tapes before anybody was ever brought to justice. CSIS should not have been allowed to guard its own tapes. It destroyed them to protect wrong-doing inside the organization at the expense of justice for 329 innocent people.)

Remember Ian Bush: Bush died due to a single gunshot wound to the back of the head [while in police custory]. Because no independent, external investigation was performed, it is still unclear as to whether Ian Bush was murdered by Constable Paul Koester, or killed in self-defence.

Ian Bush is just one example. The list of deaths and injuries at the hands of the police is long, very long.

Remember Frank Paul: A drunk hauled unconscious out of the police drunk tank and dumped in an alley where he froze to death.

Despite the "recommendations" from the above, there still isn't any independent overview of deaths at the hands of the police. As for the police "assurances" at the end of this video that "this will never happen again". It has happened again, and again, and again.

Remember Robert Dzerkanski: An immigrant to Canada who didn't speak English, but who was joining his mother in Canada, who didn't get any help at the airport, but who did get tasered to death by the RCMP.


... and these stories keep coming, and coming, and coming.

A society gets the policing that it "deserves". If the society does not hold its police -- and its entire justice system -- to high standards, then you get this kind of police brutality. You get innocent people railroaded into long jail sentences. You get these kinds of horrors.

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