I expect everyone in the Canadian blogging universe is ranting about this right about now. Good for them, I’m not ashamed to join in. So these cops walk up to this guy, taser him, sit on him, don’t bother to check for a pulse (it looked to me in the video as if it was a bystander who finally did that) and don’t bother to apply CPR or, indeed, appear to take any measures whatsoever in the interest of trying to keep someone alive that they just stopped the heart of. The broader situation is heartbreaking. I cried when I saw that sweet lady talking about how she wanted to show her son how beautiful Canada is. If it was me, my air time would be taken up by howls for police blood.
There are lots of issues here. Clearly, the specific RCMP officers involved here are vicious, brutish hooligans who should be charged with committing a serious crime. And the corporate culture of the Vancouver International Airport is obviously in dire need of an enema. But personally, I’m hoping that if something good can come out of this tragedy, it would be a broad recognition, and determination to do something about, the culture of impunity in both the RCMP and local police forces such as the Vancouver and Toronto police. These people have a culture of impunity because they have a reality of impunity. They can do anything they want, and if anyone complains, they investigate themselves and conclude that the complaint was without merit. To ensure that their conclusions stick, they lie vigorously. We have reached the point where in any given case, we know exactly what the police statement will be before they make it—they will smear the victim, claiming his/her behaviour was deranged and violent and that he was apparently on drugs, and they will claim that the police made every effort to defuse the situation but were forced to defend themselves—no matter what the actual events might have been, whether the victim was a raving, heavily armed crackhead or a disabled grandmother. In short, all official statements by police to the media can be ignored as having no informational content whatsoever.
This must not continue. We need a serious external review capability, and serious penalties for police officers caught lying, much less brutalizing people for no reason. And we need some serious reorganization to make the force less paramilitary in its structure. And we need to push towards more community-style policing, because the ultimate problem is that the police have for some time seen the situation as Us vs. Them, with the result that Them (that is, the ordinary citizens they’re supposed to protect) becomes dehumanized to them. They’ve been operating that way for long enough that a lot of people have started agreeing with them, from the other side as it were. I’m sure getting there. Problem is, the more it’s two tribes against each other, the more police violence there will be, and the more worthless they will become at actual, you know, policing that serves the public.
As for the rest of us, I think we all need to avoid calling the police for any disturbance that isn’t seriously threatening. Essentially, what we are looking at here is a large, extremely well-financed gang. Some of the gang members may be OK people, but that doesn’t mean you want to call the Hell’s Angels in to deal with a noise problem. If they brutalize or kill someone, or just vandalize property, or steal it as “evidence”, do you want that on your conscience? If you do feel you need to call the police, try to make sure you have some way to record their behaviour when they arrive, and avoid letting them get their hands on it until you’ve made a copy.
His behavior was deranged and violent - and he did look like he was on drugs, and I know how he must have felt, having flown from Europe to Canada many times, exhaustion sets in. Although I agree with you that the officers should be charged(I say manslaughter), I think the crux of the issue is the use of tasers to subdue unarmed people. It should be banned. Period. And as far as the RCMP having a culture of impunity is concerned, all police forces have to contend with that problem, world-wide. Comparing the RCMP to the Hell's Angels is just silly, and you probably know it.
You couldn't possibly know how he felt Howard. He spoke NO English and it was his FIRST flight and he was a naturally shy person according to his family back in Poland. He did not look like he was on drugs, that is a very unmistakable 'look'.
Speaking English and having flown from Europe to Canada many times certainly gives you no understanding whatsoever of what this man was feeling.
Define "violent". He didn't do anything threatening to any actual people. In any case, it doesn't matter much what he'd done during the X many hours he was hanging about, because the police didn't stop to find out about any of that. They just walked up, swaggered at him, said a few semi-threatening sounding things to him in English, zapped him, and jumped on him. He didn't do anything violent while they were there, and they never bothered to find out what seemed to be up with him until that point.
But in fact, his behaviour wasn't deranged, and he certainly didn't look to me as if he was on drugs. It wouldn't even be occurring to anyone to think he looked as if he was on drugs if the police hadn't put that fairly standard victim-blaming meme into their initial statement. He looked like someone who was pissed off, upset, and at the end of his rope. Which is what he was. But he didn't look either dangerous or drugged up; IMO anyone managing to project that onto him is succumbing to the power of suggestion.
Comparisons to the Hell's Angels, silly. Well . . . OK, the Angels mostly raise money from the drug trade. The police do not raise money in that way. But the way they raise money *is* starting to look a bit like a protection racket. But people who speak out against the police, up to and including city councillors, tend to become victims of intimidation campaigns--that sounds kinda like the Angels. The police, like the Angels, have a strong in-group vs. out-group mentality. They don't seem to consider anyone who is not in the gang to be a genuine person deserving of respect or consideration as a human being. Both the police and the Angels, and gangs in general, tend to deal with what we might call civilians using a hair trigger--they resort to violence quickly and easily. With both the police and gang members, violence is frequently used against civilians who "diss" them, do not give them adequate deference or "respect", or fail to quickly enough obey orders or demands. Police are more likely to commit violence in public places than Angels or other gang members, because normal gang members don't have the same immunity that police do. Both police and gang members, when talking later about a violent incident, will generally take the position that the victim was asking for it. Gangs frequently enter into "turf wars", fighting other gangs for control over terrain. Police interventions in these turf wars are often hard to distinguish from the actions of a particularly large, well-armed gang which considers the whole city its "turf".
On the flip side, the police *do* spend energy keeping order. But then, on the flip side, many gangs also work to keep order in their turf, settling disputes, attempting to subdue violence other than their own if only to make clear that they have a local monopoly on violence, and so on. They don't try to stop drug use, if only because they have no access to revenue sources such as taxation.
The only clear difference is that the police are empowered by a democratically elected government, and are sworn to respect and obey the rule of law. But to the extent that they are functionally above the rule of law, that difference disappears, leaving effectively an exceptionally well-financed, well-armed gang. The ability of the police to internally investigate all complaints against them makes them functionally above the law. That is a Bad Thing.
rewind.it - I think perhaps I pointed out that I was referring to the man's exhaustion when I said I knew how he felt...perhaps the point wasn't clearly enough expressed.
Purple Library Guy - if throwing chairs, tables and computers in an airport doesn't seem 'violent' or 'deranged' to you, then we should all be thankful that only one of 'you' can be an in airport at one time :-).
if i'm left stranded in an official area for eight or nine hours i'm going to become agitated. if i can't leave that area, i'm going to be frightened. if there is no help available, no-one that speaks my language i'm going to feel a little panic. i watched a woman lose her crap in a bank the other day after being kept waiting for 15 minutes at a counter while the teller tried to do her a favour. she threw a tantrum because they weren't fixing her mistake fast enough. that included grabbing the little 'closed' sign and whipping it at a manager. patience is a lost art here in the greedy culture of me me me. to expect a frightened, exhausted fellow to behave calmly after an international flight of 6 or 8 hours and another 9 hours in antiseptic limbo? get real.
those officers should be facing murder charges and the airport authority should be fined, airport management should be held criminally liable for the egregious security failures that led to a murder on their grounds and the victims family should sue the rcmp and the airport for a vast sum of money. that won't bring back their loved one but perhaps it will instill a notion that official actions (or inactions) will have consequences.
BBC
NY Times
And they're talking about this in Australia and NZ too. I just want to make sure that our friends in the RCMP and Canada's increasingly frayed and worn and shabby government feel as ashamed as I do.
PLG, I would add one thought to your meditations above. I know it's not news that our police forces (like some of our generals) have been badly educated and disciplined for a long time. They don't seem to know where they are supposed to fit into the general scheme of things in a democracy, and we seem to have precious few political reps capable of reining them in.
But I think things are worse now. Paranoia has been licensed on this continent -- it has become a respectable way of thinking, the only respectable way to think as far as some of the elites are concerned, and our police forces and military will inevitably pick up on those attitudes. Even if a few Canadian politicians were to start showing some backbone on this turf, the general attitude seeping north from the U.S. is overwhelmingly poisonous -- most people don't even think of resisting. And the incompetent cops think they are doing the right thing.
The RCMP: they get their man. Yeah, sure. Like Maher Arar. Like Mohammed Mansour Jabarah (that's CSIS -- let's spread the shame around). Like Robert Dziekanski.
Our cops and our politicians are clowns, incompetent clowns, and they have been for a long time (anyone up for a barn-burning?), but the war on terra has loosed all the authoritarian wannabes on us, on the people whose peaceable lives are supposed to be the point of the whole exercise.
That guy was held for ten hours in a secure section of the airport after an international flight? I would have been smashing broken machines too. The whole story matters. The breakdown of the whole system matters. The assault on the liberty and sanity of ordinary people matters. If not that, then nothing matters.
When will the proper authorities take responsibilities for their actions. Do we treat our "unsavorable" immigrants with such distain? The police were told that he didn't speak English... they appeared to be one track mind.... no one asked questions. Did they all have a blonde day? Why do we pay the RCMP for stupidity. My taxes should be used for better purposes. The RCMP better get their act together, up north they're killed and down south they do the killing. Get it together folks this is Canada we ask questions and action later.
I noticed the RCMP spokesperson was emphasizing that the video was "just one piece of evidence" that gave "one view" of the situation, and that they, the RCMP, would never jump to conclusions from just one piece of evidence without looking at the whole picture.
So, after I'd stopped laughing and picked myself up off the floor, and after various now-famous names such as Arar, Donald Marshall Jr., David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin had run through my head, not to mention all the many cases of protestors shoved in the slammer on trumped-up charges, I found myself thinking that just maybe the cops don't want to go there. Yeah, I'm so sure that the cops are utterly hesitant about prosecuting based largely on solid video evidence, although they're generally just fine with prosecuting based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, bribed or coerced testimony from snitches, or just their own (often made up, it seems) testimony that a crime was committed. Just how stupid does this guy think we all are, anyway?
skdadl--I find it hard to disagree with a word you say. Of course I'm a fellow blogger so I'm biased (let's just all pat each other on the back. Group hug!), but really, this is exactly the kind of thing we've all been saying could happen as the security mentality took hold.
For that matter, we don't really know how many cases there have been that are more or less similar but without any cameras. Take that guy who was shot in the back of the head in a police station recently, and the cop claimed he was being strangled (by a guy who had only had a couple of drinks, was not charged with anything, and was supposedly being released at the time. Yeah, sure, he went for the cop and tried to strangle him, and then the cop shot him *in the back of the head*). We don't have a lot of direct evidence otherwise, and nobody's likely to look real hard for any, so it seems likely that cop will get away with murder. That got in the news. But when it comes to just roughing people up, by default or if they say something the cop doesn't appreciate, and not getting unlucky and having them die, just how standard is that becoming? How would we know? Simple police brutality doesn't make the news, unless it's both videotaped and incredibly flagrant (i.e. generally against a "worthy" victim, like a well dressed white or an old lady). And complaints about that level of misconduct just drop down the memory hole--they don't even go through the motions of investigating and then concluding that the cop did nothing wrong. It's hard to be sure just how far developed the police state already is.
What struck me most about the video was the contrast of the actions of the woman in the lobby and the police. The woman, unarmed and untrained, approached him (as he held the table in the air and seemed at the peek of his agitation), reached out her hand, and tried to communicate with him, and seemingly to calm him. If the police men had taken even a fraction of the care or displayed a fraction of the courage that this woman did, it's hard to imagine we'd be talking about a tragedy right now.
And it's hard not to agree that the police acted like thugs... with the unthinking cowardice that can go hand-in-hand with strength in numbers.
Interesting read at the G&M about the trustworthiness of the RCMP.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071116.etaser17/BNStory/specialComment/home?cid=al_gam_mostemail
The Globe has played a truly honourable role in this affair and the Afghan torture case. Funny--I used to see the paper as fairly conservative. Maybe I've mellowed.
But I think we need to go all the way. How many more Ian Bushes and Robert Dziekanskis are Canadians prepared to tolerate? The RCMP, utterly out of control and "horribly broken," must be disbanded, pronto, and a new federal police force built from the ground up, with proper training, serious accountability to a complaints commission with teeth, and a zero tolerance policy for officers who get out of line.
Yes, the Grope are being good on both these stories. The Afghan torture investigation is theirs, so they will back up their reporters, who have done a great job, but it is a pleasant surprise to see them respond so well on Dziekanski.
Let's not get lulled, though, Dr Dawg. ;-)
Heh. Not to worry. I have Margaret Wente, Rex Murphy and Christie Blatchford to keep me on the straight and narrow. : )
When I go to a peaceful political protest and I am (without any provocation) attacked by a police riot squad kitted out like a platoon of light infantry, something is terribly wrong. I've always thought that the motto of many police forces: "To Serve & Protect" was just short for: "To Serve the Rich & Protect Property".
We'd be wise to defend our liberties a lot more vigilantly lest our own government, allegedly terrified of 'terrorists', brings the terror home themselves; brings the terror down on us...