Blow the boys in blue

For some reason I have never liked the police. Perhaps it’s some lifelong oedipal thing where I reject authority figures as proxy representations of my father; I don’t know. I believe I emerged from my adolescence fairly unscathed concerning mother and father issues but my issues with authority have continued unabated. I still am wary of politicians of the right, department store managers, doctors, school administrators, and anyone who appears at the top of a hierarchical pyramid. In my mind these are representatives of oppression and repression of the aspirations of the individual.



Now don’t get me wrong, I have always thought of myself as a “team player” who goes out of his way to carry out group decisions that have merit and are arrived at by consensus. I even understand and support the occasional unpopular initiative because I can see the long term necessity of its implementation. What I vehemently oppose is the arbitrary proposal that strengthens the position of the hierarchy at the expense of the individuals at its base: management rights clauses in collective agreements are a case in point.



So, back to police. Why do I bear such antipathy to the boys in blue? Why do I see them as a growing threat to liberty and personal freedoms? I guess I started out with a personal bias which has caused me to cast a more critical eye than most toward our public security force. Given my Austrian post-war roots, I have always thought that police officers were a step removed from the jackboots of Nazism and just the flip side of the coin from criminality: in effect, the largest legalized gang in society. They have appeared, historically, to trample and bludgeon some of the groups I admire most in student protesters, peace activists, and labour unions. They protect the moneyed elite, the corrupt, and the powerful while victimizing the poor and marginalized.



Contrary to popular opinion, police are not dedicated to upholding the law. Order, yes, but law, not so much. Over the years I have had a number of friends and acquaintances in the legal profession, from both the attorneys' and crown prosecutors' sides. Regardless of which side of the courtroom they were on, both characterized police as dishonest, self-serving, arrogant and single minded. From a defense attorney's point of view, they would lie and fabricate evidence in order to advance their own conclusion on who was or was not guilty of a crime. On the other side, they would pressure crown attorneys who they thought weren’t getting convictions at a high enough rate or those who were critical of police tactics.



It seems to me that most of the above has been borne out by events we see reported on an almost daily basis in newspapers, but does it have to be that way? Is the character of the policeman always going to tend toward the abusive and dishonest or can we create a police force that serves the public good, will only use those powers given to it under law, and will differentiate between criminals and the public at large. In other words, is it possible to have a police force that knows its place and does not become a close knit, paranoid, clique who considers itself above the law?



We have not always had police forces. Although it has always been important to keep order in organized societies, this was done by private security or the armed forces. Colonial America had a system of “Night Watches” who were responsible for duties as varied as enforcing a curfew, lighting streetlamps, and sounding the time. Canada’s police was an outgrowth of the British model with the late nineteenth century Toronto Constabulary; however, their close association with elected officials to whom they owed their appointment caused them to be little more than hired thugs who a provincial government report in 1841 labeled, “formidable engines of oppression.”



The old adage, “Send a thief to catch a thief” seems to have been a pretty good description of policing in North America until the 1960s when the racial tensions in the US tore the lid off the sadistic, racist and lawless tactics of much of America’s policing. Corrupt police forces had been a mainstay of large American urban centers, exemplified by the Chicago and New York police forces whose ties to organized crime had been public knowledge since the Prohibition Era.



Following the anti-war protests and their extreme repression by both militias and police forces, police began to slowly don the mantle of community service or, at least, community based policing. In reaction to the negative light in which police continued to be seen, especially in poor or minority neighbourhoods, the hiring of visible minorities and the integration of the police department with existing community services was seen as a sure fire way to improve the image of the force.



Unfortunately, this infiltration of community service also meant the extension of the ubiquitous police presence in which we currently find ourselves. With community policing as a front, officers have been able to insinuate themselves into situations and environments where their previous presence had been unwelcome. We have police officers in our high schools, including the academic flagship of Edmonton Catholic Schools, where teachers have to discourage students from handing in essays that are twice as long as what had been assigned. We have police in numbers at every public event and police representatives in the form of 'partnerships' with a variety of community organizations and groups.



So, back to the question of a police force that knows its place and functions in a way that is not a long term threat to individual freedoms and liberty. I believe that, without some counterbalance to their power, that police forces will continue to be corrupted by that very power. Unless some way is found, be it a civilian watchdog agency at arm’s length from any police influence or some serious laws to punish abuse of power and intimidation, that the disconnect between what we want and what we get will continue to grow.



With the movement to the right in politics, brought about by the increasing withdrawal of wealth from the common good by the ultra rich, police forces will continue along their current path of increasing conflict with non-criminal citizens. At some point in the not too distant future, if this tide of conservatism is not stemmed, the threat that police will totally fill the role that Animal Farm had cast them in as running dogs of the power elite, as well as a society of privilege and power within the greater society of the rest of us.



In this scenario, the citizenry are no longer the collective to be protected, but the hapless masses to be intimidated and controlled.





http://law.jrank.org/pages/1647/Police-History.html Police: History

http://www.russianbooks.org/crime/cph3.htm Toronto Police in 1834 - 1860 "Formidable Engines of Oppression"

http://www.communitypolicing.ca/community-mobilization-project