Finally Something I Agree With

A very surprising report was issued by a group of Canadians investigating a police shooting in 2004. In it, officers were cleared of any wrong-doing in the death of 26 year-old man who charged them with a knife. The surprising part of the report was that the group recommended that front-line officers be issued Tasers. Being pro-Taser is dangerous water these days, especially in Canada.

The best part about the report was the emphasis on de-escalation. The de-escalation theme has been getting lots of run lately, and for good reason. I completely agree that an officer’s first concern when encountering angry, disturbed, emotional, or otherwise out-of-control people should be not to increase the tension but to attempt to decrease it. In other words, rather than going straight for the Taser like so many guys are doing these days, make an effort to calm people down first. If that doesn’t work, then you start looking at compliance-inducing options.

Give Them Guns

Continuing on the topic of global law enforcement issues, you may or may not be aware of the brewing crisis in the United Kingdom. The 2.5% pay raise for the national police force was recently approved with a discrepancy: the raise wasn’t retroactive to the fiscal year, meaning instead of a 2.5% pay raise officers got only a 1.9% pay raise. The inflation rate over there is 2.5%, and math types will tell you that this actually amounts to a pay cut. To add insult to injury, the clandestine pay cut only applies to police officers in England and Wales while the Scottish constabulary’s raise is retroactive and matches the inflation rate.

The British police are even talking about striking. While this is far from a possibility due to the stout and noble character of the British police force, it is an indication of the dire nature of the circumstances across the pond. The British and Welsh police have every right to a pay raise that matches A) the Scottish raise, and B) the inflation rate. Police in the United Kingdom deal with an underclass that has no respect for the law. I’ve referenced this before, and I still think that police officers in the U.K. should be trained in the use of and be issued firearms individually. This will only partially help, because the police in the U.K. are also woefully understaffed. For further information on this developing situation, and some great entertainment as well, check out the Police Inspector’s Blog which I recently discovered.

To top it all off, the slighted bobbies get to sit back and watch while the British government approves an additional £7,000,000,000 or so for London’s 2012 Olympic budget. Clearly, the U.K. needs to get its priorities in order.

If You Thought It Was Bad Here

There’s been lots of clamor lately regarding “excessive use of force” by police units, especially with regard to Tasers. While I agree that there’s lots of Taser-overuse out there today due to lack of proper discipline, procedure, and training, people in the U.S. need to realize that in general their society has very good police. Even if you live in Chicago where the police are really on the ropes these days, you have to admit that police in the U.S. are by and large a respectable group that upholds the honor and nobility of their profession.

Not so in Nigeria, where there is an on-going crisis with the national police force. In Nigeria, thousands of suspects are killed every year ex-judicially by police, including many that die after release due to injuries from torture. An even more disturbing trend is the idea that raping sex workers is “a fringe benefit of night patrol”. The more you read about Nigeria’s police force the more atrocities you will discover. The crime wave sweeping the country has prompted the Nigerian government to bring in British police to supplement the decidedly sub-par (understatement of the decade) performance of the Nigerian police. This is far from a solution, and is in fact a recipe for disaster. The mind boggles when considering what it would take to really fix this problem.

From our perspective, it’s important to remember that ultimately morality and ethics are the foundation of society. The Nigerian police force is plagued by a complete disregard for the rights of the people they are supposed to protect. We thankfully live in a society where life, liberty, and property are highly respected and/or upheld as sacred. These ideals can erode if they are not protected, however, and moral decay in our own society will eventually lead to a Nigerian type of situation where nobody is really safe at all.

Those Darn Canadians

Don’t let the title confuse you; I love Canadians. Their peace-loving nature, congeniality, and disproportionate amount of beautiful women all endear them to me, but sometimes I just have to laugh at stuff they’ve come up with. The Political Party system of Canada has always been a source of laughs, specifically because of outfits like the Marijuana Party. Recently I was reading up about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and came across what is perhaps one of the greatest Canadian Inventions of all time, nicknamed the “Fruit Machine”.

The Fruit Machine, which “worked” by measuring pupil dilation in people when shown erotic pictures of the same gender, was used by the R.C.M.P. Security Service during the 1950s to root out alleged homosexuals in Canadian society. Back then homosexuality was illegal and also considered to be a character flaw by the Canadian government, and as a result of the Fruit Machine dozens of people lost their jobs. The sheer brilliance of the plan overwhelms me.