It is time that police are held to the  same standards as the rest of us.  Were I to attack a child with a potentially lethal weapon I would be behind bars right now.  Not walking free with public money being used to justify my actions.  What I fear is that as time passes and a series of Potemkin investigations carry us farther from the truth, people will begin to forget and be inclined to accept the official (police) version of events.  But no version can justify this action.  Only the complacency of the Canadian public will provide a faux justification.  Don’t give them a victory.  Demand the immediate arrest of the officer involved.  The charge should be attempted murder.

Canadians need to keep their eye on the ball here.  It doesn’t matter if the child was armed.  It doesn’t matter if he approached in a threatening manner.  He is still a child.  Police are trained to subdue people by a number of means.  The taser was the incorrect choice in this case.

Tasers are being used as a great big fun toy by police forces across Canada.  Deaths have already occurred.  It is fortunate that this child is alive.  Next time we may not be so fortunate.  Will it take one of these over sized goons killing a child before Canadians see the light?  The police are no longer the servants of the people in this country.  They are just one more street gang and they need to be brought under control.

Our passivity will only send the message that this behaviour is acceptable in our communities.  It is not in mine.  It is not in the Canada I grew up to know and love.  But I wonder if that place even exists today.

Today Remembrance Day has been hijacked by those who would support new unnecessary and counterproductive wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to the amorphous War on Terror.  The poppy is being made the symbol of those who romanticize war as a public good.  I will not join their number.  I will not be a hypocrit.  War is not romantic.  It is not glorious.  It is ugly and wasteful and a cancer upon human society that should be blotted out.  No one should support a war unless they admit the truth behind it.  I suspect that would be very difficult for most people.  How many Canadians would justify the murder of Afghan civilians or even partisan insurgents for the sake of controlling a pipeline route for our southern neighbour?  How many would say those who died to grease the wheels of cross-border trade were heroes?  Parents of the dead and injured must believe the fairy tales to cope with their loss.  But wouldn’t it be better to confront the truth before and have their children and siblings and parents with them still? 

This year I simply mourn.  Not just those whose lives were stolen in wars they were never allowed to fully understand, but those who they killed, who we all have killed.  I mourn the deaths of Afghan civilians and fighters.  I mourn the deaths of the children of Iraq.  I mourn the deaths of Palestinians as they are slowly exterminated in a genocide in which we are compliant.  I mourn the deaths of East Timorese whose killers were in part financed by Canadian taxpayers.  I mourn all those who have died unnecessarily for the greed of others.  And I mourn the poppy.  Murdered at the hand of those who have distorted its simple message and who now make its withered corpse dance to their beat.  If there ever was a death that I would not mourn it would be the deaths of these necromancers of war.  

John Kelly

The Web is a community.  Blogs are coffee shop conversations in a virtual reality.  They are the arguments, stories and laughter we share in a planetary cyber café.  Would the police have arrested Mr. Kelly, the accused in this case, if they had overheard him making similar remarks to some friends over cappuccino and biscotti?  I strongly suspect that the answer would be no.

The cornerstone of their case will be the obstruction of a peace officer in the execution of his duty of his duty.  This is a serious offence and certainly warrants criminal charges.  It is alleged that Mr. Kelly interfered with potential witnesses.  The Calgary Herald reports:

Much more than this should be necessary to charge someone with obstruction.  I fail to see how this would hamper police investigating a crime and so I expect police to explain to all of us clearly and concisely exactly how this action interfered substantially with their investigation.  .

In public service it is never enough to act correctly.  You must be seen to be acting correctly.  Perception is everything in the public domain.  This episode smacks of intimidation.  The CBC reports:

Why go to such lengths to uncover an obscure law?  It begins to sound like Calgary Police found Mr. Kelly to be a right pain in the ass and wanted to show him.   The Calgary Police do themselves or their fellow police services no favour by proceeding with this prosecution.  It makes us all wonder just what they have to be afraid of and unveils the lack of a real freedom in this country.  A revelation I would welcome far more than they.

I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

Conservatives are often the culprits in both countries though not exclusively as the reference to Clinton shows.  It is not really that the Liberals are all that chaste.  But Conservatives are always lecturing us to be choirboys, seemingly forgetting that being a choirboy can be hazardous to your virginity.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Gerda Munsinger Affair that scandalized the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker.  Apparently Gerda had done the rounds of the Conservative party leadership including the minister of defence.  She was rumoured to have connections to the East German secret police.  The story was disseminated in the early 1960s, likely by the Kennedy administration who worked tirelessly to oust poor old Dief and install the more likable (at least to Kennedy) Lester Pearson.

More recently there was the scandal over Maxime Bernier leaving secret documents at his girlfriend’s home.  Pundits at the time wondered why he would risk his political career by dating a  woman with biker connections who had once worked as an exotic dancer.  Ah! our intrepid media, a brain trust if there ever was one.  I can give you two very large reasons up front it you would like.  If the reporters don’t realize why they should talk to their cameramen because they always seemed to place the reason front and center.

I always knew Betty Davis eyes were a popular look but Sarah Palin hair?

Now we have the dynamic duo of scandal, Rahim Jaffer and wife Helena Guergis.  Allegations have been brought to the prime minister’s attention of some shenanigans by Ms. Guergis and she was asked to resign from cabinet and was at the same time expelled from caucus.  Although no official word has surfaced as to what specifically she is supposed to have done rumours abound.  The only observation I will make is that having a minister resign is a common tactic to ease pressure and embarrassment for the government.  But also expelling the member from caucus in one fell swoop is not an every day occurrence.  Whatever this is Harper must think it makes him and his government, which is the same thing, look really, really bad.  I can hardly wait I am so excited with anticipation.

In the meantime, let’s have a look at her husband Rahim Jaffer a former Conservative MP from Alberta, land of cold hearts and toxic waste.  Apparently, Mr. Jaffer was internalizing some toxic waste of his own last September when he was pulled over by Ontario police.  He was speeding, drunk and cocaine was found in his car.  In a plea bargain the more serious impaired and drug possession charges were dropped and he pled guilty to the lesser charge of careless driving.  Wait for it.  That’s not the best part.

The reason for pleading Mr. Jaffer down was the Crown’s decision that conviction was unlikely.  Why you might ask?  Well the Ontario Keystone Cops refused to let the man see his own lawyer on request and made the poor man get naked.  That’s right, naked.   Now I know we hear constantly in the media that there is a shortage of cops out there and the workload is getting pretty heavy.  Dalton McGuinty says these little slip ups will happen from time to time.  But really now, give these poor guys some R and R and let them see their wives and girlfriends once in a while.  We can’t have police roaming the highways looking for some unsuspecting speeder to fulfill their fantasies.

Now I could be interpreting this wrong.  After all I am reading it in a CBC report where the wording could be read another way.  The actual quote is “… repeatedly denying Jaffer access to his own lawyers and a strip search after he was pulled over on a rural road …”.  So was Jaffer asking for a strip search.  Maybe he’s thought the silhouette of his body in the moonlight would bring a soft sigh and a warning rather than arrest.  Either way our police need to find better ways to relieve the tension.  Perhaps that could be a new use for those tasers they are so fond of.

Of course, even if the Crown had moved forward on the cocaine charges Jaffer could have used Richard Hatfield’s defence.  Hatfield, then Conservative premier of New Brunswick, was found at Fredericton airport with a bag of marijuana in his luggage.  He denied it belonged to him and had the police dust the bag for prints.  When his weren’t found charges did not proceed.

So thank you for being consistent, Conservative party.  Hypocrisy is what you are best at.  Good thing cause you aren’t good for anything else.  The Liberals may be slimy, power-hungry spawn of Satan who would pimp their mother for a vote, but at least they admit it.  The Conservative choir may sing like angels but up close there cassocks smell of booze and stale sex.

Tasers are in the news again.  Ontario has announced rule changes for the use of the device and the RCMP will offer a second apology along with compensation to the mother of Robert Dziekanski.  Nothing can compensate the family of Mr. Dziekanski and no apology will return a son to a mother.  All we can do is learn from that tragic night at Vancouver Airport.

So what have we learned?  If the recent report to the Ontario government is any indication, not much.  The report recommends stricter limits on use against ‘vulnerable groups’ such as pregnant women and children.  How I wish Cheech and Chong were still together.  I can hear a rewrite of their famous emergency room sketch where the attendants at the desk are betting whether the old geezer will make it to reception or croak along the way.

Image if you will:

Cheech:  Oh wow!  That poncho is really ripe.  She’s gonna pop any second.  I bet I give her two zaps and that bambino will shoot right out the cruiser.

Chong:  No way man!  I bet she’ll take three zaps without even dilating.

And now a word from our sponsor:

Ed McMahon:  Women are you tired of your pregnancy?  Is that little bugger just refusing to come out?  Well President’s Choice Baby Zap is just the thing for you.  Just place the Baby Zap firmly on your stomach and crank that trigger.  Voila!  Instant motherhood.  Recommended by police wives everywhere.

Why do we pay thousands of dollars for morons to state the obvious?  Of course it is not really the obvious.  The obvious would be don’t use this on pregnant women at all.  If you feel threatened by a bloated human being who needs help to get up out of a chair perhaps policing is not your vocation and you might want to rethink your career choice.  Or perhaps it is a reflection of police intelligence that they need everything spelled out for them.  ‘Duh, I wonder what’ll happen if I zap her?’  Beyond this little gem of reasoning the bottom line is business as usual for Ontario police and tasers.  The only other big recommendation is to discuss expanding their use to all uniformed officers.

Once again police justify the deployment of tasers as less lethal alternative to guns therefore saving lives.  Twenty or more people have died from taser attacks by police across Canada.  I would be curious to see, in say the decade prior to the introduction of tasers to Canadian police agencies, how many people were fatally shot by police.  I have been searching for that information on Statistics Canada but if it’s there they aren’t making it easy to find.  I do know that there are many officers who retire without ever having fired their gun in the line of duty.  The taser has been deployed much more liberally.  I would also like to know how many people have been killed by police using pepper spray or the baton.   In the same breath as saying tasers are less lethal than guns police agencies assert that the taser was never meant as an alternative to the gun but as an alternative to these choices.  Double talk like this by those charged with our safety should make us pause.  Ask yourself this simple question.  If Rodney King had been zapped with tasers instead of beaten with batons do you really think he would have lived to tell about it?

But our politicians are right on the ball.  The Minister of Community Safety is quoted in the Globe and Mail saying:

We’re enhancing Ontario’s position with regards to its measured approach by introducing a very, very significant guideline (that’s) very very prescriptive

Oh that makes me feel so much better to know a genius like you is very, very on top of this.

What the public needs to see is the evidence that could only be attained through the use of the enhanced police powers contained in the anti-terrorism laws and how that evidence directly prevented catastrophic loss of life.  Anything else is diversion.  Everything thus far released could have been achieved using standard police procedures.  Why then do we need the added tools of the anti-terrorism law.  That is what must be justified if those laws are to be extended. 

The weakness of the government’s arguments for maintaining the anti-terrorism laws is demonstrated by the mock explosion.  The only reason to include that footage is to terrorize the public.  Terrorism in service of preventing terrorism, there is a metaphor for the new millennium.  Scared and confused the electorate is prepared to accept whatever the government claims will safeguard them, whether it really will or not.  I am surprised that this footage was allowed in court as it is clearly irrelevant.  Whether you are planting a bomb capable only of cracking a ceramic pot or a nuclear device capable of taking out an entire city, you are still committing a crime.  What possible value could a demonstration of the blast from a particular size of explosive be in a trial to determine if these men were guilty of plotting a terrorist attack?  Would they have been less guilty if the explosion planned had been for instance half the size demonstrated.  Or is this the purpose of out anti-terrorism laws?  Are they needed so that the crown may enter irrelevant and inflammatory evidence in order to convict by hatred and anger rather than law.  If so, then it is a frivolous and dangerous justification. 

Eight years after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington it is time to return to sanity and allow these over-reactions to pass into history.  In the wake of those events a terrified population lost track of what this country and western democracies are supposed to stand for.  Yes it is a dangerous world out there and yes we should be vigilant against those who would threaten our lives.  But in being vigilant let us not become vigilantes.  Let us remember that while law and individual rights and freedoms can leave us vulnerable to dangers, the dangers of a police state without rights are far greater.  In retrospect the chaos of Weimar was preferable to the order of the Third Reich.

How many of us could afford to have our mortgage payment triple overnight?  I couldn’t and I doubt there are many out there that could.  Now with unemployment rising rapidly more and more families will end up watching their possessions parade out of repossessed homes toward an uncertain future.  Billions, trillions have been pumped into the banks and yet no one stopped them from ripping the life out from under the very people who had provided that money.  They are toxic assets now, not people, not families. 

In recent days a housing project a bank seized from a developer that went under was torn down in California.  Bank officials determined demolition would be cheaper than repairing the houses and completing construction.  Twenty houses, homes, were torn down at this particular development and workers on site reported they had a similar demolition order for another development not far away.  Squatters had moved in and vandals had caused damage.   Much of the vandalism, beyond the usual obscene words spray painted on the walls, was theft of fixtures and infrastructure carefully removed by tools.  Sounds to me like someone was cutting a few costs on their home renovations.  Probably some of the very same sanctimonious individuals mentioned above.  The squatters on the other hand may well have included some of the very people this same bank had ripped from the comfort and security of their own living rooms and thrust onto the street.  Now they became squatters and vandals, the mainstream media purposely or ignorantly making them one and the same in the minds of a gullible public.  Sleeping tonight made easier thanks to a propaganda industry dehumanizing them. 

People ask me what I have against a capitalist system.  Well open your eyes.  This is capitalism at work.  The capitalist market is amoral (I would argue immoral).  The bank has no responsibility to care what happens to people.  Bank executives don’t have to answer for the consequences of their acts.  If people suffer it is not their problem and government should not stick its big nose in, that would just mess things up.  Government doesn’t know what they are doing;  the financial geniuses of Wall Street do.   Yeah right!  Try selling that argument to anybody today.  That is why the capitalist system doesn’t work.  It argues that society should be run without any moral oversight.  The law of the jungle; survival of the fitest; all the rest of that crap.  How hypocritical.  Capitalists want society to be dog eat dog until something starts nibbling on their flanks.  Then it is ‘call in our buddies the local, state or federal authorities to pound these nuisances back into the muck they are.’ 

Okay so who brought the vaseline?

The squatters at that development needed a home and they found one.  That is dog eat dog.  They should have been allowed to defend it.  After all a man’s home is his castle and as soon as they laid down amongst their meagre possessions those houses became their homes.   Nothing is more beautiful than when an inert mass of wood and metal begins to breathe with the soul of a home.  Our so-called government authorities are truly agents of the monied classes.  Rather than stand aside and do what the capitalists argue they want from government, let the private sector function, they stick their big noses in, not to tell the bankers that they need to be responsible citizens, but to make sure the vulnerable can’t stand up for themselves. 

It is interesting to note in current times that those who most argue for a minimalist state are those who also argue for greater state coercive power.  The New Right does not want the state to be involved in our lives except to keep THOSE people under control and we all know who we are.  When they talk of a minimalist state they are referring to the Hobbesian Grand Watchman.  Government should keep us secure.  Good idea on the surface.  But justice would keep us even more secure without having heavily armed paramilitaries running our streets with guns and tasers (see past articles on RCMP love of tasers). 

The slogan so commonly chanted at rallies and marches, No Justice - No Peace, is not a threat but a statement of fact.  In an unjust society motivation to violence is never far away. Where justice prevails only those few who suffer from anti-social disorders would create a problem diminishing the need for state coercive power.  We could save young people entering the police force the psychological damage done them by a training regimen that makes them the social problem they are today.  Saving not only them but their families and friends as well.  Current police personnel could be put into rehabilitation facilities where mental health experts can attempt to salvage something human in them.  Okay.  Okay.  I digress.  My ranting aside my point remains valid.  Where people feel they are treated justly, they are less motivated to destabilize the society by violence. Less violence; less need for coercion.  Simple.

As factory workers and the service workers who rely on their commerce lose their homes, anger is bound to rise.  It is not that we think that everyone should be paid exactly the same or live exactly the same lifestyles.  Equality is not sameness.  But there should be some relationship between what someone can legitimately expect to receive from society and what they contribute to the society.  Here in Canada we have a game called hockey.  It is a fun game and I have fond memories of playing it myself in a vacant lot or on the roadway.  But today grown men are paid millions of dollars to chase a frozen rubber disc around an ice pad.  Is there any connection between contribution and recompense here?  America has its equivalent baseball and football.  Today, men (mostly anyway) are receiving multi-million dollar thank yous for driving companies into the ground.   Only bad management and arrogance can explain General Motors plunge from number one to bankruptcy in fifty years.  Especially since the number of cars sold today is exponentially higher than the number sold then.  Apparently they not only did not gain any of the increase but lost the customers they had.  Quality management there, eh?  With grown men playing for millions while children scavenge to survive; with incompetence rewarded by the very people it destroyed; how can anyone expect peace and calm? 

For a practical example of a peaceful yet poor society one only need look at the Tanzania of Julius Nyerere.  Nyerere retired from office and returned to live in the village in which he had been born.  There was no coup or assassination attempts.  Tanzania is a very poor country and Nyerere died as poor as any other citizen.  Justice works.  But in North America we see increasing calls for more police, tougher sentencing, greater restrictions of citizen rights.  The Patriot Act and the anti-terrorism laws in Canada are just the tip of the iceberg.  (One thing I will give Americans, they always have neat names for their laws ).  Terrorism is a convenient excuse to accelerate a process that has been going on for decades.  Particularly since the expansion of the franchise to all formerly discriminated groups, we have seen a steady gutting of the political sphere and an aggressive campaign for control by economic players.  Can’t have THOSE people thinking they can determine the course of their own lives.  If you go back and watch the scene in the film Remains of the Day where Anthony Hopkins character is being ridiculed by the participants of the pro-Nazi meeting you will witness an example of the attitudes of any of our current business leaders.  The very concept of democracy is ridiculed. 

And there is the problem.  Justice means sacrifice.  Justice requires honour and humanity.  Police are cheaper.  So lock your doors tonight but don’t feel all that secure.  Remember the words of Phil Ochs’ song ‘Outside a Small Circle of Friends:’

Living in the ghetto with the coloured and the poor

The rats have joined the babies who are living on the floor

Now wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops

But they got too much already and besides we got the cops

For now anyway, for now.

The inquiry shows no indication that a life or death crisis existed at the time Mr. Dziekanski was killed.  I am not jumping to conclusions.  But I do admit a prejudice against people and organizations that exert maximum effort to deny and obfuscate their mistakes instead of owning up to them.  Something went wrong at Vancouver airport that tragic day and we could have gotten to the bottom of it long ago and implemented corrective measure had the RCMP not dug in their heels, protected officers whose testimony varied, and generally tried to push off the blame on the victim. 

If you want public respect, don’t insult our intelligence with the we know better than you defence and own up to your conduct. 

As a side note of an even scarier nature, the Commissioner was in Kandahar because the RCMP will be training Afghan police.  All I can say is the Afghan better keep their staplers holstered.