Cops are Liars (among other things)

I will start this post with a confession.

Back between 1987 and 1997 I drank way too much for a variety of reasons, none of which are important now.

I started to think that maybe it wasn't such a good thing for my health or sanity after a few arrests for public drunkenness and a DUI!

The clincher was in 1995 when I was in downtown London at a bus stop waiting to take a bus home when I was again arrested for being pissed.

The first part of my detention was rather uneventful until we got to the police station. There I made the mistake of telling the cop that was taking me out of the cruiser to go take a "flying fuck!"

For my candor I had two front teeth kicked out and then I was charged with assaulting the cop to make it harder for me to sue them.

The Special Investigations Unit, (A civilian watchdog agency) got involved and hounded me for months to give them all the details, since they wanted this guy for a bunch of incidences where he had gotten carried away with his treatment of prisoners and his conduct in general.

(I won't tell you about the time this cowboy was on his way to a crime, and even though the call was cancelled he continued to roar through town with sirens blasting until he finally went through a red light and killed another motorist! As far as I remember the cop got a slap on the wrist for this.)

After loosing my teeth, I decided that enough was enough, and let the matter drop rather than have the cops follow me around a harass me for making trouble for them.

It did, however, lead me to the conclusion that cops very quickly forget that their purpose is to uphold the law.

Instead they rapidly loose that perspective and start to think that they ARE the law, which leads to a very dangerous mind-set on the part of the police.

I won't even get into the stories about Rodney King or others but instead focus on recent events right here in Canada

Now don't get the impression that I think all cops are lyin' bastards, because that is not true. When it comes to covering up their own ass and closing rank to protect themselves, only most of them are lyin bastards.

There are also one or two good cops.

Here is the latest hue and cry in the papers about our police forces.

There was a guy at the Vancouver airport last month who was killed when the RCMP tried to arrest him.

To make this long story short he was needlessly tasered twice and died while in custody.

Just so you don't think this is my bias against the police force I will give you part of an editorial by Greg Weston of the Sun Media Group on what happened that day!

The Polish immigrant's first and fatal encounter with four RCMP leadfoots and a 50,000-volt stun gun was amply documented in the now famous amateur death video taken by a civilian bystander, Paul Pritchard.

While right-thinking Canadians everywhere are disgusted and outraged over the incident, it is clear from the video that the Mounties did their spinning best to cover up the whole affair.

This is one sick story: At age 40, Dziekanski had never been away from his home in Poland, much less on an airplane, when he landed in Vancouver exhausted and confused after more than 20 hours in transit.

After seven more hours of bureaucratic hell in the airport, with no food or water, and no one to translate for him as he searched in vain for his mother, Dziekanski tossed a piece of computer gear on the floor, and a small wooden folding chair at a partition.

HANDS RAISED

The video showed the four RCMP officers arriving on the scene a few minutes later, Dziekanski backing up with his hands in the air, and suddenly he is screaming in agony on the floor.

Even as he is writhing in pain from the first jolt of 50,000 volts, he is zapped again, as the burly RCMP officers descend on him, at least two knees on his back and neck as he lies face down.

By the time the cops are finished, he is dead.

RCMP spokesman Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre subsequently told reporters that when police arrived on the scene, they tried to calm down Dziekanski, but he continued "throwing things around" until he had to be subdued. False.

Lemaitre went on to say the first Taser shot "didn't seem to have any effect on him." False.

The officers held the victim down by the shoulders face up, he said. False.

The one thing the RCMP spokesman did not mention to the media was they had seized Pritchard's home-video showing the entire incident.

Indeed, if Pritchard had not taken court action to get his video back, and then posted it on the web last week, the RCMP might well have gotten away with explanations of the incident we would generously describe as a pile of crap.

And where was commissioner Elliott while all of this deception was going on in his department?

For 34 days after Dziekanski's death, Elliott remained completely silent, finally issuing a statement last Saturday -- four days after the damning video became public.

Elliott called the affair "tragic," but insisted that while the images on the video are "disturbing," no one should draw conclusions from them.

Baloney. One conclusion from the video is that the RCMP spokesman was not telling the truth.

MISINFORMATION

Since it is likely the spokesman was only the messenger, what has commissioner Elliott done in the last month to ferret out the RCMP official(s) responsible for feeding so much misinformation (lying) to the public?

This was not a case of four officers having their recollections distorted by the heat of the moment -- the RCMP had the home video.

As I said, police forces in this country and others develop an "us vs. them" mentality and when you combine this with an acquired belief that they are above the law we get into very dangerous territory.

Probably the best example of this is the taser gun itself.

The original purpose of tasers was as a substitute for "Deadly Force."

Instead of shooting someone that was threatening them with a weapon, cops could use the taser and not have to kill the guy.

BUT, because the police are a law onto themselves some bright guy arbitrarily decided that a taser would be a perfect tool for enforcing COMPLIANCE on suspects without the trouble or bother of having to physically restrain them.

Once this was established they just started zapping everyone left, right and centre!

I will leave this with a comment from a reader here in London.

Thank goodness for the video!

Having the RCMP investigate the RCMP's conduct into the taser death of a Polish immigrant at Vancouver International Airport is nothing short of absurd.

Indeed, having any Canadian police force - all of which must rely on the RCMP from time to time - to investigate the conduct of other police officers - is absurd.

It is long past due for this country to have an independent, civilian body to look into the conduct of police officers and to review police procedures.

The amateur video capturing the last 10 minutes of the life of Robert Dziekanski, 40, is extremely troubling on many levels.

First, it proves that the initial official statements issued by the RCMP following Dziekanski's death were inaccurate to put it mildly.

RCMP admitted that they tasered the disoriented and agitated man twice.

"(The taser) didn't seem to have any kind of effect on him," said Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre shortly after Dziekanski's Oct. 14 death.

In fact, the video clearly shows the taser having a profound effect on Dziekanski, who started to scream and fell to the ground writhing in pain and panic, which is when he was tasered again before lapsing into unconsciousness and dying.

Liberal Public Safety Critic Ujjal Dosanjh is right to call on the Harper Conservative government to establish public hearings in order to develop national guidelines for the use of tasers.

Police argue that tasers save lives since they give officers an alternative to using their firearms.

If that were the only circumstance in which these potentially deadly devices were used, then this debate, which is raging around the world, wouldn't be taking place.

Instead, this gut-wrenching video proves that the RCMP officers who attended to a clearly disturbed Dziekanski used the taser as a first resort within 23 seconds of approaching Dziekanski, who was breathing heavily and sweating.

This shameful incident has sullied Canada's reputation around the world.

Independent oversight would go a long way to preventing this kind of abuse of power in the future.

POSTED BY: Licia Corbella, london

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com