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Chris Selley: Policing won't get better until politicians get their hands dirty

More and more, police seem free to enforce — or not enforce — whatever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in last week on a vile campaign of racist and misogynist harassment currently being endured by several Canadian women in the public eye, including journalists — a campaign that police have not been terribly interested in addressing, according to the women’s reports. (One reported being advised to “lower your expectations,” which some Canadian police forces nowadays may as well adopt as their motto.)

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Trudeau said that Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino would later that day be “bringing forward an expectation” to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police “that police forces across this country take seriously — very seriously, not just as individual issues, but as a systemic issue — this pattern of intimidation and attacks of people who serve their country, like journalists.”

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It’s a fair request, and also perhaps politically wise. The RCMP is investigating Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s recent run-in with a raging oik in a Grande Prairie, Alta. hospital — a disturbing encounter, certainly, but not one that reeked of criminality. One could say the same about some of the crap landing in these women’s inboxes: Racist and misogynist slurs aren’t illegal on their own.

But some of the abuse they’re receiving goes much further than that, in some cases rising to the level of overt threat: “I am going to first rape you till you bleed and then I’m going to cut your throat and f–k your head,” is one highly notable example.

There’s also criminal harassment, which was added to the Criminal Code in 1993 “as a specific response to violence against women,” the Ministry of Justice explains in a Handbook for Police and Crown Prosecutors. I don’t know whether serial emails would meet that bar — the charge is laid most often in domestic violence and stalking cases — and it’s not surprising the police aren’t much interested. They are often accused of not taking stalking seriously enough when the person is known to the victim, after all. The cowards sending these vile missives obviously don’t use their own names, and the worst of the worst seem to mostly use Protonmail, which encrypts user data before it even arrives on its servers in Switzerland. You can just imagine a desk sergeant’s eyes glazing over.

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At the very least, it’s reasonable for people facing this kind of abuse to get a rational explanation as to why it doesn’t make the cut — not just a yawn and a shrug. It’s often good advice to expect less from the police, unfortunately, but all the more reason we should demand better.

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After days and days of testimony at the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia, the mind still reels at the RCMP’s performance — particularly its decision not to tell people (except on Twitter!) that there was a madman on the loose, quite possibly in a mocked-up police cruiser. Here in Toronto, the police insist on ticketing cyclists in High Park for speeding and stop-sign infractions, which might be defensible — the law’s the law, after all — if they paid any significant attention to motorists, who kill infinitely more people (at least 58 in 2021, by CBC’s count) than cyclists. The Toronto Star reported this summer that police were failing to respond to auto thefts even when the owner had installed a tracker and knew precisely where it was!

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More and more, the principle of independent policing — the idea that senior officers should establish enforcement priorities for their forces without political input — seems to have degraded into the principle that police can enforce, or not enforce, whatever they want whenever they want for whatever reason they want. This is nowhere more true than in Ontario, where the provincial police force has a hard-won reputation for not enforcing anything involving Indigenous protesters, even after court injunctions are issued demanding it — most recently during the CN rail blockade near Kingston in 2020, and for years on end in Caledonia before that. The Ottawa police proved themselves utterly useless in the face of the trucker convoy earlier this year.

It’s not good enough. And the idea politicians mustn’t weigh in is bunkum, as Trudeau demonstrated last week. When it’s politically advantageous to wash his hands of a police-related situation, he appeals to police independence: Canada is “not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do in operational matters,” he said during the 2020 rail blockade. “The decisions made will be by police doing their jobs the right … way,” he said during the convoy’s occupation of downtown Ottawa (as if invoking the Emergencies Act wasn’t sending a rather pointed message).

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When it’s politically advantageous to tell the police what to do, however — or tell his public safety minister to tell them — he’ll do it. This is true of many politicians, especially when they’re campaigning for re-election, and they shouldn’t get away with it. We certainly don’t want mayors and premiers and prime ministers telling police what to do on a day-to-day basis — which person to arrest, which business to target. But the population of Canadians dissatisfied with the status quo seems to get larger and more diverse by the year, and it will not get better without serious political intervention, if not a wholesale soup-to-nuts rethink of Canadian policing.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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