So my Member of Parliament wants more police officers to combat gun violence (regardless of what inciting hysteria about those evil awful firearms does to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; regardless of the fact that if someone stabs me to death with a screwdriver I’m just as dead as if I’d been slain with a firearm). What can I say? Hoplophobia is popular with the voters these days, and politicians just want to get (re)elected. We’ve voted ourselves into this clusterfuck, and we’ll have to vote ourselves out of it while we still have the right — or is it a privilege now? — to do so.
But if this is how those new cops are going to protect and serve their community, count me the fuck out:
(Just as an aside, I find it rather fascinating that the CBC is so careful to point out that the victim here has only “alleged” that she was assaulted by Victoria’s Finest, while it displays no such circumspection in its reporting of brutality that isn’t dignified by government subsidies. Well, we all know who funds the CBC — taxpayers! Uh, I mean, the government.)
See, kids, this is what happens if you get a sober friend to drive you home from a party:
The teenager said her friends dropped her off at home around midnight, but she was locked out because she lost her keys. Neighbors called 911 when they saw her staggering outside, out of control. Paramedics arrived and called police.
Police said that when Kinloch was unable to tell them where she lived, they took her to the main Victoria police station and put her in a padded cell to sober her up. They chose a padded cell because no other cells were available at the time police said.
[...]
After four hours, Kinloch said, she calmed down and sobered up. At 4:30 in the morning, police released her and tried to take her home. Once there, Hamilton said, they found that neither the buzzer nor the phone at the Kinloch family apartment was working.
Kinloch said the two male officers refused to let her out of the car to yell to the second-floor window to her parents and refused to let her call her sister, who, she said, had a cell phone.
Are you ready for some weapons-grade irony, dear reader?
Because they couldn’t legally release a 15-year-old onto the street, Hamilton said, the officers took her back to the station as “a child in need of protection.”
This is how Victoria’s Finest “protects” children:
The surveillance tape shows a female guard coming in and gesturing to Kinloch to remove her jacket and her bra. Kinloch complies. When the guard tells her to take off her shoes, the tape shows Kinloch kicking one of them off, and it lands in the corner of the cell. There is no audio on the tape.
The guard, later identified as special constable Merle Edmonds, then grabs Kinloch by the throat and pushes her into the back wall. The two male officers who had tried to take Kinloch home earlier, Const. Ryan O’Neill and Const. Brian Asmussen, rush in and use force to put Kinloch face down on the floor. They hold her down by her legs, body and head for several minutes while they handcuff her.
Another guard, who is named as John Doe in the civil suit because he was not yet identified at the time the suit was filed, arrives with what looks like a strap or a leash. He ties Kinloch’s feet together. The three male officers turn her around and drag her, feet first, to the door. They secure the strap outside the door and close it.
Kinloch was left tethered to the door, hands and feet bound, for four hours.
Of course, as far as the agents of the State are concerned, she had it coming:
When Kinloch kicked off her shoe, the police spokesman said, Edmonds felt threatened. At one point during their interaction, Kinloch grabbed the guard’s arm, Hamilton said.
“Oh my fucking god! A fifteen-year-old girl with a hangover grabbed my arm!“
After four hours, another police officer who had started his morning shift untied Kinloch and told her she was going to be charged with assaulting Edmonds.
If this is the way the State plans to protect me — count me the fuck out.
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