Anyone who checks Jamie Graham’s lineage would understand why Victoria’s chief constable, who is to retire at the end of the year, stands behind his police officers when they’re accused of going too far.
The crest of Clan Graham depicts a falcon savaging a prostrate stork. Obviously, the raptor is using excessive force.
Its scrawny victim might say that it’s abusing its authority.
It’s more than a question of DNA, though. Our outgoing chief has been moulded by a culture of policing that once was largely hidden from public view. Now, though, folks are carrying video cameras or badgering authorities to put the devices in police cells.
They’re taunting the cops to use what is tiresomely referred to as “police brutality” so that they can catch it on film or whatever the things use.
There have been annual protests against police brutality in Montreal for 17 years, for Pete’s sake, and each anniversary succeeds in provoking more cops to provide more evidence of it. Those spotty-faced people in dirty bandanas are proving nothing but their own deficiencies.
Cameras focused by undercover cops on these sorts of “peaceful” gandy dancers have been useful to apprehend ringleaders as well as those with rings through their noses. Now the worms have turned and trained their cameras on those in riot gear who are spoiling their fun, drowning out their “statements.”
I hate to say it, but this is a good thing. Ours is supposed to be an open society. Our warts should show and be shown, too, and we see them too often when police find themselves in what Graham has described as “dynamic” circumstances.
It’s understandable that a chief should tend to side, initially, with officers alleged to have used excessive force. So it is that “use-of-force experts,” who are ex-cops themselves, should see things differently than those on the receiving end of it or those who see it caught on camera.
Graham, though he may not like it, has consistently expressed support for the review processes supplied by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner and the courts that have found cops went too far — including the OPCC adjudication that found two officers had used excessive force in dealing with a brawl outside Social Club in March 2010.
During the OPCC hearing, it was shown that a use-of-force expert found the two had acted “within training and use-of-force guidelines” if the police version of events was true. He accepted no other.
What the 55-second video shows is a police officer kicking one man in the buttocks twice before saying anything to him. It shows him kicking and kneeing another man who is lying on the ground.
Is this what police officers are guided to do by their training and use-of-force manuals? I can’t believe it is.
I can’t believe any guidelines say a cyclist who runs a red light should be punched by a cop as happened last month in Vancouver and has been shown repeatedly on Facebook. I can’t believe that police anywhere are trained to bludgeon suspects on the ground or put them in choke-holds until they expire.
We bystanders and viewers can’t know, as Graham says, the dynamic set of circumstances that police have to react to sometimes. We can’t even assume, as we might have before YouTube and Facebook’s prying into policing, that brutality is practised just by a few bad apples.
Some cops may have personalities that make them use excessive force more than others. Some, like the first-year officer filmed using his boot as a baton, are inexperienced.
Some learn behaviour from more experienced officers. Some ignore what they’ve been taught at police academies and think they’ll learn what they need on the street.
If degrees of enforcement are laid down — from verbal warnings to use of arms — maybe too much is left up to the officers’ judgment to decide what degree of force is necessary to make an arrest.
How many who become police officers quit because they find that serving and protecting isn’t all that’s expected of them — because they aren’t birds of prey?
