This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.
Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.
A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.
I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.
According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.
All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.
Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.
The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.
Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.
You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.
Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.
There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.
The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.
The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.
(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.
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6 years ago
Hear, hear!
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