Booter
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This isn’t as true as you make it seem.
High Ranking Police Folk Allegedly Behaving Badly
- Thread starter Bruce Monkhouse
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To be fair, I should have said "under your custody and control". I am certain there are incidents where "duty of care" and "right to self defense" intersect in interesting ways.
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I have relatives who were formerly police officers. I’ve heard stories…
Just because someone is cuffed doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t aggressive or a danger to others…
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The problem is not only individual officers; it's police services that drop charges and plead out disciplinary matters to retain individuals that should never be trusted as peace officers ever again. Missing money from an arrest - but theft charges dropped at the disciplinary hearing, and a repeat offender will get a two year demotion, but still be a cop.
This pisses me off to no end, and it doesn't do the profession any good either.
There isn't a single positive thing that results from crap like that, but the consequences for members across the board can be severe and take YEARS to rectify...
Best case scenario it creates the image with the public that there is a two-tier justice system, and that agencies sweep things under the rug for their members if it's convenient. My take has always been...if doing it prior to getting hired would have given you a deferral, then just don't do it.
Leading by example, holding members accountable for deliberately bad choices, and serving the community makes the job a whole lot easier.
When people don't trust you, they don't talk to you or bring things to your attention, they don't cooperate even during ordinary everyday encounters, and it creates a level of danger to both the members & the public that doesn't need to exist, and can take years to fix.
My 2 cents
Tough to get a sense of which charges were disciplinary and which criminal- and who had authority to drop the latter. Unless there’s something markedly different in how they prosecute disciplinary cases, criminal and police services act charges shouldn’t be getting prosecuted together, and only crown should be able to drop criminal charges. Maybe they have in-house prosecution for this stuff who can do both criminal and police services act?
@lenaitch - any idea?
lenaitch
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I agree. Criminal matters are for the courts and discipline matters are for the service. I'm not aware of any system that combines or in-houses both but I don't really know.
The Calgary video was nasty. Seeing as he is described as avoiding jail time then the assumption is there was a criminal conviction. The commentator mention that he had "turned his life around" but we aren't given any details.
For me it's always a tough issue. I was an Association branch president for a time and was sometimes conflicted with representing a member while, at the same time being concerned for the profession as a whole (I was also an NCO). Sometimes, it simply boiled down to giving the member the fair representation that they are legally entitled to without championing their case.
Members are human and humans screw up. I'm always reluctant to armchair quarterback cops in action. I wasn't there and video/audio often doesn't tell the complete story. We (OPP in my former area) recently had something similar. The member was booking an intoxicated prisoner and apparently became frustrated as the prisoner struggled removing some jewelry , so she ripped it off then proceeded to bash the prisoner's head into the bars to the point of bleeding. The was compounded by not reporting the incident to a supervisor and the charges were only laid sometime later when the SIU investigated (I forget how they became aware). She received 15 months probation with a bunch of conditions. Just on the basis of that alone, my take is she should find another line of work, but there might be other matters at play.
I'm often conflicted. Should a cop lose their job for a one-off in probably one of the most monitored professions? A trucker popped for impaired most likely would. The courts tend to go light on convicted cops. I'll leave their decisions to them. Is it their first time? Is there a pattern? Some people simply shouldn't be cops; e.g. Toronto's Forcillo. Should they buried buried in some off-the-road role? For the same money some might view that as a reward.
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