The distraught family of a dead 16 year old boy allege racism on the part of justice officials who have not yet charged the man who took his life.
“If he was a native man and he killed a white man it would be first-degree murder,”
The Calgary Sun quotes uncle, Rick Bear Hat;
“He has taken a kid’s life over jumper cables,”
(They were wrapped around his neck at the time.)
To Doubting Thomas: ” if somebody walks down the street with booster cables, he’s bound to start something” wish I’d said that. Beautiful. Seems like nobody caught tht one.
Bryceman-Thanks! Your reponse and the Loki’s answered quite a few of my questions.
Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe adopted the children of their bi-polar dau’r. The police come looking for a grandson. The frail-looking (from the photo) 76-yr old is an ex-naval officer and the tale is a sad one from the paper’s acct.
Held for six hrs, no pillow or blanket, weak and couldn’t stand on marked spot, was in his sock feet because he hadn’t had time to put on his shoes before the officers took him downtown, without telling him what the charge was. Later learns he is charged with obstructing the police. Leaves the station, still in his socked feet, hails a cab home, where his wife was recovering from knee surgery.
Charges dropped. Now, there is a story.
If a wealthy white man is treated like this in his own home, then what chance does a native have?
Just asking.
Regarding Martin B’s comment: I am not at all a proponent of forced abortion, but I do believe in individual responsibility. FAS is preventable and the probability of FAS in children has been up to 25% of births in some native indian populations in Canada (unfortunately getting good estimates of FAS is very difficult and the numbers I’ve found vary immensely with rates of 1/1000 to 70/1000 being reported around the world. Also, FAS risk appears to be significantly lower in white populations than in indian or black populations).
People with FAS have low IQ, greatly diminished frustration tolerance and impulsivity which makes them virtually unemployable in a modern society except as criminals. It is far better to abort them before they are born. Failure to do so is completely irresponsible and at this time, women who give birth to one FAS child after another face absolutely no penalty for their actions. Thus, I think that civil action is appropriate.
The other proposal that has been put forward is to incarcerate mothers who are drinking or using drugs during pregnancy. Aside from being a gross violation of individual rights, this will likely only get mothers when the damage to the fetus is already done. I don’t think that one is doing anyone a favor by ensuring that they are born brain damaged.(I have Catholic friends who would disagree with me on this). Alcohol is one of the most destructive of neonatal neurotoxins and pregnant women who drink very heavily on only a few occasions during pregnancy are likely to cause far more brain damage in the fetus than a woman who injects heroin throughout her pregnancy (aside from easily treatable opiate addiction in the newborn, there are no detectable neurologic sequelae to maternal opiate use). The net result of such a policy would be an large numbers of incarcerated mothers and probably the same number of FAS children and maybe even more since they would now be getting optimal prenatal care.
There is no in-utero test to detect FAS; possibly small head size on ultrasound might be a way of making diagnosis of FAS more likely. Until such time that there is an in-utero test for FAS, aborting high risk fetuses is the only way to deal with the problem.
It would probably be quite simple to get affected women to agree to an abortion; how about $10,000 and free booze for 2 weeks if you go through with it. The cost of this option is likely far less than the lifetime social cost of an individual born with FAS to society. Also, it respects indivual rights.
As far as reproductive choice goes, I would strongly discourage women from having abortions and I think there needs to be far more scrutiny of the abortion process in Canada to prevent such aberrations as an increase in male/female ratio which is the result of some cultures aborting female fetuses as they want all male offspring. Given the demographics of Canadians, healthy women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant should be offered payment to bring the baby to term and then give it up for adoption. Again, far cheaper in the long run than encouraging a muslim 5th column to take up residence in this country because Canadians won’t breed.
the case of Mr Sharpe and his pummeling at the hands, er FISTS of the cops proves my current position that cops are the biggest threat to the freedom of citizens and greatest danger to their safety of all large organizations in the country.
mafia hit men and street punks looking for grannies with purses they can snatch for drug money cant do their deed and then turn around and arrest you.
cops can ‘do their thing’ and then arrest you and compound your situation.
they have the communication system, authority and training in law to know just the right way to carry it out.
car theft cartels dont.
cops do.
‘serve and protect…. who?’
I will be creating a web site devoted to counteracting their malfeascance by posting whatever number of documents and video stuff comes in.
dont believe me? look up the case of one al gramolini, former CHIEF of the london fukwa… er police, BUSTED for fudging his expense account and slapped on the wrist why he copped (pun intended) a GUILTY plea.
the top one in the entire organization was a petty thief.
incidentally, the recently former chair of police services board here in the biggest hick town in the country sent me an email in response to a meeting I had claiming I had agreed to ‘informal arbitration’
there is no such thing as ‘informal’ arbitration, therefore I filed a complaint with the civilian police review board on grosvenor street in toronto demanding to know which explanation for chahbar’s claim was true:
– the meeting I had with the cops was in fact arbitration, but they didnt inform me, therefore that is misconduct, or,
– it wasnt but they told chahbar it was, in which case they lied to the chair of the services board, or,
– chabar dreamed it up himself in which case HE the chair of the police services board is a g**amn liar.
I still have the email.
I showed it to hundreds of his constituents between june when I got it up to the election last week, pointing out the sarcastic flippant tone.
he lost by less than 300 votes.
do the math.
‘cops are tops’ BULL BULL BULL BULL BULL
Loki, excellent commentary on FAS. Band council leadership should read it for sobering thoughts on social leadership for their people. How much effort Native leaders currently give to reach pregnant mothers on reserves would be an interesting question to see answered (is anything seriously being done?). But there is no way to know if the life being aborted has FAS or not. I hope you recognize the slippery slope of the shotgun approach you’re proposing.
As for the threat to incarcerate (i.e. stict monitored pregnancy) high risk mothers, the sooner Canada recognizes unborn rights, the quicker the “grey area” of gross violation of individual rights is put to rest for the sake of our children. Kids win first place in my family.
Loki:
Brilliant comments! How delightful to find another commentator to look forward to on this blog, aside from ET.
SOMAS
Martin, I think we can both agree that educating women about risks of alcohol during pregnancy is the preferred method of preventing FAS. Given the performance of band leaders in dealing with other public health issues such as contaminated drinking water and rampant solvent abuse on some reserves, I don’t expect any better performance in preventing FAS. There is an unfortunate tendency of native leaders to blame all their problems on external factors rather than looking within. We haven’t helped by creating a system which basically infantalizes natives and ending the reserve system will likely be required before any progress is made on this and other issues.
I don’t think that recognizing unborn rights would be wise, although such a move would provide years of work for hundreds of lawyers. It would certainly make things much easier with regard to ending maternal behavior which has a high probability of damaging the fetus but unfortunately in most cases the damage would already have been done by the time the state intervened. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way of reversing fetal brain damage following sufficient alcohol exposure. The only way to prevent the damage would be to intervene pre-emptively in the case of any potential high risk mother and this would be a violation of individual rights in my view. Preventing pregnancies in this high risk group would be one way of dealing with this issue without opening the pandora’s box of fetal rights, but I can just imagine the howls of outrage and accusations of racism should this be proposed.
well having checked out Mr Shaxon’s web site and voting ‘innocent’, I just whipped off an even MORE critical fax to the halton boys.
including demands for answers why they refused to respond to any of a half dozen increasingly vehement demands for action regarding a drug dealer who chose to harass and threaten me for months.
cops in canada are WORSE than useless; they can actually do vastly more damage after the initial crime by then turning around and busting you for ‘whatever’ and thus you are caught in the black hole of the court cystem. (note the spelling).
This story exemplifies how rediculous the Canadian Legal Industry has become. It is tied hand in glove with the Social Service Industry. These areas of our society have become so twisted that any semblance of common sense have disappeared. How could any family have the nerve to go public about the “injustice ” that has happened here.
They should be hanging their head in shame not wailing that they have been wronged.
The responsibility for this incident lies directly with that young man’s family starting with his mother. The affect of drinking alcohol during pregnancy have been well known since the 70s.There is a definite possibility that the perpertrator’s mother may have had fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol affect . This would make her more subject to making bad choices.
There will never be the possibility of forced abortion or forced absention of toxic substances in this country. Does anyone out there remeber the Manitoba case of the young aboriginal woman who had had a number of children taken away fom her because of her extreme drug use. There was an attempt to encarcerate her in a controlled enviroment(not a prison ) because she became pregnant again for the fourth or fifth time. (this all at the ripe old age of 25 or 26). Some rights group took the case and she had to be released because this action infringed on her human rights. You can be sure that once released she went back to the drug use and gave birth to a damaged child that is being care for by the Social Service Industry. If she had not overdosed she is probably out there regularly producing new clients for said industry.
I worked in the health care field for 30 years and regularly came into contact with families that had 8-10 children all with FAS or FAE and there was no consequences to the birth mother of these children.
The only way to change this behavior is to force these individuals to care for these children themselves.
When they can just hand them over to the nannystate to care for they can just keep behaving the same way.
I also take offense to the excuse for leniant sentencing that is often used is that many aoriginal people had a rotten upbringing. My question is “DOES THIS MAKE THEM ANY LESS DANGEROUS?”
bollocks:
I don’t know what the situation is with the police in your area – but obviously you feel that they think they are a bunch of elitists who overuse their power of discretion (or knowingly decide to use bad discretion). Maybe that’s true. I don’t know.
But, you also make sweeping declarations like “cops in canada are WORSE than useless.”
You might also want to consider that they, like the rest of us, are under enormous political pressure to do things differently than they would otherwise.
In the 90’s, I met a whole lot (5) of ex-RCMP officers while in university. They would often talk about how the RCMP had “gone from a snarling guard-dog of law enforcement to an obidient lap-dog of politicians.”
I don’t know for sure, but they were pretty convinced that the police forces of Canada (RCMP, regional, and municipal) were suffering from the worst turn-over rates in history. People who thought that they would be signing up to “fight crime” and “keep the neighborhoods safe” were increasingly finding themselves “baby-sitting photo-radar machines to make the government money”, arresting one group and not another because their political masters were trying to get re-elected, and dealing with the fact that promotions were often being decided on racial/gender quotas. The message I got was that the police forces were losing the best people (i.e. those who disagreed with what they were being given as policies).
Maybe I’m totally off when it comes to your situation. All I’m saying is, be careful about painting the whole group with the same brush. There are other possible explanations.
“cops nowadays are only and exclusively interested in wringing excuses out of crimes to lay charges at anyone involved including the victim. THIS is proof.”
I think you might be confusing the cops with the crown prosecutor..The ultimate decision on proceeding with charges is the crown.In the case of Mr. Shaxon if he is charged it will be a case of the crown investigating the case to inform the officers on scene that night they are proceeding with charges..
loki: “I don’t think that recognizing unborn rights would be wise…”
Wisdom depends on what you believe, doesn’t it? I believe the unborn are developing human lives and you don’t. So not only do I think it’s wise but a necessity in a truly moral and mature democratic society to give priority to the rights of eveyone unable to defend themselves which by definition includes the unborn.
You’ve already given your wisdom consisting of jailing mothers of FAS babies and massive payouts to groups of pregnant individuals in the “high risk” catagory (does that include mandatory sterilization?). It looks like you’re o.k. with taking away rights once the damage is done and using plenty of public money to coerce addicted native women into giving up having children.
rural roots: “The only way to change this behavior is to force these individuals to care for these children themselves”
I believe you’ve hit it correctly, rural, except that the care for the children must begin during pregnancy. If individuals are being forced by society into taking responsibility, shouldn’t that begin when taking responsibility does the most good?
Never bring jumper cables to knife fight.
a ^ :^(
FRONTEER JUSTICE A NECKTIE PARTY A GOOD STOUT TREE A LEIGNTH OR ROPE A HORSE AND THATS IT its too bad they did,nt do that with CHARLES MANSON be we had GOVENOR MOONBEAM BROWN in office