Steyn enters the fray;
And that’s my biggest problem with “law-&-order conservatives”: They seem to think when the coppers are kicking around Mike Brock, that just shows they’re doing their job. Au contraire, the ten minutes they’re kicking around Mike Brock is ten minutes they’re not doing their job, ten minutes they’re not devoting to the guys they should be kicking around – just as pulling over the octogenarian nun for secondary screening doesn’t demonstrate the rigor of homeland security but rather the waste of limited resources.
Except that he wasn’t “kicked” around. He was asked, rudely, for his ID and to surrender his backpack for a search – an egregious case of police being “insufficiently polite”. By his own account, there were no witnesses. But also by his own account,
The reason I said that, is because they seemed to be criticizing me as if they were aware of some sort of political positions I held without me having saying anything to them. It almost makes me think they were monitoring Twitter or something. Because I had indicated on Twitter where I was minutes earlier.
Okie… dokie.
Mark overlooked linking to my original commentary whilst summing it for his readers, so I’ll reply with my own last word here by repeating something I told Jay Currie when he declared, “Deference to Authority is not dead. And if you want to see it in action, SDA is the spot. Sad really, but there you are.”
No one HERE handed over his backpack – he did. If you have a problem with “Deference to Authority”, take it up with the Deferrer.
I have plenty of respect for people who defend their rights when they think they’ve being violated. In Mike’s case, though, he didn’t, did he?
He submitted his papers and his sack, and then scurried back to his ‘puter fast as his legs could carry him, to set in motion his very own libertarian pity party.
Paper Marxists, digital libertarians. Two sides of the same coin, I’m afraid.
(Ahem. This is sort of interesting.)
“… I was nowhere near a protest.”
Addendum: What seems to have been missed by some commentators is that while Mike has spent considerable effort here and in other venues, portraying himself as an innocent disinterested citizen inexplicably detained by roving police, his Twitter record suggests something quite different: that not only was he following police movements in the minutes before the encounter, but that his attitude towards their activity is arguably hostile. (See this one, as well.) To make matters worse, the Twitter post and the Shotgun account, posted within mere minutes of each other, include a direct quote that undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation, a “sexing up”, if you will.
Perhaps there’s a reasonable explanation for the discrepancies, I don’t know. I’ve never had a reason to doubt Mike Brock, nor do I hold any animosity towards those who support him. But for me it comes down to “who to believe – he, or my own lyin’ eyes?”
Either way, one thing is certain. When it comes to throwing in my lot with someone on the strength of his word, this isn’t the molehill to die on.
Black Bloc.
Quebecers arrested at U of T.
Just sayin’.
ET;
Couldn’t agree with you more. Brock had to have said something to the police. Why else would one of them have said they didn’t care what he had to say if he hadn’t said anything in the first place. There’s no ring of truth here.
Posted by: bob c at July 1, 2010 12:52 PM
What unmitigated bullshit. Key-reist, first “what were you doing wearing a black shirt” (the stupidest question ever asked at sda) and now “he had to have said something ….”.
I’m a motorcyclist, a good one, and a conscientiously safe one. I live in Vancouver, I’m 61. I’m a very responsible man and polite to a fault with “the authorities” out of mature self interest. I learned obsequious deference to authority by being the owner of a small regulated entity for 30 years and learning to survive the regulatory madhouse.
A few months ago I got caught — fair and square, and I made that clear to the cop — for riding briefly in a bus lane in Vancouver.
Mostly out of embarrassment, I attempted to explain to the cop how I ended up in said bus lane — something I never do. Briefly: my lane froze, I was caught in the middle of an intersection when the light changed, I moved to the only clear spot, the bus lane, with the intention of getting out of it as soon as a safe gap opened to my left.
And our jolly copper had this to say: DON’T. YOU. LIE. TO. ME. [bold, his].
I explained that I wasn’t disputing the ticket, merely trying to explain the mitigating circumstances. And again,
DON’T. YOU. LIE. TO. ME. [bold, his].
Defer to authority? It was AWOL on Saturday because of political considerations. On Sunday, “we did our job”.
The blame for this should be handed to Mayor Miller and Chief Blair. Period. There was no “law and order” present on Saturday, only at the MAginot Line “fence”. It stood off to the sidelines and under political orders, surrendered the field to thugs, so that Mayor Miller and Chief Blair could “work the crowd” for political purposes. What a bunch of sheep.
God help them that they would have had to respond to citizens taking control of the streets of Toronto, while the police, contracted for that purpose stood idly by for the photo op. Once that was achieved they began to swing the clubs and round up the “usual suspects”, bystanders. I haven’t heard how many of the Black BLOC were arrested for our $1 Billion.
They (Miller & Blair) “knew” their city. The “city” just stood by and filmed the process and didn’t lift a finger to stop it. Says a lot about those people of Toronto and less of the Black BLOC imports.
Look in the mirror folks, quitcherbitchin’.
I think that Canadians may want to appraise themselves of Canadian law as it applies to the Mike Brock case, especially the point about unlawful search.
A very instructive read can be found here:
http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc52/2004scc52.html
It’s an easy read, but meaningless unless read in its entirity. A follow-up of some of the case law presented is also instructive, and surprisingly straightforward. My conclusion, as I’ve posted elsewhere, is as follows:
As set out by the SCC, context is everything. For instance, when going to an airshow, post 911, all conveying items are searched. When entering family law division court in Saskatoon, a full scan and search of all conveying items is done … but rarely is a search done at regular Court of Queen’s Bench sittings. When getting on a city bus, no search, but when getting on an airplane, detailed search (even a joke made about bombs or hijacking will get one detained at an airport.) When getting on a city bus in London, post-tube bombings, a full search may occur. Any public event where it can be reasonably expected that violence may occur may subject all participants to a search … like going to a speech by Hirsi Ali.
The context here is:
1. G20 hieghtened security crack down which has been well publicized makes the city a high security zone.
2. Black shirt (but only in the context of the G20 riots)
3. G20 riots and violence the previous day by black shirts
4. Extreme G20 violence at other international events
5. Public safety was the singular reason for the search; and incidently the single most important test as laid out by the SCC for patdowns.
The officers were completely within their rights, and in fact, likely duty bound to do a check. I’m surprised they didn’t do a pat down. Mike was not detained for anything but the shortest length of time, all clearly outlined by the SCC as standards to be met. The bag search, given the context, was reasonable. His pockets were not checked. Pretty clear case.
I find the profanity disturbing, as no officer I’ve ever met or worked with would’ve used it in the case as described by Brock. But, we only have one side of the story.
So, I do disagree with Kate on one point … the bag had to be handed over and searched. ID, likely need not have been provided. There is also a crossing over of issues here … the macro issues like admistrative tactics by the City of Toronto, and the minute ones like the search of Brock. Steyn mixes them and makes a mess of his argument. He’s a macro thinker.
I wonder if we’d all feel differently if some dirt bag had of managed to get through with a bomb? I blame Miller and the Police Chief, also it appears the cops were trying to locate the black bloc two days after they let them riot and rampage thus they targeted innocent bystanders.
I missed the flurry of discussion of the last couple of days until now. Wow!
I find this disagreement among friends (I hope) to be both painful and hopeful to read.
There’s no way to 100% reconcile “true” libertarian conservatives with “law and order” conservatives. Either you:
A) govern yourself and take all responsibility for this, as well as for what may come from permitting other to govern themselves with few or no restrictions
B) or you accept that it is necessary to delegate someone authority over you. Further, to be practical about it you must expect that this authority you delegated will be subcontracted out. By this I mean to say that you don’t vote for individual policemen.
Either. Or.
So, let’s take the case of that guy on his bike who wanted to go to the demonstration on Monday but was stopped by police who wanted to search his bag before letting him through. If he had a bomb with him, and used that bomb to kill people, would Mike Brock have been defending the police for their unwillingness to search bags? Would he have been calling for stronger search laws.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZgjX5vHt2o
I found the police pretty reasonable in that particular instance. I wanted to slap the “you’re denying my rights” guy down by about 2 minutes into the video. They didn’t hold him down and forcibly search him. They let him repeat himself, rudely, for 5 minutes, and when he tried to push through them he calmly stopped him. He could have left any time with no search or arrest.
If Mike Brocks’s experience was anything like this, then I have to take the side of the police.
If the police went out of their way to harass Mike for no good reason, and were unnecessarily verbally aggressive, then the police individual involved displayed poor professionalism. I would regard that as an error of judgment, not a sign that we live in a police state.
At the end of the day, I don’t think I want to live in a pure Libertarian society nor in a conservative authoritarian society. It has to be somewhere in between. The laws we make will be imperfect, and will be interpreted by imperfect judges and lawyers, and enforced by imperfect cops. You can’t take the “imperfect” out of the equation. If over time it emerges that there is such a degree of imperfection in the system that the law needs to be revised, a healthy society will be able to have this discussion and act appropriately.
Which brings me to what make me hopeful – the quality of the discussion here and in related sites has been, for the most part, very good. No one was compared to Hitler (AFAIK), no one was threatened, name-calling was minimal, and I learned a lot about what I had to consider before taking on a policeman in a disagreement about rights. I suspect others have similarly reflected on this issue. It’s been educational and thoughtprovoking.
Contrasted with what goes on in much of the blogosphere, especially the lefty blogosphere, I am impressed by the intellect and thoughtfulness of the people discussing these issues in relatively civil manner, using short blog posts, presumably mostly off the top of their heads. That’s how we can improve our future, even if we don’t agree on all details of an issue.
Having organized sit-ins and many demonstrations in my younger years I do understand what happens.
While we debate the minute details of what did or did not happen, one overriding principal should not be overlooked.
Freedom goes hand in hand with responsibility and virtue. License means one can do anything without being responsible. When any individual or group assumes they have license to provoke violence and damage, then don’t cry when they are met with force of any kind. For any individual to claim they inhabited some tiny island in the midst of anarchy shows that the individual doesn’t have much common sense.
If one doesn’t want to slip and fall, don’t go to slippery places. In the end it’s not a question of freedom at all, but a result of a well organized violent campaign against Government.
I have to agree with Mike’s editing, f*ck does add more to the element of *danger* than sh*t ever will.
Kate, Personally, I found your sentence “Paper Marxists, digital libertarians. Two sides of the same coin, I’m afraid.” insulting.
How are they the same?
Perhaps I am being a bit thin-skinned, but I would say a large portion of your readers are libertarian. Was your intention to insult them?
EarlW: read “scurried back to his ‘puter
… “paper” … that’s the key. Libertarians in general were not at all insulted.
EarlW, I shouldn’t presume to speak for our brilliant hostess, but I think she means Mike Brock didn’t actually stand up for his rights, or what he thought his rights were. Kate appears to not appreciate whininess, which pro-Mike, or anti-Mike, you’d have to think he’s a tad whiny.
Steyn agrees with one of Kate’s points:
Kate:
I have plenty of respect for people who defend their rights when they think they’ve being violated. In Mike’s case, though, he didn’t, did he?
Mark:
That’s true. I would have. I always defend my rights, even if it involves raising the stakes dramatically. Not because I’m brave, but because the writer in me is figuring it’ll make a much better column if I get the crap beaten out of me and tossed in the slammer. Tried it with both British and Moroccan immigration officials in recent days, but in both cases the wimps caved.]
Me No dhimmi
You are looking at what happened to Brock through your own experience. But situation-wise both experiences are different.
Further:
there is no corner of University and Bay. They are both parallel streets.
Brock could only be (reasonably) at corner University/King if he is working somewhere in financial district (on King St. from Yonge to University)- otherwise he was there because he was curiosity seeker. This is quite far from UofT and majority of people there are business people and/or tourists.
****
I am also surprised that many people are talking only about rights. But when there is a terrorist act you forget “rights” and see only obligations. [the police should go there and keep these bast’rds longer in detention, the police should have more powers – right?]. But then you look at everything differently when you, personally are involved……. like now.
There are no rights without obligations and I think that people concentrating only on rights[my rights trumps all else] forget that obligations are also important part of well being of society.
I could be in worse company than Mark Steyn, seems to me.
You can say Kathy Shaidle, BCF and Mike Brock are whiners all you want Kate, but you can’t escape the fact that we have two-tier justice in Ontario.
There has been a policy decision made that police -will-not-take-action against particular groups to protect property or even life and limb. Police will be ordered to stand back and let it happen, been going on since 2006 in Caledonia.
Y’all watched it on Saturday. Burning cars, broken windows. There’s 15,000 cops in downtown, armed with everything from guns and batons to tasers and super duper hight tech sound cannon. They couldn’t arrest 20 college students vandalizing a $75,000 cop car? How stupid am I supposed to be here?
Sunday, no union demonstration, police not ordered to stand down, SHAZAM! No property damage Sunday, lots and lots of arrests. Wow, how did that happen? Monday no union demonstration, tired cranky cops breaking the law and pushing people around for no good reason.
I do not consider it to be in my best interests to allow that to pass unremarked. If Mike Brock gets pulled over for speeding, that ain’t news even if the cop breaks his nose. You lip off, you asked for it.
If Mike Brock and a bunch of other people are subjected to illegal search on Monday -after- the big show for wearing a black t-shirt (he has video), that’s news. Because gee, where was all the “screw the rules, lets catch these creeps” gung-ho police work on Saturday?
Oh, and cops breaking the law to make super duper sure the black t-shirt wearing potential perp was completely disarmed and harmless. SINCE WHEN in a free country is Mike Brock required to prove he’s harmless to police at their whim? I don’t care if there is a protest, you arrest guys when they are breaking stuff, you don’t hassle guys sitting on a park bench listening to their ipod.
As for me, I’m not going be in the Canada Day parade in Caledonia today with my cool car. Why? Good possibility of “demonstrators” getting a free pass from the OPP, that’s why. Its hard to get a new windshield for a ’64 Buick, know what I mean?
dp @12:37: The root of authority is power. Ultimately the authority of any state or political organization is its ability to coerce or enforce. The most important aspect of the police, and one they share with the military, is that they are the enforcement arm of the state. The police deal with internal challenges to authority; the military with external ones.
The second consideration of the application of power is that it must be intimidating. No state has the power to enforce its dictates over all its citizens 24/7. So, the application of power has to be intimidating, essentially to make examples, so that all the rest of the citizens stay in line. When that intimidating aspect of power is broken the state collapses, such as East Germany or Romania in 1990. When it is sustained, opposition collapses, such as Tiannamen Square.
Phantom: Define illegal search, in legal terms. Otherwise it’s just words. What law was broken? What charter right was violated, specifically?
That’s a fair comment, ella, but I wasn’t so much defending Brock as responding to Bob C’s contention that “he must have said something”.
I came of age in the cops-are-pigs era but never signed onto that at all. But sadly, over time, I’ve kinda arrived at the feeling that, generally, cops are thugs, representing of course a THUG STATE. And the top echelon of copdom is now utterly contaminated with multi-culti, PC, social-worker policing.
And The Phantom is absolutely right about two-tier justice. That is crystal clear.
AND, there is zero interest in protecting private property, which I always thought to be a core duty of the state. After all, it’s covered by insurance and, as we all know, that means no actual costs are incurred! And oh, think of the stimulus to the economy: paying for all those repairs!
Me no dhimmi
Canada is a Thug State? Are you serious?
It seems to me that the only state which (according to you) would NOT be a thug state would be an anarchist state.
As for contaminations with multi-culti, PC, social-worker policing I think you are somewhat right. But isn’t it, in some small measure, YOUR fault that in Canada there is multi-culti, PC, social-worker policing?
What did YOU do to prevent it?
I can agree that someone has more of a right to be pissed off about their rights being violated if they’re arrested for standing up for what they believe in. I find that most cops will fold when you do stand up for your rights and I’ve been lucky thus far in that I haven’t gotten arrested and I haven’t had to open my pack or tell them where I was going or where I lived.
What I find disturbing is the number of people who call themselves conservatives who buy into the surveillance society that we’re heading toward. Slaves submit to searches and freemen don’t. If someone is clearly breaking the law, then by all means arrest them. A much more desireable outcome in TO would have been if business owners were allowed to use force to protect their businesses and a load of buckshot in response to a molotov cocktail will make surviving protestors seek softer targets. Socialized policing has clearly failed and it’s time for a private enterprise solution for the protection of property.
I fly very little now because I am very uncomfortable sitting in a public area unarmed. I’m doing a long drive tomorrow to get somewhere I could be in an hour by plane but I prefer to bring along the things I might need which are banned on aircraft. I don’t go to any bar which requires me to go through a metal detector or provide identification. Right now the streets are the one place I can walk around without being hassled because I chose to carry around what I consider to be essential survival tools. Fortunately I now live in a place that is very unlikely to be the future venue of a statist gathering.
Sorry Kate, I love you but I find Mark’s arguments much more reasonable and persuasive than yours.
Massive fail.
Cjunk, this isn’t a court room and I’m certainly not a lawyer. Its my understanding that police do -not- have the power to randomly demand ID and a search of personal effects from Canadians on any random street corner.
If they do have that power they damn well shouldn’t, and there’s something else that needs fixed.
Do you guys -want- to live in a free country?
And by the way, why isn’t there an inquiry under way to find and recalibrate whatever geniuses ordered cop cars be left to burn on Saturday? Those things are all signed for by the guys responsible for them, and I guarantee you the guy that signed for it didn’t voluntarily leave it there to get burnt. He was -ordered- to leave it there.
I feel like I’m in the frickin’ Twilight Zone here. WTF you guys?
Beginning to wonder about Steyn. When are the Liberals going to parachute him into a riding?
He certainly has about as much knowledge of this country as Iggy.
cgh – most certainly, the nature of authority is its nature to, well, authorize and validate and even require a certain mode of behaviour. First, we must understand that all societies have limits on individual behaviour; all have modes of normative behaviour. No, authority does not have to be ‘intimidating’ in the sense to which you refer.
Authority can be expressed in various ways. A key and probably the most important agent of authority in a society is ‘peer pressure’. What will the neighbours think is an important tactic of constraining individual whim. Indeed, in some small societies, the role of gossip, frowns and turning one’s back on the one who steps out of line is more than sufficient to enforce the normative mode of behaviour.
Then, moving from the ‘lateral tactics’ of enforcing normative behaviour, we can move into the hierarchical. This moves from parents, teachers, to religion – an important agency – and the state. In the democratic state, it is the citizens who make the laws via their legislature. The police enforce these laws, the judges interpret whether the individual actually broke that law.
Now, do we have a two-tiered legal system? That arises when ‘special deals’ are made for political purposes. This has been the norm in societies, and it’s most certainly a corruption; that is, all societies must wage an endless battle against corruption and special deals.
So, we have the multicultural hands-off scenario where the Tamils can take over a major Toronto highway and the police chief and Ontario premier won’t allow them to be removed. Same in Caledonia and the natives there. What about the Liberal Party’s theft of millions from the taxpayer to fund their political campaigns? The abuse of taxpayer money in benefits and pensions?
Phantom: I’ve been fairly scrupulous about confining my remarks to specific people in specific circumstances. If I feel like commenting on police policy in general, I’ll do that in a different post.
As a conservative, I don’t believe in “group guilt”. Thus, if a cop punched a reporter on Sunday, I’m not going to drag him to the scene of another alleged cop crime on Monday to scream “aha!”.
So, stay on topic.
I was willing to take Mike at his word right up until the moment I read that Twitter feed.
Now, all bets are off.
In the minutes between his post to Twitter and the one to the Shotgun, the word “shit” became the word “f*ck”.
Tell me – why did he feel the need to sex up his report?
Shaidle: “Hicks hate us big city people.”
Oh dear. I take it that was an passive agressive dig at Kate.
I was a big critic of Shaildle and BCF’s phony “police brutality” video on that thread and I live in Vancouver.
Posted by: brick60 at July 1, 2010 4:33 PM
Did your critique of the video get you banned from commenting at BCF’s Youtube page and blog as well?
ET said: “Now, do we have a two-tiered legal system? That arises when ‘special deals’ are made for political purposes. This has been the norm in societies, and it’s most certainly a corruption; that is, all societies must wage an endless battle against corruption and special deals.”
Uh huh. So ET, that’s why it isn’t “whining” when you report being the subject of two-tier policing. I got caught up in this in 2006, I think I posted about my full-tactical stop experience right here on this very blog. Nobody called me a wuss for doing every single thing the cops said to do.
How we know its two tier is people reporting it. You want -more- reporting, more Kathy Shaidle with the video camera, more Mike Brock reporting his experience.
What do you think we should do, just shut up when we get hassled by cops? If everybody shuts up, how are -you- going to know whats going on ET? Going to watch the CBC?
Phantom: police do -not- have the power to randomly demand ID and a search of personal effects from Canadians on any random street corner
They don’t, but that wasn’t the case now, was it? There is a very narrow criteria for searches, and in my opinion, based on the charter and SCC, the police had every right to search Mike, given the circumstances and over-all context. The ID request was perhaps outside their right. Kate also gives proof that Mike may be engaged in creative hyperbole.
I feel like I’m in the frickin’ Twilight Zone here … perhaps you’ve just descended from the twilight zone into reality. You have no idea of what constitutes a lawful search, which would make your opinion one grounded in ignorance.
As far as the macro issue of two-tiered justice and police responses at the G20 on day 1, versus 2 and 3, I completely agree that things are screwed up.
AtlanticJim 4:35
No, because I don’t go to BCF. I go to Shaidle’s site because Mark Steyn says it’s so great but I haven’t seen the light, if you will.
Kate, just read your comment. Clearly I’ve missed the point somehow.
phantom – no, Mike wasn’t the object of a ‘two-tiered legal system’. I’m going strictly by his words:
He says he was at the corner of Bay and University – hmmm- as noted, those two streets are parallel and there’s no corner.
Then, he says he was simply sitting there, and the police came up and said they wanted to talk with him. What’s wrong with such a request? Then, it becomes strange: Mike says he was stunned. Why on earth should he be stunned? They could have been going to ask him..’did you see someone wearing orange and purple running by a few minutes ago’? Why would anyone be stunned at being approached by the police.
Then, he continues that he ‘paused for a moment’; he also says he ‘opened his mouth’ to ‘respond to their request’. And then Mark says that an officer then immediately yelled at him: ‘I don’t give a sh# what you think’. Or was it “I don’t give a f# what you think’.
That simply doesn’t make sense. If someone comes up and says ‘we want to talk with you’..and you haven’t yet said a single word..and according to Mark, he hadn’t said a word…then, why would the officer yell at him? Didn’t they want to talk to him?
That’s why I think that a great deal has been left out of Mark’s story. These ‘facts’ that are missing include his location; what he was doing there (we find out he was sitting somewhere, talking to someone and holding a Starbucks coffee). …and above all, what he said to the police. According to Mark, he was utterly silent. It simply doesn’t make sense.
Kate,
I assure you, that I did not intentionally “sex up” the report. I was clearly shaken and disturbed by the experience. I believe that my recount on the Western Standard is accurate and the one on Twitter was hastily written without proper parsing of my memory.
You believe this discrepancy between what specific curse word was used in what incident bring my entire credibility into disrepute. I think that’s silly.
But I’ve acknowledged the contradiction and attempted to provide an honest explanation.
You have instead painted a charicature of me that shows me as someone who went looking for trouble, and was looking to be a martyr, but didn’t have the cahoonies to follow through on his own rhetoric. Your assumption I intentionally “sexed up” the story, of course, fits your narrative.
I will correct the accusation that you have banned me as soon as I get back to a computer, as editing posts from and iPhone is next to impossible. But your comment at the WS stands to correct that record.
The point is, Phantom, you started talking about “two tier justice” in Ontario, and that’s a different topic. I’ve written about two incidents that I don’t think rise to the level of “blogworthy”, much less “rights violation”.
I cringe when I see words like “tyranny” dumbed down. What’s distressing is witnessing it done from people who should know better, and that’s why I called them on it. A little proportion, please.
The other issue I have is this triumphant self-portrayal as some sort of rights warriors – all of it limited to posting crap to the internet. I’ve put more “skin in the game” defending myself from parking tickets.
And I haven’t found the need to take any cheap shot sideswipes at friends with whom I disagree – you’ll have to ask them why their arguments require such tactics. [addendum – I should have made clear that this does not refer to Mike]
Posted by: EarlW at July 1, 2010 2:32 PM
Does the phrase ‘taking personal responsibility for your actions’ ring a bell?
“Digital libertarians” apparently are fighting for freedom FROM responsibility.
With all due respect, Kate, if you are referring to me, I take total offence to any suggestion I took any “cheap shot sideswipes” at you. The only allusions I have made to you, and even in private correspondence have been about the respect I have for you.
Your post here, is a direct assault on my integrity. It makes a severely personal negative value judgement agains me.
I dare say, you would not be being as friendly as I am being now if the tables were reversed.
I must admit that a lot of legal discussion here is pretty good and it is a worthy discussion to have. I personally think that it’s too bad it’s wasted on something as trivial as the complaints that started the whole discussion rolling. I get the feeling that the people who are outraged the most have the least to complain about. Anybody who grew up poor in any major city went through what these people did 100 times before they turned 16. They managed to get over it. Cops are like bikers. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. If you keep your dealings with them down to a minimum you’ll live a happier and less stressful life. Nobody said life was fair.
No Mike, the cheap shots were not from you.
A much more desireable outcome in TO would have been if business owners were allowed to use force to protect their businesses and a load of buckshot in response to a molotov cocktail will make surviving protestors seek softer targets. Socialized policing has clearly failed and it’s time for a private enterprise solution for the protection of property.
Posted by: loki at July 1, 2010 3:45 PM
AB-SO-LUTE-LY right loki. For those who are sympathetic to loki’s cogent observation, may I recommend a little book: The Private Production of Defense, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Murray Rothbard’s acolyte.
Caledonia convinced me of the wisdom of loki/Hoppe’s thesis. For I’ve come to the conclusion that the STATE does nothing competently including those core tasks that even libertarians assign to it.
Mike Brock got ensnared in a bogus police operation. Totally bogus!
CCA means capital cost allowance but also, cops covering ass.
If you think dealing with a bad cop is terrible just wait to you deal with a bad judge.
I’m getting a headache.
loki
In my view cops represent the law (and order) that’s the real reason why people do what police ask them to do. It is trite but true. People park cars in parking lots, do not vandalize shops and do not drive 250 km/h not because police carry guns, not because they have batons but because people think the laws police represent are reasonable and good for them. If majority think otherwise then you have situation like in banlieues in France or in some part of Sweden where police can not go in. Simply put, there are not many policemen/women for x numbers of persons. In Toronto(acc. to Wiki) there are 5,710 uniformed officers and 2,500 civilian employees— for 2.5 mln people. Do you think that if majority of people decided they would not follow rules police could do much about it? You wrote that “I find that most cops will fold when you do stand up for your rights ” – true, and the above is the reason why.
You also wrote that we are going to be a surveillance society – I think you are behind the times, we are already surveillance/the-lack-of-privacy society. Your bank (and any bank) can check the state of your credit card or your bank account. The people on facebook or on google can check your likes and dislikes. Your employer can check whether you smoke and your insurance guy can refuse to give you low cost insurance if he finds out that you smoke ( it is called – profiling). Your airplane people can profile you and your friendly grocery guy can check your shopping preferences when you use your credit card. And so on and so forth. There is not much privacy and government surveillance is only one facet of it. Freemen may not submit to searches (as you wrote) but freemen do submit to constant leak of information about freemen finances and freemen likes and dislikes.
business owners were allowed to use force to protect their businesses ……… I hope you realize that some time ago it was business/land owners in Sicily who tried to do just that, – the result of their decision was …………..mafia.
gord – dealing with anyone who makes personal and subjective rather than objective judgments is bad, whether it be a parent, a teacher, a friend, an employer, a neighbour..or a police officer or judge.
me no dhimmi- We still haven’t heard from Mike (whom I sometimes erroneously refer to as ‘Mark’) exactly what he did and said to get the reaction from the police officer. His statement that he said nothing, and got that action, is, to me, suspect.
I also don’t agree that personal self-defense for storeowners, in this scenario I stress, would be productive. I certainly support it for the local corner store and gas station during regular times. But this event was different. Here, you had a particular weekend event, plus organized thugs with a particular agenda, which had little to do with the G20, which served only as a cover for their regular anti-capitalist violence. After all, they claim, how could they be charged with violence and disturbing the peace when they were..ahh…expressing their right of freedom of expression?
Mike wasn’t at the College and Bay demonstration; he was, we understand now, at the corner of King and University, right in the ‘fence zone’ and Convention Centre area, one block south of the violence on Saturday. That puts him, even on Monday, still in the fragile zone where something else could come up. Furthermore, since he was on his phone, then, spatial distance is not relevant. The police had every right to question him and his claims that his ‘charter rights’ were violated are untenable.
He was behaving as a robot rather than a reasoning person, ignoring context, ignoring the realities of the ongoing demonstrations and the fact that the people who were active in these demonstrations were still in the city.
I think that the term ‘rights’ is flung around too readily. That’s all one hears – of how one’s ‘rights’ have been violated. There are demonstrations against ‘police brutality’ (?) in various cities today. The demonstrators are talking about ‘sexual abuse’ (what???); about ‘violation of rights’ (?); complaining about ‘the hard floors’. These words are flung around without any empirical or logical base; if you ask them to be specific about ‘rights’, they become evasive and more ambiguous.
If you go to a peaceful demonstration, fine. If that demonstration turns violent via other’s actions, then, don’t participate, don’t stay to watch, don’t cheer them on. Leave.
I would suggest a truce and an agreement to disagree, here’s why.
There is probably some merit in both of the main arguments being made (here and throughout the blogosphere, it seems). The Toronto free speech activists may very well have dramatized some problems with the current state of law enforcement attitudes to free assembly and individual liberty. Their critics may equally have a point that their actions were unwise or ill-defined relative to our core concerns.
Further to that, I don’t see either side convincing the other side of the superiority of their position through any amount of debate.
Therefore the only possible outcome of continuing the debate is to split the free speech coalition.
Clearly the two sides will tend to divide along the fault line of their pre-existing beliefs about how effective a champion for freedom and principled conservatism Stephen Harper actually is.
While it doesn’t matter to this argument what my personal view is, I can honestly tell you that I am conflicted about the debate, that I can see merit on both sides and a certain weakness on both sides as well. In basic terms, I don’t think Harper is as bad as some perceive, and I certainly don’t think he is as great a champion as some others do. I tend to see him very much as the proverbial glass half full compromise.
And because I suspect that many others do as well, this debate can only weaken our cause in the long run. I know that the real enemy is on the political left. We need to declare an end to this current controversy, because nothing about it will help us to fight the real enemies of freedom.
Shorter Law-and-order conservatives:
The fact that Shaidle and Brock were harassed and/or roughed up by the police for taking pictures while the cops were standing idly by watching as rioters and vandals were setting up police cars on fire is evidence that the TO police department did an awesome job.
Heckuva a job Chief Blair!
Kathy must have a lot more detractors here than I’ve ever seen, if Mark Steyn can refer to “many of them” as being “rural dwellers.” I visit SDA every day, and read most of the comments. Out of hundreds of different commenters, those who persistently voice their dislike of Kathy in anything resembling an ongoing way number in the single digits. There were a lot of people who disagreed with Kathy’s behaviour wrt the officer and the posting of his badge number, but that was a one-time thing; this site isn’t full of Kathy’s “detractors” by any stretch.
Incidentally, of the tiny number of commenters who have some general animosity to Kathy, the two whose identity I am aware of are urban-dwellers to the nth degree, and are of a libertarian, rather than a law-and-order conservative, bent.
With regard to Mark Steyn’s take on the Mike Brock incident, Steyn seems to believe that police in an uneasy, rolling security situation have magic powers to be able to casually differentiate between an upright citizen and an anarchist with a communications device in his ear: “When you’re…harassing Mike Brock, that’s pretty much a failure of ‘profiling’ by definition, isn’t it?” Well it is in hindsight, but when the police approached Mike Brock he was an unidentifiable individual sitting on Queens Avenue in a black t-shirt talking on a communications device. He then brushed the cops off – excuse me, svp, I’m on the phone – and got yelled at.
Insofar as Mark Steyn was addressing Kate’s and her commenters’ assessment of Mike’s situation (and in the context of the piece he seemed to be) what Mark Steyn failed to notice – and I can’t really fault him for it, because there were an awful lot of comments – was that the faultline in the discussion wasn’t so much between “law and order” types and libertarians but r between those who understand that having a cop raise his voice to you before sending you on your merry way isn’t the same as being kicked around and those – Mike, most notably – who don’t. If he had actually been “kicked around” in the literal sense of the word, the comments here, including my own, would have been entirely different, and in support of Mike, and the distinction Steyn makes between libertarians and the law-and-order types who putatively haunt SDA would evaporate.
My concern has less to do with this incident in G20 Toronto, than the World wide Timidity of Police in Democracies. In the face of Islam or any other Identity political groups. Caledonia in Canada. The several tiers of a legal system. Depending on skin color, race, religion, gender.
Ive had enough of political police. Where is the guy who the community knows is their for them, not a pension.
On the other leg we have to have a coherent body of Law that treats us all the same. For effective policing.
JMO
In my opinion this is why the Police got out of control in Toronto. Than struck back when told they where doing nothing.
I don’t think its so much a rural, urban thing. More like different perceptions predetermined by cultural expectation. Which have grown wide between East & West. Not saying anyone is better, just different reactions to similar situations.
In Edmonton the Police even purposely targeted Kerry Diote & another Reporter.
They where called out & lost bad.
Equal Law for everyone is the fix here. At least as much as humans can.
Never though. Confront police alone unless you want a cracked head.
Those attempting to link this issue to the HRC free speech debate are drawing a false comparison.
At all times, the protesters and others in Toronto have protection and access to the legal system under due process. Those prosecuted under the HRC system don’t, and that’s the fundamental affront to liberty – not the fact that they prosecute speech, per se.
Ella said “I hope you realize that some time ago it was business/land owners in Sicily who tried to do just that, – the result of their decision was …………..mafia.”
the Mafia never really had a presence in North America until prohibition. Here in Hamilton the Mafia already had a toe hold because city hall and the police considered Italians to be not worth protecting. It made it easy for someone else to offer protection to the Italians. Bootlegging changed the mob from a local protection racket to an international crime syndicate. Had the cops done their job and protected the Italian businesses in the first place they wouldn’t have done it themselves or gone elsewhere.
The cops did what they thought they needed to do.
Brock got messed with because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and for no other reason.
Now is Mike Brock were such a brave crusader for individual liberty and such he COULD have played it out as a beligerent arse …. and got the next level of interference in his life from the police.
I don’t blame him for being angry or upset about what happened.
I do see his subsequent behaviour as petualant whining.
Grow up Mike … Grow a pair … suck it up.
BTW … did the police waste their time harassing him? Emphatically yes. But adults understand that the police do not know who or what they are dealing with until AFTER they have engaged that person.
How they engage is a matter of predetermined protocol …. not a personal issue with the fool.
The only thing I’m concerned about over the weekend was how the police allowed the vandals to break the law without intervening decisively.
Upon reading Brock’s reference to the case R. V Mann, one can only conclude that when given the context of the G20 in Toronto, the Police acted appropriately and lawfully.
I can only applaud the restraint the Police showed, considering that what we have seen from Shaidle and Brock in this instance, is but a smattering of the rank and obnoxious behavior the Police had to deal with.
If Brock and Shaidle truly believed their rights were violated, then their blog posts should have documented the formal complaint each had launched, instead of this paranoid, self-righteous indignation!
That guy’s tweets do show hw was following closely what was going on and reporting it. Is that a crime?