Canadian Cincinnatus

The Baltimore Police, Freddie Gray, and the unwritten rules of police work

I used to know a Toronto police sergeant who, on the side, wrote adventure stories. He was a colorful old character and I miss him now that he is gone. One of his recurring themes was the many unauthorized ways that the police employed to get the upper hand on the bad guys.

One of those methods was called ‘deporting’. This was used on a ‘kangaroo’ (a Toronto Police term for bad guy) who needed to be dealt with but who, at the same time, wasn’t doing anything serious enough to bother arresting. In cases like this, what the police did was to drive the ‘roo out to of town into the middle of nowhere, someplace where there was no bus service, and tell him to wait there for the rape squad, who wanted to talk to him. At some point, the perp realized that the rape squad wasn’t coming and he would begin his long walk back home. That walk was his punishment. No courts, no paperwork, and no criminal record. Justice served, quickly, efficiently and cheaply.

This kind of makeshift solution naturally appealed to me. I understand that the Cartesian, hyper-rational society, where every possible contingency has a rule to deal with it, is a fool’s dream. The French Republic attempts to govern itself this way with the end result that everybody goes to Paris to riot whenever anything goes wrong. The Soviet Union, Communist China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia took this ideal to an even further extreme. The results were economic misery and mass murder. The problem is that it is simply impossible to make a rule that governs every possibility. As Hayek correctly pointed out, life is simply too complex. This is where customs, unwritten rules, and ancient traditions come in. An appreciation of the utility of such rules is a fundamental principle of conservativism.

To take an example my Toronto cop friend gave me, suppose you are confronted with a no-goodnik hanging around shop. The merchant wants him gone as he is scaring away the customers. The problem is, he isn’t really doing anything wrong – at least not yet. You could give him a ticket for loitering, but even if he gave you his real name, he has no intention of paying the $35 ticket. The practical solution: you walk up to him and step on his feet. The kangaroo can respond in one of two ways. One, not liking that his feet are being stepped on, he walks away. Two, he takes a swing at you. In this case, you can charge him with assault police. That isn’t a trivial charge and use of force is now justified. Either way, problem solved.

The Baltimore riots got me thinking about this because it seems that the Baltimore Police Department has an unwritten method, analogous to deportation, of their own. It is called a “’rough ride’ — an ‘unsanctioned technique’ in which police vans are driven to cause "injury or pain" to unbuckled, handcuffed detainees, former city police officer Charles J. Key testified as an expert five years ago in a lawsuit.” It seems that a ‘rough ride’ is what caused Freddie Gray’s spinal cord to break, killing him. He was not the first person to be given this treatment:

“Christine Abbott, a 27-year-old assistant librarian at the Johns Hopkins University, is suing city officers in federal court, alleging that she got such a ride in 2012. According to the suit, officers cuffed Abbott's hands behind her back, threw her into a police van, left her unbuckled and ‘maniacally drove’ her to the Northern District police station, ‘tossing [her] around the interior of the police van.’

‘They were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns,’ Abbott said in an interview that mirrored allegations in her lawsuit. ‘I couldn't brace myself. I was terrified.’”

Freddie Gray was not the first person to die from this treatment. According to Baltimore Sun article cited above, there have been a number of successful wrongful death suits brought against the Baltimore Police by the next of kin of people taken for a rough ride.

Indeed, in Saskatchewan, the Saskatoon Police were involved in a scandal where a number of natives froze to death in snowbanks after being deported. In Saskatoon, it was standard practice to dump drunk and disorderly natives out of town. Over there, the practice was called ‘starlight tours’ instead of deporting. The problem was they did this in the dead of winter as well as in more temperate seasons. Saskatchewan winters are very cold and the Indians deported were likely very drunk.

The problem here it seems to me is that some of the more dim-witted police officers don’t realize that, while unwritten rules and methods may be tolerated because they help keep the public peace, they have unwritten conditions attached to them. The principal one being that if anything serious happens to the perp - like when a drunk Indian freezes to death in a snow bank, or an arrestee breaks his neck in the paddy wagon and dies or becomes paralyzed as a result - it is on you. Society will then treat you as if that rule didn’t exist. That is the implicit check and balance in our unwritten code of law. Society is willing to tolerate unorthodox and rough police work, but only up to a point. So be careful.

 

The NRA won because it fought

Every now and then I receive a comment along the lines of, what’s the use, we can’t win, they’re too powerful, Putin can’t be stopped, our leaders are too weak and decadent, the left controls everything, the media is out to get us, etc.

I just stumbled across the best antidote for this breed of defeatism I have yet heard. It is a PJTV video of famed law professor Glenn Reynolds, covering the recent NRA convention in Nashville. The clip is short, only 2 minutes long, but it packs a punch. Here is a partial transcript for those who don’t have time to watch the whole thing:

“The real reason they’re happy is because they’re winning. It hadn’t always been that way.

 I have been writing about gun rights for 20 years and 20 years ago people weren’t winning. And they weren’t happy. 20 years ago, the media was all against people interested in gun rights, they were losing battles and there was a real temptation to hunker down and to see how long you could hold out. Instead, they fought back. They won. …

The reason why they are winning is simple: it’s because they fought. You can’t win without fighting and they fought. They fought everywhere, they didn’t give up, they made arguments year after year, they campaigned in elections, when all they could get was half of what they wanted, they took it and went for the rest later. They fought and they won.

That’s a lesson for people in other parts of the conservative and libertarian movement. … I think gun right is a real model of what you can do if you are just willing to fight. … If you don’t show up, you don’t win. If you want to win, you better show up and you better fight. That’s the lesson here from the NRA convention.”

In Canada, in the early 1990’s, the odds against gun owners were even worse. The first round of gun laws were passed by the Progressive Conservative Party and Canada’s then-Justice Minister (and future Prime Minister), Kim Campbell. We were in a real pickle, because the closest thing that Canadian gun owners had to a political ally - the Progressive Conservatives - had just declared total war on us. We had no allies and we were under assault on all sides, including by a uniformly hostile media. But we had one advantage. We were on Death’s Ground. We had no choice but to fight - no matter what. And we did. And we won.

To see how hard the road facing us back then was, consider this: our first order of business was to destroy the ruling Progressive Conservative Party. And we did that. Gun owners were the shock troops of the newly formed Reform Party, which led to vote-splitting in the 1993 federal election. This was followed by 10 years of Liberal dominance – and even more draconian gun laws. But in the fullness of time, we defeated them too. And the newly reconstituted Conservative Party that replaced them proved to be friendly to us – because we were involved, from the get-go, in reconstituting the party. As a result, the long-gun registry has been repealed and significant deregulation of current gun laws are in the works. So don’t tell me it can’t be done. If scattered and disorganized and politically inexperienced Canadian gun owners could do it in the early 90’s, so can you today.

So here is my message to pessimistic, defeatist conservatives: Go Away. Far away. Your weakness and fecklessness means you won’t accomplish much good even if you stay, and your cowardice might spread to others. Fear is contagious.

Instead, go join the Liberal Party. I’m sure you will do some good for our side over there.

Stephen Harper should play the anti-American card over the Keystone XL pipeline

With a federal election coming up later this year, Stephen Harper’s electoral strategy is now coming into focus. He intends on emphasizing a series of wedge issues designed to separate his principal opponent from the Canadian voters, or to strengthen his bond with conservative voters. In the latter category has been Bill C-42 – designed to deregulate gun ownership, as well as Harper’s comments on the need of rural people for guns to defend themselves. Another has been the building of the Victims of Communism memorial in Ottawa, which has elicited shrieks of outrage from the Ottawa intelligentsia (as well as specious excuses from the Liberals). Again, the politics behind this effort is designed to separate voters of Polish, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European extraction from the Liberal Party (and for that matter non-European refugees of communism such as the Cambodians).

As I have said a number of times before (here and here), an excellent wedge issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, whose Congressional approval President Obama has recently vetoed. Traditionally, the Conservatives have been seen in Canada as the pro-American party due to the Conservative’s ideological sympathy with the American system of government. The Liberals have used this perception to insinuate Conservative disloyalty to Canada. With Keystone XL, the roles are reversed. Harper can play the anti-American card against the Liberals who are forced, by their ties to environmentalism, to oppose a project that is indisputably good for the Canadian economy. So far so good.

What Stephen Harper hasn’t done but what he needs to do is to call President Obama out personally, accuse him anti-Canadianism in his opposition to Keystone XL. As Obama is an icon of the Canadian left, Trudeau will have two forces pulling him in the opposite direction – environmentalism and Obamaism. At that point, Harper – and/or his attack ads - need to ask in public whether Trudeau is capable of standing up for the Canadian economy, or whether his allegiances to left-wing ideology and foreign leaders disqualifies him from doing that.

Done right it is will be effective, and leave the Liberals sputtering and speechless. They have never been accused of being too pro-American before.

How much are all his military exercises costing Vladimir Putin?

One of the themes in my writings is that dictatorships are weaker than they appear on the surface (the reverse - that democracies are stronger than they appear – is also true).

For instance, some people – some even conservatives! – view Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as some kind of a Nietzschean superman who is so competent and capable that it is futile to resist his will. A related view - often held by these same people - is that the Western democracies are too decadent, weak, and corrupt to defend themselves - as evinced by weak, stupid and/or incompetent leaders like, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, and Obama. Both opinions are of course wrong, even when they are not bleeding into cowardice. The simple fact is that Western democracies seem weaker than they really are, and despotisms seem stronger than they really are, because we air our dirty laundry out in public and the dictators hide it. Even if the above appraisal of world leaders is completely accurate, I will bet on the strong institutions over the strong individuals any day.

In line with this, it should be remembered that the Russian economy is a one-note song and took a terrific hit with the collapse in oil prices. Since the Crimean takeover, Russia suffered a net migration of million people out of the country! With this backdrop, and in addition to his ongoing adventures in the Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been conducting ongoing military exercises at an aggressive pace. For instance, upon returning from his mysterious 10-day absence, he abruptly announced a full-scale military exercise.

In light of this, I wonder how much is all of this costing him. Most people do not realize that a significant part of the cost of running an army is operating those expensive modern weapon systems. They may be expensive to buy, but so is running them. Those Tupolev Bear bombers that Russia has been flying alongside everybody’s borders (propeller-driven aircraft designed by German POW’s after the war, I might add), don’t fly themselves. This is why most of the Russian Air Force and Navy was idle throughout most of the 90’s and early 2000’s. They couldn’t afford to operate the ships and planes. With the price of oil coming back down to earth, all of this activity must be imposing a terrific strain on the Russian state – a strain that the Kremlin is able to, for now, hide behind a wall of slick propaganda.

If the West had a real leader, he’d understand that this show of force is really an indication of weakness not a sign of strength. And he’d push back hard.