Please, be Quiet
Opaque is an idiot.
Worse, he's irresponsible and dangerous.
Worse, he's the province's top cop.
The man says on the radio that the police make too many mistakes.
He says this, of course, in a knee-jerk defense of the courts.
It is no accident that most of the citizens of this sovereign state have lost all confidence in our courts.
Today, three cases illustrate.
In two of the, Hell's Angels have been acquitted of various criminal charges. Oops.
In another, a man fired eight shots at his mother, striking her with three, killed her, then buried her in the woods nearby.
Sentence? Four years.
So, in a time when the police need more support, not less, our top cop babbles shamelessly on the airwaves that the police make too many mistakes.
No doubt the police, like you and me, make their share of mistakes.
No doubt their mistakes are costlier than most of our failures to put the top back on the marmalade jar.
But their mistakes pale to insignificance compared to the atrocities doled out by our courts on a daily basis. Criminal justice is but a ghost in this town these days and most of us feel it viscerally.
Opaque is a shame.
3 comments:
Notwithstanding a some headline stories where police officers should have proceeded differently (i.e. a big mistake was made), I support our police and understand when and where various "mistakes" can occur.
It is a difficult job having to deal with the entire public on a front line basis. Police deal with the general public and especially victims of crimes, people who commit crimes, people in crisis, and people who have varying degrees of mental illness.
They don't have a team of legal staff, legal assistants/secretaries, volumes of documents and guidelines and the blessed luxury of TIME to ponder over their work like the courts do.
They have assess, make a professional decision and act immediately with every interaction they are faced with.
It's really easy for a lawyer to go over a police officers "mistakes" with a fine tooth comb.
It's not so easy to do the job of a police officer.
More respect should be shown to the police (especially from our so-called "top cop").
Linda Yuill
It seems every previously thought of decent person turns into a half-wit when elected as a BC Liberal.
Shame on Opal, shame on the Liberals and shame on us for electing them!
I think we have reached the point where police officers are going to have to have a constitutional lawyer riding in the back of the police car.
The lawyer can advise them of every bit of legalese that they might encounter during the arrest and the following trial( if it even proceeds to trial).
It is extremely inappropriate for an Attorney General to take swipes at an entire profession when an officer is simply saying that many of his fellow officers are frustrated with court proceedings.
I'm a member of the public who is frustrated as well.
By the way, the newspaper article about this said that most mistakes made were due to the increasing complexities of search warrants. In other words,legalese.
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