Three members of Vancouver's Finest spoiled my coffee.

The BBQ Pit
1

No, I didn’t run afoul of the law, or anything like that-- I just overheard a conversation in the squalid little coffee shop near Joyce Station which left a bitter taste in my mouth.

These officers of the law were commiserating about how things had changed for the worse since the “old days.”

I set down my book as soon as they came in, not out of a desire to eavesdrop, but because they sat down at a table inches away from me, and it was impossible to concentrate on anything else.

As they sat down, one of them was saying, “You know things are gong to go to hell as soon as you have the Law Degrees coming into the department. The Blue Li-- the Thin Blue line disappears, the respect disappears, and everybody wants to rat on each other to get ahead.” Well, I thought, it might prove to be more interesting than Exiles, anyway.

Then the second cop speaks up. (and this is verbatim, mind, not a paraphrase-- it made enough of an impression that I made an effort to remember it.) “It used to be that you took someone down to Stanley Park, you boot him in the ass, kick him in the head, whatever, you let them walk home, and that was the end of it. Now everybody wants to fight, and if they lose, they make a big deal of it.” (Here’s a link to the “Big Deal” for anyone who needs one.)

What the fuck? It’s one thing to know that six bad cops got disciplined for making a habit of committing felonious assaults on members of the public, but it’s another thing altogether to know that there are at least three more who view such behaviour as perfectly natural, to the point where they loudly lament about the prosecution of the crimes while they are in public, in uniform.

I gulped my coffee, and couldn’t help giving them the evil eye as I edged past them towards the door. I briefly considered commenting on their cavalier attititude toward beating the tar out of people, but then I remembered their cavalier attitude toward beating the tar out of people, and adjusted my behaviour as I would for any other trio of dangerous thugs.

What a PR coup for the VPD these fucking backsliding knuckledraggers pulled off.

2

A couple of gems that I forgot to include:

“People used to know how to take their lumps.”

“They’d go ‘Yeah, you win,’ lie down, and take the humilation.”

“Where’s all this fucking attitude coming from?”

3

Yuck.

I’ve posted about this before, but I once witnessed one of “Vancouver’s finest” threaten a friend of mine (a fifteen-year-old gay guy) with a “starlight drive” for having the temerity to cruise his partner. I’m sad to hear that things haven’t changed much.

It’s this kind of behaviour that makes people lose faith in their police departments.

4

Larry, perhaps you noticed their names or the numbers on their squad cars? You could call and report them to Internal Affairs or whoever.

5

Larry, one can only hope that these cretins are older members of the force, and that the rest of us will be able to outlast them.

Locally, over the last couple of years we had a pair of defendants who’d each spent close to 25 years in jail for first degree murder released when it was finally determined that some of the ‘evidence’ and testimony had been fabricated by one of the lead police officers. (Obviously, after 25 years, a new trial was out of the question, and so both had to be released. I don’t question that, nor do I disagree with it: when cops screw up like that, there is no choice but to protect the rights of the accused. I may have personal opinions that the two were likely guilty of what they were accused of, but that’s neither here nor there.)

What burned me about this was that the daughter of the officer in question spent a good deal of time and effort trying to say that what her (now deceased) father had done was proper, and he was a ‘good cop.’ Until EVERYONE accepts that police have to be held to very high standards we’re stuck with a mess that scares anyone with a brain. Before anyone starts drawing conclusions, I’m not expecting policemen to be saints, or to be error-proof. Just that they don’t condone ‘stacking the deck’ for the good of society. Or worse, in favor of their own arrest/conviction rate.

6

Yeah, right. Me I’d advise against filing a complaint against a couple of cops having a conversation. That’s just my opinion.

7

Yeah I’d agree with County here, a complaint will do nothing to help anyone in this case.

I’ve been front row, center to many a police misconduct, unfortunately, forever making me suspicious and critical of all police offers. Which sucks. I feel worried around them, and I feel bad that I think so negatively of them, when I know it’s only the minority that are scum.

I’ve had cops threaten to beat me up for sitting in a public park with two of my friends playing guitar. I’ve had cops threaten my 35 year old mother to “shut the fuck up if she knows what’s good for her” after she asked to have the driver that hit her car take a sobriety test (he was obviously drunk). The guy, drunk driver was, of course, a cop.

I’ve seen 3 cops take pleasure at beating up a homeless man for no reason whatsoever. They just felt like assaulting him (I was in the squad car at the time because I happened to stop to say hi to a friend who happenned to have a a small amount of weed in his jacket (I don’t stop to say hi to him anymore :wink: ).

Add to that the experiences my friends and family have had with them, what I read and see from the news and it’s no wonder the way I feel about them.

8

That’s why I said IA, not the actual squadron. And you should be able to do this anonymously.

9

No, but a call to the local newspaper might help to fuel the fires a bit.

Although, having lived in Vancouver for over two years, i’m also aware of the awful quality of what passes for journalism at the two local papers (Sun and Province).

10

I think you’re kind of missing the point of what the cops were saying.

Time was, people got into a scrap with the cops cause they were drunk they got their bell rung and more likely than not got sent home. Now, people want to shoot when drunk, or carry on about being “disrespected” when they usually started the problem to being wit. When they get their asses handed to them, the cops have to arrest them because sure as hell there’s going to be a lawsuit or a complaint.

We used to live in a less litigious society, that’s a fact. Policing used to be more about keeping the community safe and less about paperwork. That’s a fact too.
Hard to blame cops who remember those times for commiserating about it.

None of this is to excuse truly dirty cops etc, but I’ve worked with many good cops for years. Different communities have different types of policing. Trying to fit them all into one mold as if every place were anal retentive whitey-land is silly and a waste of time. And it doesn’t work. Nonetheless that’s what we’re trying to do.

So no, I can’t really blame cops for being frsutrated.

Regards,
-Bouncer-

11

In this case it wasn’t a matter of someone getting some deserved lumps for taking a swing at a cop. This was a case of the cops taking some “undesirbable elements” off into the woods and beating the snot out of them. It wasn’t an isolated incident, just in this case, a rookie cop blew the whistle.

12

No one is complaining about arrests. No one’s complaining about licks received “resisting arrest.” People are complaining about beatings. Brutal beatings.

Now, the folks that they beat the hell out of weren’t saints by anyone’s reckoning- but they received a beating that night despite the cops’ having nothing for which they could be legally arrested. Not possession, not trafficking, hell, not even loitering. They were just there and “suspected.” Many reports of this incident talk of them being “in breach of the peace.” This conjures images of them creating a disturbance. Maybe fighting in the street, something, right?

In Vancouver, being “in breach of the peace” very often means nothing more than a cop doesn’t like your looks. This is because the cops can take your for a ride and dump you somewhere else at their discretion, if they determine that you’re in breach of the peace. There are no guidelines for this determination, and there is no paperwork required to document it. VPD Chief Jamie Graham explains the concept behind it:

Fine, if you trust the cops’ discretion. Myself, I don’t, but that’s only because I’ve been “in breach of the peace” myself. Let me tell you about it: I was going to see a film at the Pacific Cinémathèque on Howe Street with a friend. This meant walking North from the SkyTrain station on Granville. We walked a couple of blocks, and as we approached Georgia St, we were both slammed up against a wall by three cops. “You’re interfering with a police investigation!” they said. “What?” “You’re in breach of the peace!” “What?” “Come with us.” “What?” We were held there for a bit, (No requests for ID were made,) and a van showed up shortly which we were obliged to get into.

You probably think I’m conveniently leaving out some little detail, like having been stumbling around pissed drunk, or harrassing the cops, or someone making a nuisance of ourselves. I want to emphasize that you couldn’t possibly hope to meet two quieter people. We were walking North, just like any number of other folks were that night. Whatever “police investigation” we were supposedly interfering with by (gasp!) walking North on Granville Street in order to get to a theatre, it evidently wasn’t very important, since all the visible cops were concerned with loading us into a van and dropping us off in the West End, near Stanley Park.

I was confused more than anything by the whole thing, and spent quite a bit of time puzzling over just what the hell happened that night, apart from us missing our movie and generally having our night wrecked. In retrospect, I think our offense was “looking gay.” Okay, to be fair, I “looked gay.” (I’m not.) My friend just looked like a hippie. He is gay, for what it’s worth, and probably “looked gayer” standing next to me.

Nowhere near as bad as being taken somewhere against your will and beaten senseless, of course, but still an abuse of power. Police should not be able to fuck with people to that degree without some accountability/documentation.

Anyway… I agree with county about the idea of reporting cops for having a conversation on their break, even if it was an offensive one. If any of them had spoke in specific terms about crimes that they had committed, instead of a general “Aw, you should be able to put the boots to people, and dump them in the park without some smartass educated cop making things hot for you,” then that would be something else again.