Tag Archives: police

10 disturbing scandals that have rocked the RCMP in 2016

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson features prominently in several of the Mounties' largest scandals this year. (Image credit: RCMP)

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson features prominently in several of the Mounties’ largest scandals this year. (Image credit: RCMP)

The RCMP has been rocked this week by two major (unrelated) scandals which have once again called into question the organization’s willingness to abide by the law, respect the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and provide a workplace free of harassment.

The week of ignominious revelations was a low point for the Mounties in what is already a scandal-plagued year. Lately, it seems that every month features disclosures of misbehaviour, law-breaking, or worse by the RCMP.

Here’s an in-no-particular-order roundup of the ten biggest scandals facing the force so far in 2016: Continue Reading

B.C. terror trial suspended indefinitely after CSIS refuses to discuss their involvement in plot

Image description: A beaming John Nuttall, with shoulder-length hair and unkempt beard, sits in the passenger seat of a car. Directly behind him is Amanda Korody, wearing a black headscarf; Korody is grinning and has a cigarette in her mouth. (Image credit: RCMP surveillance photo)

The trial of Canada Day bombers John Nuttall and Amanda Korody has been indefinitely suspended after CSIS once again refused to turn over documents relating to their involvement in the plot.

Specific details on the reasons for the delay seem to be subject to a publication ban, as much of the past several weeks of the trial have been. But what is clear is that Canada’s spy agency is committed to doing everything in its power to keep its role in the affair under wraps. After weeks of efforts by the defence and the judge to compel CSIS to disclose any documentation they may have relating to an alleged human source of theirs, whom Nuttall says radicalized him and repeatedly urged him to commit violence in the name of Islam, the spy agency continues to stonewall. Continue Reading

CityNews engaged in reckless journalism by pushing pro-carding police propaganda

Image: A Toronto police car. (Image credit: Wikimedia/Raysonho)

This past weekend, there was a late-night shooting in Toronto’s Chinatown neighbourhood. Two people are dead and three injured; the shooter remains at large. It was the latest shooting in what was an unusually violent January for Toronto.

In this post, I’m not going to be looking at the shooting in much detail. Instead, I’d like to look at the way that one specific media organization has responded to it – by using irresponsible and unfounded remarks by the president of the Toronto Police Association to draw in traffic and stir up a false controversy. Continue Reading

Body cameras, TPS’s biggest response Sammy Yatim shooting, wouldn’t have prevented his death

Image description: A close-up shot of a Toronto police officer, from chin to mid-torso. Attached to their uniform just below the shoulder is a small black camera with a forward-facing screen. (Image credit: TPS)

Image description: A close-up shot of a side-facing Toronto police officer, from chin to mid-torso. Attached to their uniform just below the shoulder is a small black camera with a forward-facing screen. (Image credit: TPS)

As you’ve no doubt heard if you live in Toronto, James Forcillo, the cop who shot and killed Sammy Yatim on a streetcar in 2013, was found guilty this week – not of murder, but of attempted murder.

It’s a sad but true fact that no cop has ever been convicted of murder in Ontario, and many legal observers expected that, given the legal system’s built-in lenience towards killers in uniforms, Forcillo was likely to get off scot-free. It’s better than nothing, a lot of folks are saying. At least he was found guilty of something.

While I see where this argument is coming from, it feels defeatist to me. It feels like it gives up too easily, resigns itself to a certain level of police brutality and impunity.

James Forcillo murdered Sammy Yatim. He had a vast variety of options at his disposal short of shooting and killing the disturbed teenager, and he tried literally none of them. Sammy Yatim’s death was tragic, senseless, entirely unnecessary. In finding Forcillo not guilty on a charge of second-degree murder, the jury was essentially saying that his actions were justifiable. That this is possible, that we aren’t able to legally hold police to higher standards than the general population, is a travesty.

As for the precedent this trial sets, it’s hard to say. Police union president Mike McCormack is convinced that it will have a chilling effect on officers, will make them more hesitant to act in volatile situation, will make us all less safe. There’s a lot of bullshit in the way he’s spinning that, but maybe it’s true that cops will feel slightly less trigger-happy knowing that they may actually face (gasp!) consequences.

To date, the most significant consequence of the Yatim shooting is the implementation of a few key recommendations made by an inquiry into his death by Frank Iacobucci, a retired Supreme Court justice. One of these recommendations was the use of body cameras by frontline Toronto police officers, and a pilot program was launched last May.

In this article, I argued that body cameras are a solution in search of a problem (in that we don’t lack for footage of abusive cops, taken by civilians or surveillance cameras or dash cameras), that they are problematic and prone to abuse, and that body cameras do literally nothing to address the actual root causes of police brutality. Continue Reading

What was CSIS’s role in radicalizing two B.C. bombers? We’ll soon find out

Image: an undated low-resolution surveillance photo of John Nuttall in the passenger seat of a car, with his common-law wife Amanda Korody in the back seat behind him. (Image credit: RCMP)

B.C. Superior Court Justice Catherine Bruce’s release of a heavily redacted transcript of last week’s secret in camera session in the ongoing trial of convicted terrorists John Nuttall and Amanda Korody didn’t shed a lot of light on what went on behind those closed doors. But it did clarify a few points which have up until now been obscure.

And with Bruce’s subsequent decision that CSIS be compelled to turn over any records they have relating to an alleged source of theirs means that we may soon know quite a bit more.

The transcript’s release came after a legal challenge was mounted by a coalition of media organizations, which I wrote about last week. (You can view the transcript online; here is the opening portion of the hearing, and here is the (much lengthier and much more heavily redacted) in-camera portion.)

We now know that the extraordinary in camera hearing, extremely unusual in the Canadian judicial system, focussed on requests from the defence for the disclosure of any records CSIS may have related to a certain [Redacted] X. Continue Reading

In massive disappointment, Bill Blair selected to lead government’s marijuana legalization initiative

My initial reaction to Justin Trudeau’s announcement of the composition of his cabinet last November was profound relief at the omission of former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair.

Long-time readers of The Alfalfafield will know that I’m no fan of Blair. And after watching Trudeau’s Liberal Party do some heavy lifting to get their preferred candidates selected in their supposedly “open” nomination contests prior to the election, including having Trudeau publicly appear with Blair at a joint press conference in Ottawa long before he was selected as a candidate by his local riding association, I was concerned that a Liberal government would elevate the criminal and racist ex-cop to a prominent post in a ministry like Public Safety or even Defence. (He was selected for the seemingly low-profile position of Parliamentary Secretary for Minister of Justice Judy Wilson-Raybould.)

My relief that the rookie MP and veteran abuser of rights would be largely relegated to the back-benches was, sadly, short-lived. Yesterday, the CBC reported that Blair has been tapped by Trudeau to be the point person for the Liberals’ efforts to legalize marijuana.

For folks who have tirelessly advocated for legalization over the past several years and decades, this has to be a disappointing choice.

It seems to indicate that the government’s foremost priority is placating conservative critics of their push for legalization. By deploying a former police officer, they undermine claims that they’re being “soft on crime”, to be sure – but they’re also putting arguments about law and order, and about public safety, at the forefront of their effort.

Just look at these glowing quotes the CBC got about Blair’s selection: Continue Reading

Fallacy Friday: Acknowledging police racism endangers cops, says RCMP officers’ association

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson was criticized for acknowledging that there are racists officers in his police force. (Image credit: RCMP)

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson was criticized for acknowledging that there are racists officers in his police force. (Image credit: RCMP)

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains graphic descriptions of police brutality, violence (including sexual violence), and institutional racism.

Early last month, RCMP Commission Bob Paulson (no, not that Robert Paulson!), speaking to a gathering of First Nations chiefs, made a somewhat surprising admission. Continue Reading

RCMP chief’s illogical, incoherent arguments for eroding online privacy printed unchallenged by Canadian Press

RCMP chief Bob Paulson wants your private information (Image credit: RCMP)

RCMP chief Bob Paulson wants your private information (Image credit: RCMP)

RCMP Chief Bob Paulson (no, not that Robert Paulson!), apparently unsatisfied with the massive increase in powers the Mounties received under C-51, spoke Wednesday on the force’s “need” to access people’s Internet subscriber information without a warrant, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling barring the police from doing exactly that.

I wrote in September about the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs’ identical demand, issued in conjunction with demands to allow them to search the mail and seize people’s phone numbers without warrants, part of a troubling trend among law enforcement agencies of ceaselessly asking for more and more powers.

Paulson, speaking before a panel at Securetech, a trade show put on by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, put on a master-class in fallacious argumentation, which the Canadian Press was only too happy to stenographically regurgitate into newspapers across the country.

I’d like to take a look at some of Paulson’s more preposterous points, starting with this little gem of a false analogy:

“I’m all for warrantless access to subscriber info,” Paulson told a security conference in Ottawa, comparing the process to his beat-cop days of entering licence-plate data into a computer and coming up with a vehicle owner’s name.

“If I had to get a judge on the phone every time I wanted to run a licence plate when I was doing my policing, there wouldn’t have been much policing getting done.”

The level of sheer stupidity which forms the foundation of this argument is unbelievable.  Continue Reading

Fact-free arguments: how the case against refugees reveals widespread implicit racism

At this point, it’s a well-established and impartial fact that the attacks on Paris were committed by Europeans, and that not one of the attackers was a refugee.

In fact, the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled to Europe (and the millions more in Turkey, Lebanon, and other Middle Eastern nations) left their homes largely because of type of indiscriminate and contemptible violence which was visited upon Parisians last Friday night had become intolerably (and dangerously) commonplace in their cities and towns [CW: graphic images].

These are plain and simple facts. And you won’t hear them referred to – or even acknowledged – by opponents of an increase in the number of refugees taken in by this country.

In fact, on the contrary, what you’ll hear is a lot of subtle (and some not-so-subtle) suggestions that the refugees and the terrorists are in some ways indistinguishable, and that to accept the former is to also accept the latter.

Some of this discussion is openly reprehensible. New Jersey Governor and struggling Presidential candidate Chris Christie’s desperate-for-a-headline statement that not even orphan refugees should be allowed into the United States is a stand-out of the genre, as is the increasingly-terrifying Donald Trump’s musing that Syrian refugees may be a terrorist Trojan horse, and that as President he would create a national database to register all American Muslims (a stand he has since backed away from).

Statements like these, and the hate-filled crimes that go along with them, are, as I said the other day, the easy shit to spot and condemn and call out.

But a lot of the time, the anti-refugee animus is a lot more subtle.

Consider, for instance, this lead paragraph in an Ottawa Citizen article from a few days back: Continue Reading

Update on the ongoing Nuttall-Korody trial

Image description: A courtroom sketch of Amanda Korody and John Nuttall (Felicity Don/The Canadian Press)

As regular readers of The Alfalfafield will know, I’ve been closely following the ongoing trial of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, two now-convicted terrorists who contend that they were entrapped into a plot by their handlers in the RCMP.

The pair were poor ex-heroin addicts living on welfare who had recently converted to Islam when Nuttall encountered an undercover CSIS agent provocateur at his local mosque. Alarmed at the agent’s extreme behaviour, Nuttall reported him to the authorities – ironically, to CSIS itself. It’s unclear how this initial contact with law enforcement metastasized into a massive undercover RCMP operation, but Nuttall’s attorney, Marilyn Sandford insists that the two agencies cooperated, as they are empowered to do under the RCMP’s INSET program.

Unfortunately, no court can compel CSIS to turn over any documentation it may have on the matter, and Sandford suggests that CSIS may have deliberately avoided sharing anything in writing with the Mounties in order to avoid the court disclosure process.

Regardless, Nuttall and his partner soon found themselves entangled in an elaborate plot. Upon meeting somebody who presented himself as a jihadist, Nuttall boastfully claimed that he was plotting a terrorist attack. The only problem for the Mounties was that he was entirely incapable of formulating or executing any kind of feasible plan.

His early schemes involved building a missile and launching it at Seattle (which he mistakenly believed was a mere thirty kilometres away from Vancouver) and hijacking a nuclear submarine. As far as I’ve been able to figure from the media reporting on the trial, neither Nuttall nor Korody had invested any time or effort into pursuing any kind of plot prior to their being contacted by undercover RCMP officers.

Indeed, even after their handler (and an ever-growing web of extras) got them to agree to engage in a plot, he found it extremely difficult to even get them to put down the bong, turn off their video games, and leave their dingy basement apartment. Continue Reading

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