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| NEWS > 07 November 2006 |
Other related articles:
'He was just doing his job'
THE father of a detective accused of bashing a suspect with a phone says police bosses are to blame for the Armed Offenders Squad scandal.
In a sensational open letter to Premier Steve Bracks, former Det-Insp Bryan Dabb claims well-intentioned officers are being overworked to exhaustion in a dysfunctional force.
Now a few over-eager officers are being "hung out to dry" through the Office of Police Integrity public hearings into alleged bashings in order to cover up wider issues, he writes.
Officers and their families have been subjected to Orwellian-style phone tap... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Gateway.ualberta.ca - Edmonton
07 November 2006
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Editorial: A picture of police
Krystina Sulatycki
You’ve seen the photos: a young woman, handcuffed, receiving a “head stun,” and then being pushed to the ground by a cop. The series of images is shocking and, one would assume, incriminating. However, the Crown prosecutor’s office says the police officer in question should not be charged. According to the 2 November edition of the Edmonton Journal, “Chief Calgary prosecutor Gordon Wong said a review of the case determined that there was not a reasonable likelihood of a conviction that the use of force was excessive.” Ultimately the decision to press criminal charges lies with police Chief Michael Boyd.
The woman’s lawyer was also quoted as saying that “the pictures speak for themselves. What’s going on here is a stretch to avoid charging police officers. ... My concern is that we are sending a message to our police department that if someone, verbally, without being aggressive, is being impolite, then police have an open ticket to get violent with that individual.”
We don’t know exactly what happened before the photos were taken or who said what to whom. There are, however, two things we do know: that the woman in question sustained soft tissue injuries, a concussion and broken teeth, among other injuries; and that the events depicted in the photographs actually occurred. But the point should not be that we have a picture of a woman being hit. The point should be that the cop in question was using excessive force—an issue that’s come up several times in the past as well.
Take, for instance, the Canada Day riots of 2001. With so much vandalism and so few arrests, police went to the media asking them to publish pictures of suspects, apparently in hopes that public shaming would make their jobs easier. They all refused, though EPS did end up posting pictures on their website.
Photos can be deceiving. They can be taken at such an angle as to obscure a detail or deceive the viewer as to the subject’s intent. The angle may be unusual or the perspective skewed. A sequence of photographs allows us to interpolate a sequence of events with relative certainty. It’s therefore difficult to argue with a sequence of images that are taken in such a fashion as to show, without distortion, the events that came to pass.
Naturally there are other questions that arise. What if the pictures had never been taken? Would we still be discussing this case? And where does this leave photographers and the media—are we slowly going to become their eyes and ears on the streets?
There’s a major disconnect taking place here. With the Whyte Avenue riots, we saw press photos being used in an attempt to find wrongdoers from images in which it may or may not be clear what exactly the individuals are doing. With the more recent incident, Chief Crown prosecutor Wong is saying that “the photographs do not tell the entire story of that night. They only give us a few split seconds of what occurred between the police officer and the lady.”
It is human nature to protect our own, but police have to be accountable to the public as well as themselves. The EPS lists as its core values: integrity, accountability and respect, and for them to be selective as to when they rely on photographic evidence is hypocritical at best.
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