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“Politicized Canadian Police”
Richard Cowan, MarijuanaNews.com

Richard Cowan is a member of the Advisory Board of the Drug Policy Foundation, Senior Policy Advisor to NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), and Editor and Publisher of marijuananews.com

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Recently on Pot-TV I talked about how Canadian narks work with DEAland to undermine the sovereignty of Canada and the freedom of the Canadian people.

When I started doing research for the program, I was actually surprised by how much material I had to document the problem.

One of the problems is the misdirection of police resources when cannabis prohibition takes precedence over protecting the public.

Canadian police are far less politicized than their counterparts to the south. The major reason is that Canadian police officials are appointed, not elected. However, this does not mean that the Canadian police do not have a political agenda that seeks to maintain their power, as is typical of government agencies.

Unfortunately, unlike most other government agencies’ self-serving propaganda, claims by the police are often accepted uncritically by the media. This is a dangerous mistake.

One of the absurdities of this process is that we have police with minimal educations pretending to be authorities on medicine, and even international relations.

Obviously that does not mean that the police are the only prohibitionists, or that all police are prohibitionist. In fact, I think that honest cops are badly hurt by cannabis prohibition and many realize that fact, but cannot speak out for fear of hurting their careers.

Even members of “the Establishment” recognize this problem.

On the subject of misdirected police resources, consider this excerpt from an August 2, 2001 Vancouver Sun article by Karen Selick who is a lawyer and writer in Bloomfield, Ont. She is a regular columnist for Canadian Lawyer magazine from which this column was reprinted.

Excerpt:

“Police focus on vice leaves victims of real crime on their own

In fact, a Toronto lawyer recently told me that he had arrived at work one day to find two bullet holes in the glass door to his office. He called the police, but was told that they wouldn't send an officer to investigate. This sort of thing "happens all the time," the officer said on the phone.

Another friend told me he'd been the victim of identity theft, probably an inside job by someone working at his bank. Among other things, there was a withdrawal of $16,000 from his line of credit. When he called police, he was told they don't investigate frauds against individuals if they're under $250,000 or, for businesses, under $1 million.

These troubling anecdotes are corroborated by statistics. A 1997 study by Statistics Canada revealed that only 24 per cent of property crimes are ever cleared by police. For breaking and entering, the rate is 15 per cent.

We get another hint in a case where a pair of undercover policemen attended a Marilyn Manson concert dressed like rock fans, in white face makeup and black wigs. They cajoled and intimidated a 14-year-old boy into parting with $10 worth of marijuana -- a third of the stash he intended to smoke himself. An appeal court eventually threw out the boy's drug trafficking conviction due to police entrapment. Meanwhile, not only had the police wasted a lot of manpower engineering this silly episode, but someone in the Crown prosecutor's office also thought this boy's dastardly deed worth some prosecutorial resources.

Police argue that these vices are increasingly controlled by organized crime, leading ultimately to violence and murder. Therefore, the logic goes, we must pursue petty vices in order to prevent deaths. But don't tell that to the cops or law-and-order politicians. They demand ever-increasing funding, and ever-increasing powers, to deal with problems they actually help to create. They're willing to risk transforming the country into a police state, apparently for our own good. Have they never pondered the fact that urine tests conducted in prisons invariably show that even in those microcosms of the ultimate police state, there's always a good percentage of the population that manages to get stoned?”

In August of 2001, Eye Magazine carried an article by John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto:

Excerpted from DON'T LET THE POLICE FOOL YOU ABOUT CRIME STATS :

Next time you hear the argument that Toronto needs a larger police force, recall the data the police themselves publish about what they do. It's surprising and sometimes hard to believe, but apparently true.

On average, a police officer in Toronto arrests nine people a year -- about one person every six weeks. Most people assume that most officers are involved in work of significant danger, struggling to subdue and arrest criminals on a daily basis. It's not true.

The number of people the police arrested for criminal offences in 2000 was 47,771. There were 5,372 uniformed officers on the force. That's the math that produces nine arrests per officer per year. For every cop who arrests one person a week for the year, there are four who don't arrest anyone.

This ( and other ) data is found in the 2001 Environmental Scan released by the Toronto Police in May. The report also notes that the number of people being arrested is slowly falling -- it has fallen 10 per cent since 1996, even though Toronto's population has increased by more than 100,000.

Crime is often measured by the number of charges laid, but that depends on two things. First, incidents that could be crimes must be reported to the police, and it is well established that many incidents never come to police attention. Some women are unwilling to report sexual assault, some murders aren't reported, some thefts are considered too minor to report. Victimization studies show that there are many more victims than crimes.

Secondly, incidents become crimes only when police lay charges, and that's another story. Some criminologists think police have decided to lay a lot more charges against youth than in the past, hence the "rise" in violent youth crime. Also, police usually lay more than one charge for any one incident. Last year 195,000 charges were laid, an average of four charges against every person arrested in Toronto….

Every person arrested for a single drug incident can expect to face about three charges.

Charging someone with multiple crimes for the same incident might help the police obtain a conviction, but it makes it difficult to tell whether crime is on the rise or not. Is violent crime in Toronto increasing, or are the police just laying more charges for violent crimes against those arrested? We don't know.

We do know that almost everyone who gets arrested is strip-searched, although that's not reported in this police document. As some criminologists say, this kind of intimidation ( none of those arrested have yet been found guilty of anything ) is police acting as though they are the justice system, rather than a small part of it.

Less than 20 per cent of charges laid are categorized by the police as "violent crimes." Of those, more than half are simple assaults where no serious harm is done -- such as two guys fighting in a bar after drinking too much, or shoving matches that result in a few bruises but no requirement for hospitalization. If one excludes these shoving matches, which are registered as assaults, the number of charges for violent crime has fallen considerably since 1996, presumably because there isn't as much violent crime in our city.

We're just like other places -- violent crime is on the decline, although that's not fairly captured by the police data. ( One other point: three-quarters of all robberies and assaults, including assaults where more serious physical harm was done, do not involve weapons of any kind. )

Put the figures about violent crimes together with arrests and the picture looks like this: of those arrested, less than one person in four is accused of a crime involving violence. So the average officer arrests two people a year accused of a violent crime. It makes you wonder about the training police get, and why they are armed to the teeth. Don't these figures say police work is mostly about some ill-defined kind of community or social work?

Drug charges have almost doubled since 1996 -- 10,550 charges were laid last year against 4,100 persons -- although more than half the charges are for simple marijuana possession. One can see why the Toronto police are not in favour of decriminalizing marijuana possession: without those charges, there would be a visible enough drop in the numbers to weaken police calls for more money….


I think that there is enough real crime that ending prohibition would not cost any of the police – except perhaps narks who could not be rehabilitated – their jobs, if they were doing what they should be doing. The real vested interest that the police have in cannabis prohibition is political. Follow the power, not the money. First, at the street level, cannabis prohibition is a source of arbitrary power for the police. Even the “reforms” supported by The Canadian Association of Police Chiefs would continue to let them decide whom to arrest. For example, the association’s board adopted a policy that calls on the Canadian government to give police the option of charging someone with 30 grams or less or issuing a ticket and fine or community service.

Even more important, cannabis prohibition is a source of moral and political authority for the police and admitting that it has always been a counterproductive fraud and morally wrong would undermine their moral and political authority.

The police are in too deep to just shrug and cut their losses. This is as true in Canada as in DEAland.

It is outrageous that the police can even get away with lying to the Canadian Senate about everything from Dutch drugs policies to average THC levels of cannabis.

Consider what the David Griffin head of the Canadian Police Association told the Canadian Senate in May of 2001 about the Dutch:

"In Holland, studies conducted in the early 1990s reflect the negative impact of illicit drug tolerance.

From 1984 to 1988 the number of hashish smokers over 15 years of age doubled in Holland. From 1988 to 1992 the number of 14 to 17 year old hashish smokers doubled once again, that of 12 to 13 year olds even tripled….

According to studies reported by the International Drug Strategy Institute, shootings increased 40%, holdups 60%, and the murder rate in Holland was 3 times that of the United States ".

In fact, The Netherlands has a murder rate that is about 22% of DEAland’s and the Dutch teen marijuana use rate is less that of many prohibitionist countries, including Canada.

Griffin even told the Washington Post that Canada surpassed Mexico as a supplier of marijuana to the United States.

Then there is the lying to promote more prohibitionist propaganda in the guise of “drug education.” The DARE program is very popular among the police who are peddling it in small Canadian towns, and anyone who criticizes it is called pro-drug, even though DARE’s own president has admitted that it does not work.

However, of all the lying done by the Canadian narks, perhaps the most dangerous is that done to undermine Canadian sovereignty. This category of lying is done to support the DEAland prohibitionists interference in Canada’s internal affairs. So while it is easy to prove that the narks are liars, it should also be very clear that responsibility for this lying does not stop there. Canadian politicians and media need to be held accountable by the people of Canada for this official lying. Until the lying stops Canada will not be able to solve its prohibition problems, nor will Canadian sovereignty and freedom be safe from its enemies foreign and domestic.