WHEN POLICE BEAT UP THE INNOCENT: TIME FOR SOME SOUL-SEARCHING

It's ironic that six Vancouver police constables should plead guilty to
beating suspects in Stanley Park at the same time Canada takes Iran to task
at the United Nations for human rights abuses.

On the one hand, our collective outrage is directed at the beating death of
Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi after she was arrested by Iranian
police last July. On the other, we have Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell
breezily labelling the local incident an "anomaly" that won't tarnish the
department's reputation.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I'll be the first to acknowledge that police officers have a difficult job
at the best of times. They must deal every day with unpleasant and
sometimes violent people under the most trying of circumstances. Most do it
with restraint, discipline and remarkable good cheer.

But let's be clear about one thing. Anyone who thinks it's okay to take
suspects into the park and assault them has much in common with the Iranian
officers who thought it was okay to take an irritating journalist into a
back room and do the same. Only a matter of degree in the outcomes
separates them.

And let's be clear about another thing. It doesn't matter that the victims
in Vancouver were suspected of dealing drugs. Just as it doesn't matter
that the Iranian police suspected Kazemi of being a spy.

Both victims were innocent. No guilt had been proven in either case. And we
rightly expect those entrusted with custody of the law to be governed by
the principle that one is innocent until proven otherwise by an impartial
process.

That simple test separates civilization from barbarity. We set higher
standards for ourselves than thugs do. And so we should.

In a civil society, we don't subject people to violent punishment on mere
suspicion of crimes, or for being defiant of authority, or for exercising
their right to assembly and free speech simply because it makes a few feel
uncomfortable.

We leave punishment to the judiciary and even then, only once a legal
process for testing any accusations against strict rules has been fully
satisfied.

What we have in both the Vancouver and Iranian incidents is the subjection
of people who haven't been charged with an offence to arbitrary
extra-judicial violence of the kind that utterly mocks the rule of law.

The expedient response to the Stanley Park incident is to characterize the
guilty as misguided, or inexperienced, or over-zealous, or just bad apples
who don't represent the true nature of the police force. Or to blame the
victims for provoking them.

The ethical response is to consider the incident in its broader context and
to question whether it imposes upon all our policing institutions a
responsibility to examine the internal culture from which it seems to arise.

Because that context includes a series of similar incidents across Canada.
Considered together they raise some important questions about the culture
of police institutions.

For example, the Vancouver incident comes hard on the heels of a report by
the RCMP complaints commissioner asserting an abuse of police power in
dealing with protesters in Quebec City.

And it had a precursor. Those who watched the performance of the RCMP in
Vancouver during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings a few years
ago won't share any misapprehension about the source of tactics applied in
Quebec.

Yet nobody in authority seems troubled that many, perhaps the majority, of
the victims of such police violence are innocent and are peacefully
exercising their rights of assembly and free speech under the constitution.

At the same time that Canada seeks redress for the murder of Kazemi by
Iranian law enforcement authorities, there's an inquiry going on into the
death of Neil Stonechild. That inquiry was launched after allegations that
the aboriginal teenager was driven out of Saskatoon in a police cruiser,
kicked out in sub-zero weather, froze to death and that a subsequent
internal investigation was unenthusiastic.

The same Saskatoon police department had already sacked two officers after
they drove a drunken aboriginal man out into the country on a bitterly cold
night and put him out of the car wearing only a T-shirt, jeans, cotton
jacket and running shoes. The victim survived to report the incident when
the maintenance man at a power station got him inside.

More worrisome is the suggestion that the frozen bodies of a number of
aboriginal men have been found in the same general area over the years.
This sounds like El Salvador, not Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, in the wake of demands from Amnesty International and despite
years of stonewalling, Ontario's new Liberal government has called an
inquiry into the wrongful shooting by police of an unarmed aboriginal man
during a protest at Ipperwash. A police officer was convicted but Amnesty
thinks we should know who gave the orders.

There are common denominators in all these events. One is police officers
who seem to think that when the law is inconvenient, it can be dispensed
with in favour of some arbitrary measure, whether pepper-spraying
bystanders at a demonstration, firing plastic bullets into people lying on
the ground, driving unruly drunks into the country and leaving them to
their fate in sub-zero temperatures or trying to control drug dealers by
taking suspects into the woods to to be roughed up.

How, exactly, do these performances differ from those of the reviled
enforcement agencies in Iran which thought it perfectly appropriate to beat
a woman because she took some pictures in the wrong place?

They don't. And that is why instead of excuses, equivocations and
mealy-mouthed attempts to diminish what happened in Stanley Park as some
kind of "anomaly," we should all -- police, politicians and private
citizens alike -- be doing some deep soul-searching about the institutional
culture that permits the attitudes driving such behaviour to take root in a
democracy.