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Schools not the place for black and white thinking

By G.D. Maxwell Right at the beginning, I’d like to say I have nothing against the RCMP. Okay, I guess you pretty much know where this is headed, don’t you? But this is an important disclaimer.

By G.D. Maxwell

Right at the beginning, I’d like to say I have nothing against the RCMP. Okay, I guess you pretty much know where this is headed, don’t you?

But this is an important disclaimer. Police in any civilized society do an important, often thankless job. This doesn’t make them particularly different from other groups who do important, often thankless jobs, but the police do theirs with a gun strapped to their waists and that most definitely makes them different. It also makes them, at times, targets of other people with guns and an endless source of fascination in TV World, where they are grossly over-represented and seem to shoot bad guys and be shot at by bad guys about as often as you or I floss.

Truth be told, there was a time in my life when I gave serious consideration to becoming a cop. Of course, there was a time I also considered becoming a fireman and the jury’s still out on a lingering passion to become a cowboy poet. I’m fairly certain if I were willing to pay some shrink a hundred bucks an hour once a week for several years he’d be able to convince me I became an umpire to sublimate my desire to be a cop. The power and discretion’s about the same but people only shoot their mouths off at umpires. Then again, Freud-Schmeud, maybe I just like baseball.

Be that as it may, I feel compelled to weigh in on the proposal for a full-time police liaison position currently being considered by the Myrtle Philip Parent Advisory Council.

DON’T DO IT!

Now, as persuasive as capital letters might be, I have to assume they will not, standing alone, carry the day. So here’s why I think this is not a good idea.

1.

We have way too big a force already. I mean, let’s face it, we live in Mayberry. Okay, maybe Mayberry on steroids but on a full-time basis, we’re closer to Andy and Barney than we are to the NYPD blues. Our problem is, of course, the influx of lawless outlanders who come up here for a good time and bring the thieving, riotous, big-city ways with them. Left to our own devices, local crime consists largely of smoking pot, flashing naughty bits at the nudie dock, drinking at softball games and garden variety traffic violations. Chief Wiggins and one deputy could keep the lid on local lawlessness.

So what we have is what the electric utility boys call spikes in the demand curve. Fairly predictable periods of deranged behaviour that peak at big events, notable holidays and bar closing time.

What we need are part-time cops to meet that demand. Lure the boys in blue up here on their days off with offers of free skiing, biking, rafting and general merriment and then pay them generous overtime to keep the peace during the spikes. At 100G’s for a full-time position, we could buy a lot of overtime.

Better still, what we really need in the village around closing time is a Granny Posse. Let’s face it, if you’re drunk and have a tendency towards being belligerent, what better way to bring that character flaw to the surface than by being confronted with an armed peace officer. What’s really needed at that moment is a grandmother to say, "Stop acting like a hooligan and be a good boy." Eileen Tomalty would be a much more powerful force to be reckoned with in that situation than would her son, our former community liaison officer.

2.

The whole notion of a community liaison position is pretty much an oxymoron given the way the RCMP rotates people through this town anyway. With a couple of exceptions, you’d be hard pressed in recent years to name very many of the police who have been posted here who exhibit what you might generously call an understanding of our admittedly bizarre community.

This is a basic flaw with the RCMP model and leads to inexplicable reasoning. For example, in a tragic incident up in the land where the sun never/always shines, an officer was recently killed when he tried to intervene in a domestic dispute. In describing the challenges of policing in a town so cold for so much of the year the residents actually relish the idea of going to Hell when they die just to warm up, a spokesman for the RCMP said, "This community isn’t any different than any other community in Canada."

That he was describing a community with no running water, substandard housing, 98 per cent aboriginal population, 60 per cent unemployment and snow hip deep to a giraffe for much of the year seemed completely lost on this community-based officer. That anyone in their right mind could imagine policing in this town was no different than policing in Moose Jaw shows a seriously flawed grasp of reality.

And so it is in Whistler, which isn’t Moose Jaw either. Yet, I have heard our current Staff Sergeant say ours is no different from any other town. Makes you wonder what he smokes.

3.

Schools are where we send our children to learn how to think, reason, deal with the ambiguity of life and make sure they don’t get short-changed when they give a clerk a five dollar bill for a pack of gum. Unfortunately, far too often our police strive to reduce ambiguity to hard and fast rules, black and white thinking and zero-intelligence, er, tolerance programs.

Sergeant Haider, in support of his initiative, says Whistler has the second highest crime rate per capita in British Columbia. This statement, while perhaps statistically accurate, is specious, misleading and intellectually dishonest. Most of our "crime" comes from the influx of tourists who, of course, aren’t counted in determining our capita. This argument – known in rhetorical terms as a red herring – undermines the efficacy of the legitimate points Sgt. Haider might want to make and really encapsulates why it so often seems to be hard to separate the message from the scare-mongering when the police speak.

And that’s really the crux of my objection to police in schools. When Sgt. Haider defended the jackboot tactics of the RCMP this winter in entering local watering holes and demanding patrons produce receipts to prove they’d eaten food with their alcoholic beverage, he said, "I will not stand by and allow the law to be violated." While subsequently agreeing to rein in the force, at least as far as accosting paying customers, the overwhelming lack of understanding of the very lifeblood of our community captured by this statement, the siege mentality displayed at New Year’s both in the way policing was carried out and in publicly describing what happened as a "near riot", suggests the local police have a long way to go before they fully grasp the ambiguity of life in Whistler.

Until they do, I’d keep them out of the schools unless they’re responding to a call.