I feel the same way

"I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences."

James Crocker

Noise?

A client of mine and I were discussing various options for a new corporation, resulting in the following exchange.

Me: "Have you considered bringing on other investors as silent partners?"
Client: "Yes, but I'm not going to do that. They could handle the investment part, but they're no good at silent."

[Quoted with the kind permission of the client.]

Some thoughts on things creeping north 2

"The Real Interrobang", a London blogger, has a keen eye for apt quotes. As you will recall a quoted comment on American policing prompted a blog post here last week. I stumbled across another today which continued that "I'm glad our police aren't like that! thought:

In my experience, serious commercial plane crashes are generally the result of a chain of very minor factors that align sufficiently to result in an accident. The apologies an compensation for the victims is certainly the decent thing to do, but the more telling difference here is that there is an enormous effort made by the airline, manufacturers and government to determine what caused the crash, and (often very expensive) remedial steps to prevent that problem from ever happening again. If police departments took this approach whenever they screw up and cause injury or death to innocent people, I would find it a lot easier to cut them some slack. I'm thinking that a good analogy here is the difference between private and commercial aviation. The accident rates for commercial carriers are so low that they are almost statistically insignificant, and are still trending down. The accident rates for general aviation (that is, amateur pilots like me) have been pretty static for many years. The sad thing is that the private pilots still regularly kill themselves because of rookie mistakes like failing to properly preflight an aircraft, or stalling and spinning from a low altitude. These would be analogous to the kinds of mistakes we're seeing the police make on these raids. In my opinion, law enforcement agencies in North America are still acting like amateurs despite the years of experience they should have amassed by now. If they took an approach that was more like commercial aviation, we would all be a lot safer, and probably more likely to trust police officers we interact with day to day.
"GXT, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments".

I honestly don't think that the "North American" descriptor is fair, simply because Canadian police forces are, in the main, still far superior to their American counterparts in their handling of the citizenry and in their respect for the law and proper process. No doubt my colleagues in the criminal bar might have some cutting things to say about some forces or invidudal police (and it is, for example, difficult to ignore the shocking institutional failings in the RCMP, problems which which seem to be ongoing) but the fact remains that we have a better chance of retaining excellent policing if we also note the many things they do right; I don't accept the notion that treating them as if they were indistinguishable from their oft deeply troubling and increasingly authoritarian American counterparts is at all productive or just.

True

In the long run, luck is given only to the efficient.

Helmuth von Moltke.(Molte the Elder is, in my opinion, one of the best sources of military quotes out there, probably because most of them can apply so effectively to day-to-day life.)

Some thoughts on things creeping north

I personally have a fairly high opinion of Canadian police in general. They are, taken as a breed, far more sensible, far less violent, far less paranoid and certainly far less hostile to the citizenry than their American counterparts who in many, many instances have spent the better part of the last three decades sliding downhill in their regard for the law or obedience to any limits on their authority.

I ponder this issue because when one looks south one sees the increasing use of the Taser to ensure "compliance". This is disturbingly often not about a response to someone genuinely resisting lawful arrest or being a threat to public or personal safety but more to do with not kowtowing rapidly or obsequiously enough to the officer's authority, whether or not the exercise of that authority is right or wrong, lawful or unlawful, rational or arbitrary. One commenter has noted,

I’m sure that [the Taser] makes the cops’ jobs easier and safer for themselves if they Tase more people instead of wrestling them to the ground; I don’t care. ... The police do not have a right to a completely submissive citizenry and they should be prevented from trying to create one.

-- Scarshapedstar, “Today in Tasering: And the Beat Goes On,” Correntewire, quoted at "You Still Can't Do That On Slashdot", "The Real Interrobang", August 11, 2008

That's the key, isn't it? A citizen should be compliant with the law, not necessarily with police authority. The latter is in service to the former, not synonymous with it and certainly not the determinant of it. Indeed, one of the hallmarks and safeguards of a truly free and just society is the ability of a citizen to stand up to an officer when the officer is wrong or breaking the law.

When officers feel that they have a right to Taser somebody who is problematic -- as in the Robert Dziekański case, where four trained, fit, young and armoured RCMP officers Tasered and killed one middle aged man -- as opposed to a genuine threat then we have a disturbing Americanization of our police methods of problem-solving. [Note: I'm forty-four and of about the same height, weight and build as Mr. Dziekański was. It will be a sad, sad day for policing when it takes more than one or two unarmed officers to subdue me or somebody like me, so much so that the use of four officers was ludicrous and the use of Tasers was monstrous.]

Police work is often dangerous, but so is giving men guns, Tasers and body armour and sending them out amongst their fellow citizens. The key to a democratic society is the balancing of our need for safety and policing with our need to be free citizens. For the most part we've balanced that in Canada, thanks in great deal to the good sense of the individual coppers involved. I'd hate to see that go. I like the Americans fine, but I don't want their society and I certainly don't want their policing problems and, frankly, I don't think that any sane person does.