Richard Rosenthal has been chosen to lead BC’s new police watchdog office. Increasing accountability is a good thing. Yet Christy Clark came under fire for another foot in the mouth comment. She joked on the radio that she felt it was better to be thought a MILF than a Cougar. Kind of an airhead thing to say.
Woman advocates are left shaking their heads. Yet the BC Liberals problems happened long before Christy took the helm and Kevin Falcon is even worse. He’s just another Gordon Campbell clone in that conflicted crime family.
On the bright side, as a young lawyer in California, Rosenthal said he quickly gravitated toward white-collar crime and “holding the most powerful to account,” while “everyone else wanted to do blood and guts.”
“One man with a brief case can steal more than 100 men with guns,” he says, adding that the most difficult prosecutions are against the rich and powerful, because they’re often highly respected, well-liked, usually sociopathic and can hire the best legal defence money can buy.
So true. Does that mean he’s going to look into Christy Clark’s involvement with BC Rail and the laundering of drug money that went along with it? Or is he not allowed to bite the hand that feeds him? Please advise.
I will be greatly surprised if this "Police Watchdog" does anything more than bark occasionally. The blue wall of the VPD and the RCMP will continue to shield "members" and keep their misdeeds quiet whenever possible.
ReplyDeleteQuit frankly you would only see a change if the Police were willing to police themselves, and I think it's pretty clear they only do that when they have to or when the misdeed in question would come out anyway, and even then often a transfer or some other shuffling of the deck chairs is all that occurs, this being sold as having "done something". Technically that is true, something was done. Just not the right something. They do this time and again, because they know it works and they can get away with it. But it's worth pointing out that this is so only because the public and the media allow it. At the end of the day there's more of us than there are of them.
Unfotunately it does have the appearance of a smoke and mirrors side show.
ReplyDeleteThe greatest rise in successful cases against Police brutality, towards Citizens in BC, is because of the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that, stitched together, can follow a person almost to their front door.
ReplyDeleteThey've been *hoisted by their own petard.*
Very true. Imagine what they were getting away with "back in the day" before there were electronic eyes everywhere. Small wonder cops have a really bad reaction to being filmed, even lawfully. It cramps their style and forces accountability. It forces them to behave themselves, and they don't like it.
ReplyDeleteYet it just proves what I've said. By and large they do not and will not "police their own", as they constantly claim they do. When/if footage pops up, then they go into their "reshuffling the deck chairs" routine. They constantly lie about involvement in unlawful activity done under the color of authority and when caught, if there isn't camera footage of the deed that proves the lie, they say the same thing a criminal does, "I deny that, prove it."
Worse still, camera's that the police have access to will somehow be found not to have been working, such as when Ian Bush was murdered by RCMP Constable Paul Koester in a holding cell at the police station.