By Bill Lynch

We are in the middle of yet another inquiry into the question of how police use or misuse force. The string of inquiries seems endless but we Canadians, like amnesiacs, can’t seem to connect the dots and see that we have a problem.

In democracies, police forces are granted a virtual monopoly of coercive tools that range from cuffs, chokeholds, and various other restraints to the most powerful—the firearm, with its ability to end human life. As part of our social compact, the public have granted these awesome powers. We made a deal. The first clause in the contract is that these powers are to be used only for our protection.

Even where the rules are crystal clear, there are bound to be mistakes. The onrush of real-time events that soldiers call the “fog of war” will also muddy the waters. But self-investigations do not help to provide clarity as much as cynicism. No other institution with such great coercive powers investigates itself, nor should it. All inquiries into excessive use of force should be fully independent. For the sake of their own legitimacy, I think that police should be the first to make this demand.

Nevertheless, a pattern emerges: someone dies in police custody. During the internal inquiry we hear a few calls for a fully independent system to investigate these cases. After that, the calls die out, sometimes even before the end of the inquiry. We Canadians appear to have an automatic default attitude towards our police: an attitude of trust.

The other option—that of skeptical inquiry—seems to cause us some discomfort. Our police forces are held in high esteem, almost wrapped in cotton batting.

Every society has some sacred cows. Sentimental attachments to institutions or traditions can grow to become icons that suspend our critical faculties. Elsewhere the police are understood to be as fallible as lawyers, mechanics, or anyone else in society. But here, the police, and the RCMP in particular, may be saddled with some extra symbolism: the Mounted Police are, after all, part of Canadians’ national foundation myth.

Wherever it grew from, this gentle treatment creates a climate of impunity that could lead to worse abuses—and it may have already.

The second clause in the public’s contract with the police says that they will also protect our institutions, most importantly the institutions of our democracy. Any police involvement in politics in a way that might affect the proper functioning of the democratic process has ominous implications. On the national stage some recent police actions seem to have exposed (at least) the party political preferences of officers involved, or of their superiors.

Most worrying was the Ralph Goodale case, where a possibly spurious police investigation appears to have been timed to have an influence on the outcome of the election then in progress.

As they say of good comedy (and in politics, too), timing is everything. If this affair is in fact as suspicious as it looks we should be outraged. But we do not know and we probably will not ever know if the intentions were cynical because there has not been a fully independent inquiry. I cannot fathom the public’s quiescent response, but I imagine that it would not be so muted if, for example, it had been the army and not the police who appeared to be tinkering with democracy.

Questionable deaths in police custody should automatically trigger a full independent investigation but so should any question of politically motivated actions.

A reasonably vigilant public is a sine qua non. Catastrophes have occurred without it in otherwise functioning democracies. In the German city of Koblenz, 85 percent of the police who served during Adolf Hitler’s years were hired prior to 1933.

Closer to home, since the beginning of the “war on terror”, there have been terrible violations of human rights and of law in the U.S. Barack Obama’s incoming attorney general Eric Holder said, “Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus”¦”, etc. It is possible that when the history of this time is reckoned, in at least two cases that we are aware of, various Canadian agencies will also be found to have acted against the law.

The first of our human rights is the right to security. No other human rights are possible without that foundation. Our police forces defend this right, sometimes with great bravery. I therefore imagine an ideal in which individual police officers see themselves first and foremost as defenders of human rights. Meanwhile, clear rules for use of force, chain of command procedures, and provisions for automatic independent review are prerequisites of a good system. But I think that none of it can ever work well in a public climate of complacency.

Bill Lynch lives in Nelson and once served on Nelson's police board. He calls himself an immigrant admirer of most things Canadian and plays guitar for the Lazy Poker Blues Band.