The chief of police in the City of Toronto is Julian Fantino. Fantino is a fabulous guy. He has fantastic ideas about everything.
Fantino thinks it is contemptible that the police actually have to answer to a committee that includes civilians whenever they kill or injure somebody. The police know better than anyone else when someone gets in the way. Why should outsiders have to come in and ask questions that the police haven’t already thought of, like, “what can I charge this guy with after I beat him up for dissing me?”
Fantino thinks the police need an increase in their budget every year, until, I think, the police budget is at least ten times the budget for everything else combined. There can never be too many police officers. Not even when a RIDE (drunk driving) program in Scarborough only catches one person in one year. Money well-spent! It’s the visibility of the police that keeps those drunk drivers from getting into their cars! If that’s the case, I suggest we use Lastman’s ideas for moose and put fiberglass officers all over the city. There can never be too many moose.
The City of Toronto is facing a $300 million shortfall this year. Premiere Harris must be giggling in his downtown love-nest or from his vacation in Florida or some golf course somewhere about the civic politicians being forced to give up their limos and research assistants and cut the wages of those lucky working stiffs that get to subsidize millionaire athletes when they’re not being pulled over by the RIDE program. Everybody in the city is going to have to “bite the bullet” and give up their wage increases. Except for the police. The police demanded a 7% increase. The Police Services Committee, rightly embarrassed, decided to only ask for 3%. But you see how bargaining works: ask for something obscene and then settle for something absurd.
What’s odd about this is that even during the years of recession, when everyone else was taking pay-cuts or getting laid off, the police forces continued to grow and their budgets continued to grow. Meanwhile, in spite of Fantino’s nonsense, the crime rate has actually declined. If anyone is in a position to take a budget cut, it’s the police.
The police desperately want a helicopter. The city was reluctant to fund one, so they got some corporate sponsor to donate the money to rent one for six months. I presume the corporate sponsor was able to write off his donation as a charitable gift. Which means that someone else has to cough up that deduction to make up for the missing tax money. Which means you and I, brother. Then the police tried very hard to make it look like the helicopter was helping the save lives. The trouble is that officers on the ground routinely beat the helicopter to where-ever it was police helicopters go. If you watch U.S. television, the role of police helicopters is to video-tape the chase thereby proving how dangerous the reckless offender was driving, which justifies the gap in the tape between the point at which the officers drag the hapless evil-doer from his car and the point at which they lift his handcuffed comatose body into the back of the patrol car.
When the Supreme Court of Canada– I’m getting to my point– ruled that a pair of Canadians could not be extradited to the United States for trial until Canadian authorities were assured that they would not face capital punishment, Fantino weighed in immediately with his pronouncement that Canada would now become a safe haven for wanton murderers and terrorists from all around the world.
First of all, the comment is idiotic. The Supreme Court ruled that Canadians cannot be extradited to the U.S. to be subject to the death penalty. The ruling does not apply to foreigners. It might, in the future, if someone brings a case involving foreigners before it, but it doesn’t now. (In fact, a few years ago, the Supreme Court did send Charles Ng back to the U.S. to face the death penalty, because he was a U.S. citizen.)
Secondly, the Canadians in this case can still be tried for murder in Canada and sent to prison here. They likely won’t be because the U.S. will probably agree not to seek the death penalty.
And thirdly, who asked you? You are a police chief, not the Minister of Justice. You are not a democratically elected official of the government, and you seem hardly accountable to anyone. What’s with your big mouth on the front of the newspaper every two days? Why don’t you shut up and train your officers on the etiquette of strip-searches?
Fantino is one of the most obnoxious police chiefs in the country. What he really wants is to be in the news every day. He loves to hear himself speak. He is loyal to his officers no matter what they do. He seems to have a vision of some kind of police state in which cops can do pretty well whatever they want to. And if you object? He’ll tell you, well, that’s the price of law and order. You want us to sick the Hell’s Angels on you? Now shut up and bend over.
Now listen– I’m not one of those people who thinks we can do without the police. But I am one of those people who thinks that being a cop is a privilege. And I think that if you want to be a cop in our society, and get paid for being a cop, and get respect for being a cop…. there is one trade-off: we have very high expectations for you. You have to be self-disciplined. You have to have self-control. You have to understand the law and know how to apply it fairly and equitably.
You have to demonstrate a fundamental respect for the fact that it is the role of our democratically elected institutions to make law, and your role to enforce it.
And sometimes, you have to shut up.
