{"id":15122,"date":"2012-05-18T11:09:12","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T16:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15122"},"modified":"2012-05-18T11:12:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T16:12:52","slug":"reputations-take-years-to-create-but-can-be-destroyed-overnight-as-toronto-police-have-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/05\/18\/reputations-take-years-to-create-but-can-be-destroyed-overnight-as-toronto-police-have-discovered\/","title":{"rendered":"Reputations take years to create, but can be destroyed overnight as Toronto Police have discovered"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley<\/a> on how the Toronto G20<\/a> protest and the still amazingly bad police response has contributed to the decline in public support for all police organizations:<\/p>\n

On July 6, 2010, 10 days after the disastrous G20 summit, Toronto\u2019s City Council voted to \u201ccommend the outstanding work of [police] chief Bill Blair, the Toronto Police Service and the police officers working during the G20 Summit in Toronto,\u201d and thank them for a \u201cjob well done.\u201d The vote was 36-0. The yeas included then-Mayor David Miller and many other left-wing luminaries. At this point in the G20 post-mortem, this seems a bit hard to believe.<\/p>\n

We know much more now about how poorly the security operation was planned and executed: This week\u2019s report from Gerry McNeilly, director of Ontario\u2019s Office of the Independent Police Review, lays it out in painstaking detail. But what we knew 10 days later was bad enough: Thugs had wreaked havoc at will; 400 borderline-hypothermic people were held for hours in the pouring rain for no good reason; police cars were burned; journalists were roughed up and arrested; untold numbers of people were randomly and improperly searched and arrested.<\/p>\n

Yet no one on a decidedly left-leaning Council saw fit to vote against the absurd \u201cjob well done\u201d commendation (though then-councillor Rob Ford, now Mayor, did complain that the police had been too nice). One has to wonder how much longer politicians\u2019 traditional lockstep support for police is going to last last.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

People still call the police in hope of honest and brave assistance, and they almost always get it. But in late March, Angus-Reid asked Canadians how much \u201cconfidence [they] have in the internal operations and leadership\u201d of their police forces. A minority of 38% had \u201ccomplete\u201d or \u201ca lot of\u201d confidence in the RCMP. The number for municipal police forces, taken together, was 39%. That\u2019s about half of what it was in the mid-1990s. The respective numbers in B.C. are below 30%.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s not a credibility crisis, I don\u2019t know what is. Politicians are generally not in the habit of blindly supporting entities with those kinds of approval ratings, and police ought to be worried about that for all kinds of reasons. One of the obvious keys to fixing the problem is, simply, accountability. And it is nowhere to be found \u2014 not from the officers who witnessed fellow officers\u2019 misdeeds, not from the commanders, not from Chief Blair, and not from the federal politicians who foisted this debacle on an unprepared and unsuitable city.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the bottom of this post<\/a> you can find a litany of complaints about the police handling of the Toronto G20 protests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley on how the Toronto G20 protest and the still amazingly bad police response has contributed to the decline in public support for all police organizations: On July 6, 2010, 10 days after the disastrous G20 summit, Toronto\u2019s City Council voted to \u201ccommend the outstanding work of [police] chief Bill Blair, the Toronto Police […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,10,28],"tags":[578,87,98,289,720,567,207],"class_list":["post-15122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","category-liberty","category-media","tag-g20","tag-ontario","tag-police","tag-polls","tag-protest","tag-rcmp","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3VU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15122"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15125,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15122\/revisions\/15125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}