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(Prime Time Crime exclusive Sept. 29, 2008)
By Bob Cooper
So say the self-appointed use-of–force experts at the Province Editorial Board. I wonder where they got their qualifications. I guess the world of editorial writing is a little more rough and tumble than I would have imagined.
I’d take odds that none of them have ever been in a fight. I’m not talking about the schoolyard variety, I’m talking about a real fight. Where you’re rolling around on the floor of a skid road beer parlor or a sidewalk in the 100 East Hastings. One where you’re literally fighting for your life. You’re kicking, gouging, punching, scratching and doing whatever you can to stay on top until help arrives.
After a couple of those you learn a few things including the fact that women can fight just as hard as men and people with mental problems have super-human strength and are impervious to pain. Their question, “Three, maybe four police officers couldn’t wrestle an infant from the clutches of a 110 – pound, 16 year old mother?” belies their ignorance.
The simple answer is sure they could have, but since the object of the exercise is to ensure the baby is not killed or seriously injured, they chose not to. The mother, in a state of panic, could easily strangle, crush, or smother that child in seconds and not even realize she was doing it. Not to mention the danger to the baby when it is in the middle of 7 or 8 hundred pounds of beefy cops. You see, fights are not choreographed (like the ballet or synchronized swimming or whatever else editorial writers watch to become experts) and if that amount of weight shifts and the infant winds up on the bottom for even seconds the results would be disastrous.
Our Province experts then call Const. Jana McGuinness a liar (but use weasel words to say they’re not) when she says the police had no choice but to take action. Among the options they suggested were to (a) leave the room, or (b) to shoot her. Right. You’ve got a situation which is so serious that social workers deem it necessary for a baby to be removed from its’ mentally disturbed mother and you’re going to leave the two of them alone in a room together. Their other suggestion makes one realize why they relate so easily to someone with mental problems.
It all reminds me of a situation years ago where two policemen shot and killed a guy who was charging them with a butcher knife. The next morning before the press conference a TV reporter for a third-rate local station was trying to impress a female radio type by telling her how he would have ‘karate-chopped’ the knife out of the guy’s hand.
Big talk in the safety of the VPD Press Room. The only thing that ever got butchered in there was the truth. In reality, all that dilettante would have done before he was stabbed to death would have been to piss his pants.