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(Prime Time Crime exclusive Jan. 30, 2012)
By Bob Cooper
There’s an old joke about a guy being found dead in Tucson dressed in nylons, panties, a garter belt, and a Vote Obama t-shirt. The police removed the t-shirt to spare the family any embarrassment.
The RCMP have just announced that they are severing their relationship with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona which has been training Canadian police officers in drug recognition for years and currently trains 85% of drug recognition experts in North America. The reason? A report by the U.S. Justice Department accusing the Sheriff’s Office of civil rights violations.
Apparently the report was sent to the RCMP by David Eby of the BC Criminal Liberties Association who got a nice letter in return thanking him for bringing the matter to their attention. I can hear working Mounties gagging from coast to coast right now. The only thing Eby dislikes more than ‘the police’ is the thought of ‘the police’ having anything to do with their counterparts in the Great Satan south of the 49th and he pretty much says so.
This knee-jerk decision was likely the result of RCMP management being obsessed with optics and ignorant of the underlying political situation which led to this report. The Obama White House hates the state of Arizona in general and Governor Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in particular. In fact the only people in Arizona that the Obama White House doesn’t hate are the ‘undocumented’ folks there who keep voting for them. You see, Governor Brewer like several other governors in South-West states, keeps bringing up the issue of illegal immigration and Washington’s refusal to secure the Southern border even though it’s their duty to do so. Their patience at an end, Arizona passed laws enabling local law enforcement officers to inquire about a person’s immigration status and arrest those suspected of being in the United States illegally and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheriff Arpaio, fed up with a rising rate of violent crime, instructed his deputies to enforce these new provisions with gusto. To no one’s surprise, the majority of those arrested turned out not to be Irishmen causing DC liberals to faint like divas. Since then, Washington has been going after both by any means, fair or foul.
The U.S. Department of Justice is full of lawyers who think exactly like David Eby and joyfully spend their careers conducting witchunts into local law enforcement agencies. When the Justice Department accuses a policeman of anything it usually means he’s done his duty, protected the people he was sworn to protect, and the taxpayer is getting his money’s worth.
Oh, and the Sheriff’s chief accuser? That would be Attorney-General Eric Holder, who is currently trying to lie his way out of the Fast & Furious scandal that just won’t go away. Fast & Furious was the code name given to an ATF case in the Phoenix area in which the Justice Department allowed hundreds of assault rifles to be purchased from gun shops by ‘straw men’ and trafficked to Mexican drug cartels in order to gain intelligence. The operation was conceived by the bosses in DC and agents in Phoenix were forced to go along despite their misgivings. Now, those agents who blew the whistle on this insanity are being bullied and retaliated against by higher-ups in the Justice Department. Not only did these brainless dilettantes arm the Mexican drug lords but in a tragic turn of events at least one of those rifles came back across the border and was used to murder Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry near Nogales. E-mails related to Fast & Furious released last Friday indicate that Holder may have perjured himself in front of a Congressional Committee which is recalling him to testify again later this week. That they presume to judge other agencies is laughable.
I suppose the next thing we’ll hear is Eby demanding that the hundreds of Mounties who’ve already been trained be sent to some facility for a complete de-programming. Sadly, I wouldn’t take odds on the demand being refused. And the facility would be purpose-built in Quebec, of course.
Oh, and those alleged civil rights violations? They involve racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and disregarding basic legal obligations, you know, the very same things Canadian police officers are accused of in court every day by lawyers who are trying to get evidence excluded. So what?
A few bosses up here with Sheriff Joe’s attitude would be a pleasant change.
Bob Cooper is a retired Vancouver policeman. He walked a beat in Chinatown and later worked in the Asian Organized Crime Section and the Homicide Squad.