it's curling season - finally!
Yesterday morning over breakfast at the Blue Plate, I was informed that a mutual friend of all of ours had been arrested last week for vandalizing a curling rink. She and her friend had gone out at four in the morning with paints. She was cold sober, which is sometimes kind of an event for her, I guess.
Anyways, these two girls who together probably weigh about two fiddy if that, were taken down by, oh, god, now I'm going to start playing telephone here maybe, but I think it was four cops and two dogs. Edmonton police.
Our city is in the middle of a kind of hammerlock with respect to its metro police service these days. It dates back to the start of this year when a few cops pulled a DUI sting operation on the police commission chairman and a local columnist who had a history of writing negative things about the EPS. Nothing happened, as both men took cabs home from the Canadian Association of Journalists function they had been attending, but the tapes of what the cops were saying as they conducted the aborted operation made them all look like weasels. A couple cops were charged with discreditable conduct, insubordination, what have you. The then-Chief of Police quit/was fired, and was replaced by this Darryl da Costa guy in an interim sort of way.
Now: The EPS spent about twice as much in legal fees as its Calgary counterparts in 2003, and people want to know why. The backlog of complaints against Edmonton cops has grown so large that the IA department has had to ask for an extension on sixty-five of them. There was an e-mail passed around internally that "humourously" described how aboriginals should be dealt with by the police. Some members of the EPS may have received gifts from the private company that sought to capture the city's $90 million photo radar service contract without public tender. The EPS's past nine months' list of stuff like this just goes on and on: allegations of pepper spraying a belligerent motorist at a traffic stop and stuffing him into the trunk of the cruiser, fatally shooting a man armed with a machete, breaking into an armed suspect's house without first trying to subdue him with tear gas, intimidating and coercing a witness to a fatal police chase...
Well now this Darryl da Costa has gotten in trouble for accepting a couple of pairs of Oilers tickets from the same company seeking to keep the photo radar contract. Needless to say, a lot of people want to bring a close to his "interim" as a result. The problem that arises? Noone else wants to do the job.
Meanwhile, we just had our 31st murder of the year this past weekend: Sara Easton, shot on the street, walking home with 10 friends including her boyfriend, from a neighborhood bar called Orlando's 2, where she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday.
Oh yeah, and then there's the serial killer.
How many breakfast tables in the past year have had conversations like the one my friends had the other morning pass over them? Isn't it time for the city as a whole to start wondering if our metropolitan police force is maybe misallocating its resources? I say: How about turf them all and get the RCMP to do it.
Some guys on the EPS like to wear these t-shirts with pictures of rats on them with red circles and a red slash at a forty-five degree angle through the circle. "No rats", the t-shirts mean to say. As in don't rat out on a fellow cop. How Chicago. How 1970's.
I saw a t-shirt last year that read "I heart Whyte Ave cops". I thought that one was funnier.
Anyways, these two girls who together probably weigh about two fiddy if that, were taken down by, oh, god, now I'm going to start playing telephone here maybe, but I think it was four cops and two dogs. Edmonton police.
Our city is in the middle of a kind of hammerlock with respect to its metro police service these days. It dates back to the start of this year when a few cops pulled a DUI sting operation on the police commission chairman and a local columnist who had a history of writing negative things about the EPS. Nothing happened, as both men took cabs home from the Canadian Association of Journalists function they had been attending, but the tapes of what the cops were saying as they conducted the aborted operation made them all look like weasels. A couple cops were charged with discreditable conduct, insubordination, what have you. The then-Chief of Police quit/was fired, and was replaced by this Darryl da Costa guy in an interim sort of way.
Now: The EPS spent about twice as much in legal fees as its Calgary counterparts in 2003, and people want to know why. The backlog of complaints against Edmonton cops has grown so large that the IA department has had to ask for an extension on sixty-five of them. There was an e-mail passed around internally that "humourously" described how aboriginals should be dealt with by the police. Some members of the EPS may have received gifts from the private company that sought to capture the city's $90 million photo radar service contract without public tender. The EPS's past nine months' list of stuff like this just goes on and on: allegations of pepper spraying a belligerent motorist at a traffic stop and stuffing him into the trunk of the cruiser, fatally shooting a man armed with a machete, breaking into an armed suspect's house without first trying to subdue him with tear gas, intimidating and coercing a witness to a fatal police chase...
Well now this Darryl da Costa has gotten in trouble for accepting a couple of pairs of Oilers tickets from the same company seeking to keep the photo radar contract. Needless to say, a lot of people want to bring a close to his "interim" as a result. The problem that arises? Noone else wants to do the job.
Meanwhile, we just had our 31st murder of the year this past weekend: Sara Easton, shot on the street, walking home with 10 friends including her boyfriend, from a neighborhood bar called Orlando's 2, where she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday.
Oh yeah, and then there's the serial killer.
How many breakfast tables in the past year have had conversations like the one my friends had the other morning pass over them? Isn't it time for the city as a whole to start wondering if our metropolitan police force is maybe misallocating its resources? I say: How about turf them all and get the RCMP to do it.
Some guys on the EPS like to wear these t-shirts with pictures of rats on them with red circles and a red slash at a forty-five degree angle through the circle. "No rats", the t-shirts mean to say. As in don't rat out on a fellow cop. How Chicago. How 1970's.
I saw a t-shirt last year that read "I heart Whyte Ave cops". I thought that one was funnier.
posted by gibletquesterrs at 11:21 AM
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