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MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 1

MODULE ONE POLICE: POLICING

FUNDAMENTALS

SECTION 1.1: The Deep Roots of Policing .....................................................................2

The history of policing from monkey troops to the Victorian era and an exploration of

Robert Peel’s creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Bobbies.

SECTION 1.2: Police as Labourer .................................................................................17

An overview of police officers’ evolving position in the labour market with an emphasis

on the formation and rise of police unions.

SECTION 1.3: Policing Capitalism ................................................................................42

An examination of the private security industry, strike-breaking duties, and the 'war on

drugs.'

Online Resources

Blackfoot Traditional Justice

http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/cnqst-lw/index-eng.aspx

A Brief Guide to Police History

(Ancient, Middle Ages, Colonial, and Spoils eras)

https://web.archive.org/web/20131214051741/http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/205/205l

ect04.htm

2 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

SECTION 1.1: The Deep Roots of Policing

The start of the modern era of policing is often given as 1829 when British politician

Robert Peel, legislated the creation of a fully state-funded police force. This dating makes

the institution of modern policing less than 200 years old but social conflict and violence

has been a social problem since the dawn of humanity 200,000 years ago. So how did

societies deal with such difficulties before 1829?

To see the 'deep roots' of policing we begin this unit with a peek at the animal kingdom

and a tour through history to see the different forms policing took before Robert Peel’s

invention changed everything.

‘Police Monkeys’

Our search for the origins of 'policing' behaviours and social practices can profitably

begin with a look at other primate species as the following description of 'police

monkeys' reveals. Pigtailed macaque monkeys were recorded using a 'voting' system for

appointing their fellow monkeys to the role of peacekeepers. Voting, in this case, meant

inferior monkeys baring their teeth to more dominant members as a sign of submission

saying, “You don’t have to beat me up to establish your dominance.” Humans would call

it a form of smiling.

When an individual receives these voting signals from most of the group,

it shows he is well respected—or feared—and he becomes the new sheriff

in town. In general, the larger and more senior monkeys are voted into the

policing role. But having a gang to back you up counts for something, too.

A single Schwarzenegger-like monkey may not receive as many 'votes'

from the group as a smaller individual with several brothers.

Once elected, police monkeys earn certain rights and responsibilities, one

of which is to peacefully settle conflicts. They usually do this by stepping

between combatants or chasing bad monkeys away. Very rarely do they

need to dish out a whooping, but their actions are always respected by the

group. (Carey, 2006)

When researchers experimentally removed such police monkeys from an 82-member

macaque troop the results were a drastic drop in grooming, play behaviours, and the

number of monkeys willing to sit close together.

“Without the police, the remaining monkeys predominantly interacted

with their most familiar fellows, forming small groups and sitting apart

from each other in order to avoid conflicts.”(Biello, 2006)

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 3

Researchers were only able to perform this experiment for short periods or else chaos in

the troop would ensue. The single dominant female was never removed in such

experiments because her role was needed to prevent total anarchy. It was not that the

macaques went wild in the absence of a police monkey but rather that new violent

dominance struggles began in order to replace the removed 'police.'

These results suggest that a primary purpose of the monkey police was to maintain a

monopoly of violence 1 in the troop as only the police monkey could regularly use force

without sparking a contest for dominance. In return for allowing a few monkeys this

monopoly, the rest of society could socialize without fear of unexpected violence

occurring in their daily interactions. If any violence broke out between two lesser

monkeys a glare from the dominant monkey quickly ended it. Despite the vast gulf that

separates humans and monkeys, the basics of such social trade-offs are familiar. Not

every monkey society is a dominance hierarchy 2 (like the macaque society) but the role

of dominant monkeys in hierarchical cultures is an important force for social order.

Kin Justice and Tribal Police

Unlike the dominance hierarchies of the macaques the first human societies were largely

egalitarian 3 and based on the basic social unit of the extended family. With no dominant

individuals to monopolize force, humans relied on the collective security of kin-based 4

peace-keeping to maintain the social order. Such forms of peace-keeping are based on

interpersonal relationships, but a variety of other social customs are used including:

group pledges, conflict-ending reconciliation rituals, and magical-religious taboos 5 .

1 monopoly of violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

2 dominance ... http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Dominance_Hierarchies.html

3 egalitarian https://libcom.org/history/origins-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism-christopher-boehm

4 kin-based http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kin

5 taboos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo

4 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

Such informal social controls were adequate for populations of less than 500 people

because small populations have a dense web of inter-related families. However, as

societies grew larger new methods of social control emerged. People in a larger

community might not always know each other but they would assume that every

individual had a kin network ready to avenge any injuries or insults done to them. It was

therefore the fear of 'an eye for an eye' reprisals (called lex talonis or literally the 'law of

the talon') that was a powerful deterrent against violence. The primary drawback of such

forms of reprisal-based social controls is the devastating multi-generational feuds that

passed down to children and grandchildren. These dangers can be seen in the case of the

Black Donnelly 6 clan of Ontario and the Hatfield-McCoy feud

7 of Kentucky. Once a cycle

of violence began in an egalitarian culture there was no dominant force to extinguish it.

Systems of kin-based justice—whether interpersonal contacts, religious rites, or

feuding—are the default peacekeeping machinery found across the globe and can be seen

in every family, small town, neighbourhood gang, and police department that 'takes care

of their own.' But as societies grew into states, dominance hierarchies re-emerged to

control sprawling populations and local rulers fought to establish monopolies of force. As

states grew, expanded, and conquered, the easiest way to expand their monopoly of

violence was to incorporate pre-existing forms of kin-based justice. Two examples of

such 'hybrid policing' (that combined egalitarian justice with dominance-based state

power) are the 'frankpledge' system of early medieval England and the 'All Comrades'

societies of the Blackfoot First Nations.

Frankpledge and All Comrades Societies

When the French-speaking Vikings, known as the Normans (literally 'north men'),

invaded England in 1066 they set up England’s first large scale empire and a key part of

their occupation involved bringing local indigenous populations into their sphere of

control by incorporating their peace-keeping practices. This expansion of power was

necessary to gain a monopoly on force and it provided a method of keeping local villages

under Norman surveillance.

Norman state agents began formalizing the kin ties found pre-existing in every local

village into duties enforced by fines. The frankpledge (literally French-oath) required

every English male over 14 to belong to a 'pledge' of 10 other males. If one member of

the pledge committed a crime the others were responsible for bring their criminal pledge-

brother to the Norman authorities for punishment. If they failed to promptly do this the

whole pledge would be heavily fined. In modern terminology this was “a system of

compulsory collective bail fixed for individuals, not after their arrest for crime, but as a

safeguard in anticipation of it” (Critchley, 1972). A similar form of hybrid policing arose

6

Black Donnelly http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Donnellys 7 Hatfield-McCoy feud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 5

when the Normans formalized the widespread tribal custom of 'hue and cry.' This practice

traditionally meant that a villager witnessing a crime or act of violence would yell an

alert (hue and cry) bringing other people to gather and stop the violence or catch the

perpetrator. The Normans changed this into an enforced rule where those who did not

respond to the 'hue and cry' were fined.

A similar hybridization occurred when the kin-based justice of the Plains Blackfoot

encountered European imperial colonizers. In this instance, the driving force of change

was not the European occupiers themselves but the introduction of Europe’s most

powerful weapon—the horse—into Blackfoot culture. So important are horses to

military and policing cultures that the very word 'constable,' used to describe many

modern police officers, comes from the Latin term comes stabli literally 'the Count of the

stable.' The introduction of the horse, “revolutionized the [Blackfoot] culture and social

structures” and was vital to the emergence to the All Comrades societies whose general

functions “were primarily to preserve order in all circumstances and to punish offenders

against the public welfare whenever necessary” (Jefferson, 1994).

Go online and read the section on Blackfoot Traditional Justice (up to

Traditional Justice of the Cree) from Christie Jefferson’s Conquest by Law

for a fascinating account of the horse-based police force, also known as the

All Comrades warrior society that emerged in the Blackfoot culture. It is

perhaps one of the truest forms of community policing imaginable as it was

organically enmeshed in the community it served.

http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/cnqst-lw/index-eng.aspx

Part-time State Police

The Statute of Winchester of 1285 describes a common form of early urban policing

referred to as 'watch and ward' which required all able-bodied men to take turns in

guarding the gates to the town and enforcing night curfew (Critchley, 1972). These part-

time guards had the authority to call a 'hue and cry' if anyone resisted arrest. According to

Stansfield (1996), the 'watch and ward' was a typical stage in the transition from kin-

based justice policing to state (or public) policing:

Policing in towns during the Agricultural Era was a semiformal, part-time,

volunteer activity that was organized into a bureaucracy and proceeded

according to the principles of shared responsibility and delegated authority.

(Stansfield, 1996)

The idea of an organized but volunteer police force is an important transition to state-

based policing and so is the historical detail that some wealthier men who were reluctant

to serve on guard would pay others to perform their duty. An interesting description of

6 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

the volunteer-nature of such early state police forces—and the dangers inherent in it—

comes 2000 years ago from Athens.

In Athens, as in all of Greece’s city-states, policing was left up to the initiative of private

citizens: if someone stole your slave your only option was to convince the thief to hand

your slave back or gather your friends and try to re-claim the slave by force. There were a

few weak forms of state power in Athens that a citizen could try to use in these disputes

but with no state-paid police to enforce a ruling, it still came down to personal initiative.

The following example of an Athenian naval officers’ battle to retrieve state property

stolen by another naval officer illustrates the dangerous nature of trying to enforce the

laws of a weak state that does not have a monopoly of force.

When Theophemus, a former naval captain, failed to return some naval equipment

owned by the state to the dockyard whence it originated, his name was therefore

inscribed among the debtors to the state. As a consequence, the task of compelling

Theophemus to render up what he owed fell to one of the incoming naval captains.

Before resorting to self-help, the latter made a number of attempts to obtain the

equipment by approaching Theophemus personally in the street, to no avail. He

also brought a suit against him, as a result of which he won a court order

demanding that the equipment be returned. When he still did not persuade

Theophemus, the matter ended up before the assembly, which passed a decree

instructing all naval captains to “recover” the state’s property “in whatever manner

they could.” Decree in hand, the speaker then proceeded to Theophemus’s house,

accompanied by a public slave. Theophemus refused to comply, hurling threats and

insults at the pair with such vehemence that the slave was sent in search of passers-

by to witness the proceedings. Finally, when all arguments failed, the speaker

began to seize goods as security, including the slave who had answered the door.

Theophemus intervened to prevent the seizure, whereupon his opponent made a

move to enter the house to distrain 8

upon other property. A fistfight broke out and

the speaker was forced to depart empty-handed (Hunter, 1994).

From here the story only gets worse as the captain who tried to retrieve the stolen

property is then charged with assault by the thief, who then summons his brother-in-law

and proceeds to the captain’s house to start seizing his property, leading to yet another

fist-fight “fatally injuring an old nurse who tried to intervene” in the process (Hunter,

1994).

Eventually as states grew in power they no longer had to rely on hybrid or volunteer

forms of policing and were able to employ their own forces. For example, as Norman rule

became more powerful it set up a system of sheriffs (literally 'shire-reeves' or 'reeves of

the shire') who were responsible for maintaining the peace in local shires or counties. The

local population in a sheriff’s jurisdiction had “to report to the sheriff’s town any

suspicions they might harbour about one another” or face a fine (Critchley, 1972).

8 distrain http://www.thefreedictionary.com/distrain

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 7

Sometimes competing forms of police could arise as various state powers (kings, mayors,

generals, and aldermen) began creating their own police forces and much of Canadian

policing history concerns the struggle between federal, provincial, and municipal levels

of government trying to determine who would control, and, just as importantly, who

would pay for policing. By the 19 th

century many European nation-states had grown

powerful enough to fund various types of state police forces but it would be the British

model that would set the template for our contemporary Anglo-American police forces.

Now go online and read the sections on the Ancient, Middle Ages, Colonial,

and Spoils eras of policing from: A Brief Guide To Police History to discover

more about historical forms of policing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060831090142/http://faculty.ncwc.edu/

mstevens/205/205lect04.htm

Modern State Police

The general characteristics of police are that they have the authority to use force, are

accountable to government authority and they have general law enforcement duties with

the public. The general characteristics of modern police are that they are a single

organization of salaried personnel (with continuity in office/procedure), who have

citywide jurisdiction for criminal law enforcement (i.e., specialized function) with a

preventive orientation (Williams, 2004). In 1829 British politician Robert Peel would

bring the London Metropolitan Police into existence and many textbooks refer to that

date as the origin of modern policing. Yet it is more accurate to say that 1829 is the

beginning of modern urban policing because Robert Peel’s first attempt at creating a

police force occurred a decade earlier when he was appointed as chief secretary for

Ireland. It was there he laid the legislative seeds of what would become the first modern

rural police force—the Royal Irish Constabulary.

The history of the Royal Irish Constabulary [RIC] is often overlooked in traditional

criminology textbooks but it is an important stage, if for no other reason than the fact that

this force would serve as the blueprint for Canada’s own national force, the Royal

Canadian Mounted Police. The RIC is also important because Ireland, as a British colony,

became a laboratory for Peel’s very first experiment in creating modern policing and the

RIC’s successes and failures reveal some of the deepest dynamics involved in policing.

8 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

History of the Royal Irish Constabulary

Prior to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), policing in Ireland consisted

of 'watch and ward' patrols, tax collectors, a few city police forces and, most importantly,

occupying British military forces. When Peel was assigned to rule over Ireland in 1812,

Britain had been occupying the neighbouring island for over 200 years and while the

southern half of Ireland was now ruled by pro-English Protestants, Ireland’s northern

Catholic population continued in a bitter and sometimes violent resistance.

Peel’s goal was to bring Ireland under firmer British control through both compromise

and force, and part of his solution was to create a specially appointed body of armed men

that could be sent to any part of Northern Ireland to enforce British rule. Later acts would

expand Peel’s armed force to four constabularies, one for each Irish province, under the

control of Southern Ireland’s civil authorities. Peel used the Rifle Brigade of the British

army as a model and so the RIC’s uniform, training, and hierarchical structure were

basically that of the British Army. Accordingly the RIC were stationed in 'barracks'

(usually simple rented houses staffed by 4-5 officers), armed with rifles and horses,

disciplined with tough drills, and paid low army wages.

The Irish Constabulary’s first duty was the forcible seizure of tithes (taxes collected by

churches) from the Catholic population on behalf of the Protestant Anglican clergy

during the so-called Tithe War. Their second duty was to give protection to bailiffs

executing warrants and evicting tenants, a task made difficult by the Irish Land League

which sought to help poor tenant farmers by physically resisting the eviction of farmers.

Such duties were unpopular amongst many Constabulary officers (and are still disliked

by modern police 9 ) who were largely recruited from rural Irish backgrounds themselves.

The Constabulary faced constant unrest among the Irish agrarian poor, and even

‘terrorist’ acts from secret organizations like the Ribbonmen 10

when they were ordered to

arrest the leaders of the Land Leagues and any related political organizations.

By 1836 the force had grown to around 5,000 men and the first code of regulations was

published a year later. The RIC’s strict code of discipline included the following:

 Police should be “men respected by the people and obtain the good opinion of the

gentry, and officers were expected to attend to the “general improvement of their

mind” (Head, 1852).

 You had to at least 5' 9" tall.

 There were no rest days or annual leave.

9 disliked by modern police http://www.propertywire.com/news/north-america/us-sheriffs-foreclosure-

rates-200812122249.html 10

Ribbonmen http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F30B11FE3B581B7A93C6A8178

D85F458884F9

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 9

 Members were even banned from voting at parliamentary elections.

 Police were absolutely prohibited from entering a public house to socialize.

 Members were forbidden to marry until they had at least seven years service and

any potential bride had to be vetted by the constabulary authorities.

 Policemen and their wives could not sell produce, take lodgers, or engage in

certain forms of trade (for example, wives could be dressmakers but could not

employ apprentices).

 Special allowances were paid to encourage men in the ranks to employ servants,

as well as to maintain their own horse.

Peel’s wisdom in creating the new force was proven, at least from the perspective of the

British occupiers, when the constabulary demonstrated its efficiency against Irish

nationalists by suppressing the Young Ireland uprising in 1848 and the Fenian Rising of

1867. Both rebellions were suppressed due to the RIC’s extensive use of spies and

informers that lead to the capture, execution, and deportation (largely to Australia) of the

movements’ leadership. The loyalty of the Irish Constabulary to their English officers

during the Fenian rising was rewarded by Queen Victoria who granted the force the

prefix 'Royal' and the right to use the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick

(Thirty years later the RCMP would also be awarded the 'Royal' prefix for fighting

alongside the British Army in the South African Boer War).

Often forgotten today, part of the 1867 Fenian rebellion also took place in Canada where

Irish-American Civil War veterans purchased surplus army weapons to form a Fenian

raiding militia party and waged attacks against Canada. Soon defeated by British-led

Canadian militia units and American border guards, the captured Fenians were marched

through Toronto streets to be pelted with garbage before standing trial.

Irish nationalism continued to grow despite the success of the RIC in suppressing both

rebellions. The Irish Coercion Act or Perpetual Crimes Act of 1887 aimed at preventing

the “organization of conspiracies against the payment of rents” by abolishing the right to

trial by jury was especially unpopular. Hundreds of Irish people, including twenty Irish

Members of Parliament, were imprisoned under the act for the crime of donating funds to

evicted tenants. When a crowd threw stones at the police during the trial of a local

farmer, the RIC were told by their British commanders “do not hesitate to shoot” and

three civilians were killed.

Press accounts of armed RIC officers, sometimes supplemented by British soldiers, using

battering rams to evict tenants from small cottages was turning world opinion against the

British occupation. It was also straining relations between the now 11,000 RIC constables

stationed in 1,600 barracks dotting the countryside and the community they policed. The

10 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

locally controlled Belfast and Derry municipal police forces had to be disbanded and

absorbed by the RIC when they disobeyed English orders concerning evictions.

Despite the bad blood caused by the British occupation, by 1900 there was a marked

decline in Irish unrest as 'state-building' projects in Ireland funded local economic

development, introduced fairer land acts, extended the railways in North Ireland and

allowed for local government. As unrest declined criminal charges laid by the RIC were

more likely to be for misdemeanours such as public drunkenness and minor property

crimes instead of 'belonging to a secret organization' or 'unlawful armed assembly.' The

RIC happily settled down to low-key routine policing and the RIC’s military-grade

carbines and cannons were used more in drills and ceremonies than in practice.

The RIC had also become increasingly representative of the population it policed, and by

1913, 98% of recruits were Irish and 86% Catholic. RIC leadership which had

traditionally been recruited from British public schools and army ranks was now recruited

directly from within the ranks. The level of education of many RIC constables was often

above that of the local populace and policemen often provided the only source of literacy

and mathematical skills which locals could draw upon besides the local parish priest. An

RIC policeman could be called upon to compose people’s letters or do the accounts for

local shopkeepers.

Accordingly RIC constables began to enjoy a position of status in the areas they served

and the presence of an RIC constable at local social events, such as weddings and dances,

was expected as their company elevated the status of the event. A popular RIC officer

could expect to receive fond community sendoffs at their retirement or transfer.

However, all was not well. Ireland’s new prosperity meant a smaller pool of poor rural

males for the RIC to recruit from and the British government felt no need to pay a higher

wage if less rebellion was occurring. As many Irishmen opted for other better-paying

jobs, RIC constables complained that their low pay was denying them the ability to

maintain the appearance of being middle-class and the social isolation imposed on them,

such as regulations dictating no participation in political groups or unions, made finding

jobs for their kids difficult. Nor had the desire for freedom from British occupation been

completely extinguished in Ireland.

Britain’s participation in the First World War emboldened Irish nationalism and the

Easter Uprising of 1916 was the most significant uprising in Ireland in over a century.

With British troops stuck in European trenches, Irish nationalists began boldly forming

their own militias and court systems. As the situations worsened, RIC constables were

refused local service by businesses, threatened, and assassinated. Five-hundred police

barracks in outlying areas were preemptively evacuated by worried British authorities

and during a 3-month period 600 RIC constables resigned.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 11

To reinforce the shrinking, demoralized RIC force the British government raised wages

and began recruiting English and Scottish veterans from the First World War. These

veterans would form the notorious Black and Tans 11

Auxiliary Division of the RIC and

bring the brutality they learned in the industrial slaughter of the First World War to

Ireland, as the following orders from RIC commander Lt. Col. Smyth 12

from June 1920

documents:

If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks already occupied is not

suitable, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the

occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there—the more the merrier.

Should the order (“Hands Up”) not be immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot

with effect. If the persons approaching (a patrol) carry their hands in their

pockets, or are in any way suspicious-looking, shoot them down. You may

make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot

be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time.

The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman

will get into trouble for shooting any man. And I guarantee your name will

not be given to an inquest.

The Black and Tans savage tactics repulsed regular Irish RIC officers and some began

co-operating with the Irish nationalists in their raids on Black and Tans barracks.

In December 1920 the Government of Ireland Act partitioned the country creating the

Irish Free State. A year later a truce was agreed upon but 418 RIC personnel were still

killed that year. In January 1922 the RIC was officially disbanded and replaced with the

'Garda Síochána' in the Free State and the ‘Royal Ulster Constabulary’ in Northern

Ireland.

By the time it was disbanded the RIC’s complex history would encapsulate many of the

paradoxes and tensions found in police forces worldwide:

 The RIC was created as an occupation force but its rank and file officers were recruited from the population it was to occupy.

 The RIC was a force of economic and imperial domination; most infamously guarding the boats that transported Irish cattle to England during the Great Irish

Famine that killed a million Irish, yet individual officers were sometimes valued

members of local communities.

11

Black and Tans http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJv8QVRT09s 12

Lt. Col. Smyth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPKPlwR7_6k&feature=related

12 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

 The RIC successfully quelled multiple uprisings but it was economic and political reforms beyond their control that brought large-scale peace.

 The wages of the RIC were highest when the population most hated them and lowest when they were most respected. Their market value

13 was directly tied to

the amount of repression that the government expected of them.

Many ex-RIC officers went south to join the new ‘Royal Ulster Constabulary’ resulting

in a force that was originally 40% Catholic, however this percentage fell to 8% as these

men eventually retired and were not replaced by younger Catholics who rejected the

Ulster Constabulary’s English loyalty. Other ex-RIC officers joined the new 'Garda

Síochána' or fled with their families to England to avoid reprisal, but a significant number

joined other various British colonial police forces including Australia’s Victoria Police,

the Palestine Police Force, and various Canadian forces.

Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, specifically asked Britain for their

blueprint for the RIC when creating the Northwest Mounted Police—the forerunner to

today’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—and he appointed an RIC officer as

the Northwest Mounted Police’s first leader. Additionally, the Royal Newfoundland

Constabulary was also modeled after the RIC with ex-RIC officers as its first three

commanders and the British Columbia Provincial Police (disbanded in 1950) was created

by a former RIC officer. The RCMP now continues this export tradition by itself setting

up police forces in Anglo-American colonies around the globe 14

including controversial

training programs in Iraq 15

, Afghanistan 16

and Haiti 17

.

British Metropolitan Police

When Robert Peel returned from Ireland it was apparent that Britain needed its own

police force. England’s transition from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, factory-

based society had brought about a crisis in public order and its maintenance. Land-

owning elites were being replaced by capitalists who controlled the forces of production

and serfs were being set free to move to the towns where they became the social class

called the 'industrial proletariat.' Stansfield explains

By this stage in history, the forces of production (capital) began replacing

land as the principal element. There was an increase in the growth of the

industrial capitalist class. There was also a growth in poverty, poor living

conditions, unemployment, and crime. The people who stood to gain from

13

market value http://www.mississauga.com/print/27730 14

globe http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/po-mp/missions-curr-cour-eng.htm 15

Iraq http://thewalrus.ca/2005-03-security/ 16

Afghanistan http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/04/24/rcmp-afghanistan-elliott.html 17

Haiti http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/60/60-4.pdf

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 13

the emerging capitalist society, such as the urban bourgeoisie, feared those

people in the dangerous class or those who threatened law and order.

(Stansfield, 1996)

Growing numbers of people lived in deplorable urban conditions: poor sanitation,

overcrowding, poverty, unemployment, and poor health. All of these factors led to unrest.

Acting in his capacity as Britain’s Home Secretary, Robert Peel introduced legislation for

the creation of a public police force in 1829. These Bobbies, as they were called after

their creator (Bob being a short-form of Robert), were not unusual in themselves, many

London neighbourhoods already maintained efficient 'watch and ward' patrols. They were

unusual in that they were the largest body of uniformed men outside of the British

military and they answered to the Home Office of the federal government not to local

authorities.

In terms of duties, Bobbies were not created to be dedicated crime-fighters but 'agents of

social order' performing a wide variety of tasks now delegated to specialized state agents.

An English policemen had to: light street lights, call out the time, regulate traffic, ensure

roads were unimpeded, keep a watchful eye for unsafe buildings and burning chimneys,

administer first aid at accidents and drive ambulances, administer aspects of the poor law

(i.e., social services), look for missing persons, license street sellers and cabs, and

supervise the prevention of disease among farm animals.

Peel’s experiment with the RIC served as the basis for creating the Metropolitan force.

Both police forces were based on the English military hierarchy and selected

commanders from the upper military ranks. Like their Irish counterpart, new British

recruits were given a uniform, a personal weapon, and drilled in the military arts of

marching and shining boots, buckles, and badges. Yet Peel realized that a mounted

paramilitary force would not be accepted by the population, and so he fashioned the new

Metropolitan Police in a more civilian mode.

Due to such “public sensitivities, considerable attention was paid to the image and

styling, demeanour and status of the new police before they finally joined the parish

'watch and ward' (the Charlies) on the streets of central London at 6 p.m., Tuesday, 29

September, 1829.” In contrast to the dark green military uniforms of the RIC the new

Bobbies were given a blue uniform to indicate that they were a non-military service. The

distinct uniforms were also supposed to ease public fears that they were to be used as

undercover government spies as they often were in France. Despite these attempts to

emphasize the civilian nature of the police, some police officers still found their new

uniforms too military in appearance and a number of the first officers, both in Britain and

North America, maintained a strong “democratic suspicion” of any uniform and would

purposely fail to dress properly or adorn their uniform in “individualist or flamboyant

manners” to express their non-military nature (Emsley, 1996). The first Ontario

Provincial Police (OPP) officers called the idea of wearing uniforms “repugnant,”

“absurd,” and “dippy” (Higley, 1984).

14 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

The public also had a 'democratic suspicion' about the uniforms and an interesting

example of the sensitivity to the underlying paramilitary nature of police occurred in

2008 when Quebec’s largest police union, the Montreal Police Brotherhood, encouraged

officers to wear military-style 18

camouflaged pants “as a pressure tactic in ongoing

contract negotiations” (CBC News, 2009). Montreal’s police chief condemned the action

because “authority and respect is reflected in what they wear […] officers should not be

walking around in camouflage in neighbourhoods with substantial immigrant populations

who often ‘come from totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships’” (CBC News,

2009). Yet it was this same menacing nature of the paramilitary clothing that the police

union hoped to use to embarrass management into resolving a situation that saw Montreal

officers operate without a contract for two years.

As Reynolds (1998) writes,

It is hard to convey the depth of resistance to the idea of ‘police’ in late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.

Even though the ‘new police’ were drawn from the ‘ordinary classes,’ they

faced considerable derision, public hostility, and violent resistance to this

most ‘un-English’ of innovations from many different sectors. Well-attended

public meetings, placards, posters, and petitions demanded the abolition of

the ‘robin redbreasts,’ ‘crushers,’ ‘bluebottles,’ ‘bobbies,’ ‘coppers,’ ‘raw

lobsters,’ and ‘Peelers.’ The middle classes (bourgeois) protested against

having to pay for a public service that both lowered the tone of their

neighbourhoods and they did not believe would succeed. The working class

(proletariat) objected to the clampdown on leisure pursuits and the

unprecedented regulation of public space. London parishes took issue with

central government control while police magistrates complained about their

loss of power. Political radicals and nascent trade unions objected to the

introduction of an ‘alien’ force of gendarmerie, spies, and uniformed

troublemakers. (Reynolds, 1998)

Even the very word 'police' “was not popular among the English as it smacked of

absolutism” due to its use in France (Emsley, 1996) and The Times called the new police

an instrument “for the purposes of the arbitrary aggression upon the liberties of the

people” (The Times, 1842). The press would often highlight controversial police actions,

and particularly unpopular officers could find themselves burnt in effigy on public

holidays (McLaughlin, 2007).

This resistance to the new force was not just symbolic. The City of London (the historic

core area of Greater London and the centre of global capitalism) refused to allow Bobbies

within their small district and so did some outlying rural cities. One particular town

18

military-style http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2009/03/13/mtl-police-camo-protest-

0313.html

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 15

physically blocked any police from entering their town for years until a police station was

built under military supervision. To Britons, both bourgeois and proletariat, the

imposition of police answering to the remote central government ran contrary to their

self-image as 'freeborn Englishmen.' Battles over how best to democratically control the

police continue to this day.

IN FOCUS

The First Police Officers Killed on Duty

The first modern policeman to be killed on duty was Joseph Grantham, 31, who died

from a brain hemorrhage, after becoming involved in a fight between two London

drunks. The Coroner’s Inquest jury found the death was caused by “over-exertion in the

discharge of his duty” and his assailant was released without charge. Too little

information on this case is available to determine whether this finding was based in fact

or on political dislike for the new force.

The second police officer killed on-duty is better documented. In May 1833 the National

Union of Working Classes planned to hold their national convention in Cold Bath

Fields. When placards were posted announcing their intention, Lord Melbourne, the

Home Secretary, declared 19

the meeting illegal, but this provocative act only encouraged

more people to attend out of a mixture of curiosity and defiance of an unjust ban on the

right of assembly.

Over 1,000 people came to the national convention as did 300 Metropolitan Police

officers commanded by two commissioners, a lawyer and cavalry captain, and Lord

Melbourne. As the chaotic convention was being called to order a commotion arose

from the back of the crowd. The assembled police had blocked off all exits from the

field and had begun attacking the crowd. As a jury would later find,

no riot act had been read, no proclamation to disperse had been made, no

attempt to preoccupy the ground by the authorities had been made, the

police force, (as it is called) were marched in order and blocked up nearly

the whole of the persons who were assembled in the open space intended

for the meeting…every caution had been purposely omitted, for the

purpose of misleading and entrapping people. (Rowe, 1970)

19

declared http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history-from-police-

archives/Met6Kt/PublicOrder/poDocsHhCbDemo2.html

16 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

In the resulting battle 20

, three officers were stabbed, one fatally so—Constable Robert

Culley. Culley would become the second modern police officer to die on duty and a

coroner’s jury would again rule the officer’s death a “justifiable homicide” on the

grounds that the government did not take proper precautions to prevent the meeting

assembling in the first place and that “Culley was stabbed by a man whom the police, as

they did among the rest, assaulted, and put in bodily fear and danger” (Rowe, 1970).

This verdict was met with popular acclaim including celebratory dinners and silver

medallions for the jurors, but,

immediately after the verdict was given the morning newspapers attacked

it, in almost everyway in which it was possible to attack it. Some

comments of the Editors and some of the communications sent to them

showed both the knowledge and the talent to make the most of it. (Rowe,

1970)

The newspapers made Robert Culley’s widow the centre of the media campaign and

created enough outrage that a legal application “unprecedented in the history of English

Jurisprudence” was sent forward to quash the verdict of the jury but it was ultimately

unsuccessful (Rowe, 1970).

20

resulting battle http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15389

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 17

SECTION 1.2: Police as Labourer

The job of a police officer at the beginning of the 20 th

century varied greatly according to

the community in which they worked. Rural English police were described as “older

types, with heavy moustaches” armed with “heavy ash sticks and dog close at heel,” and

they might be expected to help fight outbreaks of animal disease and weed dirt roads.

Similarly, a 1910 Canadian newspaper described the village constable as “a local farmer

boy who cleaned the fire hall, then was promoted to 'pathmaster' and allowed to cut

weeds and impound cattle—and occasionally make arrests in dire situations.”

The duties of urban officers were increasingly dictated by the unending increase in the

volume of street traffic; as early as 1895 over half of all charges recorded in a London

officers’ notebook were against cab-drivers “who loitered and plied trade” and

pedestrians were already complaining that police “devote their attention to vehicles and

leave the public to cross the street as best they can” (Emsley, 1987). Yet all police at this

time shared common features:

 boring night shifts—made worse by strict regulations against officers going to

taverns, the habit of some children to hide in dark corners and whipping a rock at

an officers, and “the fears of ghost amongst younger officers”;

 dealing with people intoxicated by alcohol—who caused a majority of the public

disturbances in every country that is not ‘dry’;

 dealing with the many social ills that occurred in impoverished neighbourhoods;

 increasing bureaucracy, paper work, and court appearances;

 long hours; often 60-hour, 6-day weeks for 362 days a year (Christmas and Easter

were holidays);

 wages that were “assessed on the basis of that of an agricultural labourer or an

unskilled worker”;

 authoritarian employers who wielded near total control over an officer’s life.

With delivery boys and seamstresses earning more than the average police officer it was

hard to hire and retain men willing to patrol neighbourhoods where “getting drunk and

assaulting police officers was considered a right” or endure the “soul destroying

monotony of traffic control.” One survey of American officers at the turn of the century

found that “recruits were overweight, undersize, illiterate, alcoholic, syphilitic, and even,

in a Kansas City instance, wooden-legged” (Buntin, 2011).

18 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

In order to avoid this sort of disorder, Peel set very stern rules for Bobbies and only 600

of the first 2,800 Bobbies kept their jobs. By 1900 the Bobbies had earned popular

acceptance after 70 years of service—but their wages remained abysmal. The situation

was even worse in turn of the century Canada where “policing was not viewed as a full

time profession and in many communities the local police force was often relegated to a

back room of the local municipal office” (De Jong, 1997). Police faced the challenge

many workers were facing: to be seen as professionals, not just industrial labourers, and

to be paid accordingly. As other workers organized into unions and bargaining

associations to press their demands of better wages and working conditions, police

officers remained trapped in an occupation run on an uncompromising paramilitary

hierarchy that allowed no dissent. This situation was compounded by the fact that “[a]

Bobby is a man with no other trade in his hands in the vast majority of cases. So the

threat of losing a regular job has special terrors for him” (The Socialist Standard, 1919).

Unknown to all, the situation for all workers was about to be drastically re-ordered in the

wake of the titanic carnage and chaos of the First World War. In its aftermath a domestic,

working-class near-revolution would shake the Anglo-American empire to its core.

Police officers would find themselves torn between their working class roots and the

desperate demands of their state employers.

Mutiny of the Guardians of Order (1918 – 1919)

In 1914, 10,000 Canadian workers were on strike and by 1919 the number was 150,000

(Kealey, 1984). In the post-war period 1 in 5 American workers were on strike. Kealey

sums up the angry atmosphere that spread across the English-speaking world in the wake

of the First World War’s mass slaughters,

The specific material complaints by Canadian workers vary little from

1886 to 1919—unemployment, low wages, high prices, long hours, unsafe

and unsanitary conditions, abysmal housing, super-exploitation of women

workers, employer blacklists, non-recognition of unions, refusal of

collective bargaining—all remained constant working-class grievances.

What differs, post-1919, is the worker’s attitude. Their caution, desire for

respectability and, in some cases, near deference had transformed in a

clarion call for change: the capitalist system could not be reformed, it must

be transformed—production for profit must cease; production for human

use must begin. (Kealey, 1984)

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 19

The Great War had also created vast economic disruption and emptied government

coffers. Many returning soldiers found themselves unemployed. Police historian Staff

Sergeant Jack Templeman (2008) writes,

in 1919 as the soldiers were returning from the War unemployment was

very high and working conditions for those with jobs was poor with long

hours and low pay. There was also a lot of resentment across the country

by many who felt that foreign immigrants had taken over all the available

jobs.

Many desperate veterans turned to the sister profession of policing for work and by 1919,

around 40% of Metropolitan policemen were former soldiers, in the Ontario Provincial

Police (OPP) it was 79%. These soldiers brought an influx of militancy and

organizational ability to every profession they joined and police forces were no

exception. Despite the best efforts of police commissioners and captains to prevent the

creation of police unions, such associations began arising during the post-war period—

often organized through clandestine meetings with the support of larger unions.

To the ruling classes the notion of police trade unionism was akin to treason and the idea

that police unions were the first stage of “an attempt at a revolutionary seizure of power

was common throughout the British elite” (Jones, 2007). One British Admiral predicted

that the success of the police unions would encourage a revolt of the Navy, saying, “After

the police, the next strike will be the Navy! I know the British sailor to his very core! ...

the authorities will now have a mutiny as sure as fate!” (Fisher, 1959). An American

Senator saw police unions as “the first step to sovietizing the country” (Wieneke, n.d.).

Lloyd George, the British prime minister of the time, summed up the “horror of Britain’s

ruling class, and their determination to crush police trade unionism forever” when he

announced, “unless this mutiny of the Guardians of Order is quelled the whole fabric of

law may disappear” (George, 1919).

To many police it was the dictatorial, anti-labour attitudes of such rulers, as much as low

wages, that prompted them to form unions. The head of a newly formed London police

union called for the “democratisation of the police force, the ending of militarism in the

Metropolitan Force” and the common police union motto of “Tyranny is not discipline”

appealed to many officers, particularly some returning soldiers who “after being

subjected to the horrors of the trenches were less tolerant of authoritarian discipline”

(LHASC, 1919).

Police unionization was also encouraged by the growing class consciousness and

solidarity among all workers. Traditionally labour and police were enemies and many

labour supporters considered men who joined the police to be ‘class traitors’ because they

came from the same pool of untrained manual labourers but earned their wage by

strikebreaking and infiltrating labour and socialist organizations. A union organizer of the

time stated that gaining workers’ support for the police was “one of the hardest jobs I

ever undertook” (Pollitt, 1940). London dock workers asked him: “how can you stick up

20 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

for the coppers? They batoned us down in the Dock Strike in 1912” (Pollitt, 1940). In

response police union organizers promised to end this “brotherly conflict” and swore that

“the day when the Government can use the police forces as a tool against any other

section of the nation is past” (The Times, 1919). The end of such conflict also appealed to

police officers, as one union organizer reflected in his diary, “one of the reasons why the

Union was set up was because the men themselves resented being forced to do this

blackleg labour” (Solidarity, 1919).

It was the possibility of a labour-sympathetic police force that most scared the Anglo-

American ruling elites and they feared “that they were losing what has been in the past a

tool used for strike-breaking” (Solidarity, 1919). In their decision to revoke the first

Toronto Police’s union charter, the Ontario government ruled that

In our judgment, the suggested advantages that would accrue from [police]

affiliation with the Trades and Labour Congress are far outweighed by the

evil that would flow from being so affiliated and with the unrest in

industrial circles which now prevails, would in our judgment, be most

undesirable that the members of the Police Force of Toronto should

become members of the unions affiliated with the Trades and Labour

Congress. Our conclusion therefore is that it is not advisable for the

Toronto Police Union to continue to hold its present Charter (Toronto

Police Association, 2006).

Facing stiff, occasionally panicked, ruling class fears, police unions were only able to

emerge in towns that already had strong labour communities. In three such cities—

Winnipeg, London, Boston—the fight to gain recognition of police unions, or in the case

of Winnipeg the recognition of any workers’ union, came to explosive confrontations

between workers and state authorities.

Police Strikes in London, Boston, and Winnipeg

As early as 1916, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police warned “troublesome

times are ahead, and it is particularly important to keep the police happy” (Henry, 1916)

but the stubborn refusal of governments to agree to any police demand, much less

recognize their unions, had brought the conflict between police workers and their

employers to a complete deadlock. Unable to gain any compromise, the embryonic police

unions in London and Boston decided to go on “strike.” Due to their refusal to

compromise and almost fanatical cheapness, the Anglo-American ruling class “nearly

lost control over the main arm of the state apparatus” (Jones, n.d.).

The demands of Boston and London police were the same: higher wages and better

working conditions. In Boston the conditions were especially harsh as wages for new

officers had not risen in sixty years and officers worked between 73 and 98 hours a week

for 7 days a week with a day off every other week—but they could not leave town during

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 21

their day off without permission. There were also important local differences. In Boston

“there was also an ethnic overlay as Protestant Yankees sought to control the Irish-

Catholic rank and file of the Boston Police Department” while the London strike had an

explicitly political edge as “under the leadership of the National Union of Police and

Prison Officers, militantly class-conscious policemen conspired to overturn their role as

the subservient body of the State” (Jones, n.d.). According to Critchley, a historian

(1978):

[the London police strike] of August 1918 to August 1919 amounted to 'a

struggle between organised labour to secure control over the police in a

way that would encourage their sympathy in industrial disputes, and the

determination of the Government to preserve their neutrality.' Police

radicals, however, did not believe that the Government was struggling to

'preserve their neutrality,' but rather to preserve their partiality towards

State and property.

In contrast to both London and Boston, the strike in Winnipeg was not a police strike but

a larger general strike joined by the police. The Winnipeg police already had a fledgling

union but were almost forced into joining the general strike by the paranoia of their

employers. As Winnipeg Staff Sergeant Templeman (2008) summarizes it:

The result of these [poor economic and labour] conditions lead to the

demand for a general strike in cities across the nation. It was only in

Winnipeg that the unions were strong enough to actually bring the city to a

standstill for a number of weeks beginning in May. There was concern that

the police were in sympathy with the strikers and because their union was

affiliated with the other unions they may actually strike themselves.

The Police Commission refused to deal with the police union and although

the union officers stated they would never go on strike or sympathize, they

were given the option of getting out of their union or face immediate

dismissal. A deadline was set and on June 9th and 10th Chief MacPherson

called each officer and staff member into his office and requested that he

sign the oath of allegiance to the department and the city and to reject

membership in a union.

Altogether 252 members were dismissed on those days while 22 signed the

oath. This in effect wiped out the entire police department and another

black period came over the police force.

With this mass dismissal of the police force the Winnipeg Police Commission gave a

wide-scale strike the critical mass to become the largest General Strike that has every

occurred on North America soil. The critical position of the police preventing or allowing

General Strikes to occur can also be seen in the description given by a Finnish worker

describing a 1905 General Strike:

22 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

I took part in the meeting that decided on the strike. Enthusiasm was high,

we sang songs and recited poetry. When the meeting ended, we rushed out

the gate, we stopped the first streetcar coming toward us, and lifted it off

the tracks yelling “The strike has started!” The strike became complete

when the police joined with us (Kisko, 1976).

The lack of union solidarity in Boston, and of unions in general, precluded any larger

General Strike. Instead when Bostonians became aware that the police were on strike, “a

frenzy of looting, gambling and mayhem” broke out in the downtown core and the mayor

called in the mounted State Guard to restore order and break the strike (Wieneke, 1997).

Fearing that the State Guard was undermanned, the President of Harvard University

encouraged students to volunteer to join them and he received an 'enthusiastic' response

from athletics and business students. The student volunteers soon found themselves at

risk from both police strikers and unsympathetic crowds and the Commander of a South

Boston police station had to keep the Harvard volunteers inside the station to protect their

lives.

Worker solidarity in Winnipeg avoided this sort of social unrest by the creation of striker

committees to maintain order and by asking people to stay at home and not cause any

trouble. A similar tactic was used in the 1905 Finland General Strike when the strikers

“established a red guard to uphold and keep order in the town” (Kisko, 1976). Despite the

relative peacefulness of the Winnipeg strike, the responses of the local capitalists and

Manitoba state authorities were similar to those of Boston:

The Winnipeg City Council asked for government help and a number of

members of the Royal North West Mounted Police were brought to the

city and several local military units were ordered to assist the local

government. In addition Council authorized hiring 1,400 ‘special

constables’ at $2.00 a day. There was no time to put these ‘specials’ into

uniform or properly equip them so they were issued white armbands,

badges and rough wooden clubs or batons. Some of the ‘specials’ who had

served in the military formed a mounted unit with donated horses.

(Templeman, 2008)

The hiring of ill-disciplined 'specials' almost immediately caused trouble, and a conflict

soon broke out between the 'specials' and strikers. This conflict sparked what is now

known as Black Saturday when a contingent of mounted Royal Northwest Mounted

Police (RNWMP) officers charged down Main Street swinging batons and firing into the

crowd to break-up the fight—leaving two strikers dead and many more injured. The

complex relationship between police and the larger labour movement is illustrated in

Black Saturday because police officers were both in the RNWMP charge to break the

strike and amongst the strikers resisting it.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 23

When London authorities sent soldiers to disperse 12,000 striking Metropolitan

constables gathering around government buildings, soldiers refused to obey orders,

instead the “strikers held the soldiers’ rifles as they dismounted, and there were hearty

cheers” (Daily Express, 1918). The sight of police and soldiers working together sparked

panic among ruling circles. According to one Government figure of the time, the

supposed defenders of the status quo had surrounded Downing Street with “a very

menacing attitude ... [and] made the occupants feel that they were really face to face with

a revolution” (Riddell, 1933).

Unable to use force to break the strike the British government resorted to the familiar

political tactics of carrot and stick. On July 8, the British Government introduced a Police

Bill that would result in the automatic firing of any policeman who was “a member of

any trade union” while simultaneously doubling, and later quadrupling, police wages

(Jones, 2007). To many rank and file Metropolitan officers this was an offer they could

not refuse.

Pyrrhic Victories

For the Boston police the strike was a disaster leaving eight people dead (five killed by

the State Guard) and over twenty people seriously wounded. The American corporate

press was quick to demonize the strikers saying that “...no man’s house, no man’s wife,

no man’s children will be safe if the police force unionized and made subject to the

orders of Red Unionite bosses” (Danver, 2011). When the police strikers suggested that

the officers be reinstated, the Police Commission responded by firing every officer and

hiring an entirely new police force—with increased wages and better working conditions.

Most Winnipeg officers were allowed to rejoin the department if they were now willing

to sign the loyalty oath, but a blacklist of 'undesirable officers' were not rehired. The

Winnipeg police union was also dissolved and replaced by the creation of a Winnipeg

City Police Athletic Association. Despite being created as a non-political sporting club

the Police Athletic Association “was in fact the origin of the present Winnipeg Police

Association which later became the officer’s legal bargaining agent” (Templeman, 2008).

The strike in London had similar ambiguous results. Police unions were outlawed but one

policeman told a newspaper that: “We have had a great deal to complain about in the

past, and I believe that the last strike helped us very much, but today we are being treated

better than at any time since I joined the force. Our position is quite comfortable now...”

(Morning Post, 1919).

Both the Boston and London police unions can be said to have lost the battle but won the

war and the same statement could be said in general about the Winnipeg General Strike.

None of the Winnipeg strikers’ demands were met and many strike leaders were jailed,

yet the strike marked a turning point in Canadian labour history “as it left a powerful

legacy in the minds of working Canadians” (Heron, 1998). In the next provincial election

11 labour candidates won seats in the Manitoba legislature—including four of the strike

24 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

leaders. One of the strikers, a Methodist minister named James Woodsworth, would

found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) which later became the New

Democratic Party (NDP).

Despite the gains in wages and working conditions attained, forty years later, when social

unrest in the 1960s prompted another round of police unionization, the Toronto police

unions would still be complaining about the “conservative and authoritarian” nature of

their employers who were “unwilling to accept the Association as a partner in working

towards tolerable industrial relations” (Toronto Police Association, 2006). Yet the

relationship between governments and police unions would soon undergo a radical

transformation in the last quarter of the 20th century as the next section will illustrate.

IN FOCUS

Do Police Strikes cause Social Disorder?

Does crime increase when police go on strike? This is a fascinating sociological

question but very difficult to research because there have been so few modern large-

scale police strikes, And, of course, when the police do go on strike there is no one to

fill out police reports which are the main source of crime data. Examining the police

strikes of 1918-1919 gives mixed results; the strikes in Winnipeg and London did not

result in any large-scale criminality but the Boston strike and a smaller police strike

in Liverpool both resulted in mass disorder including looting and violence. Two more

recent strikes, a Montreal police strike in 1969 and a 1976 police strike in Finland, are

better documented.

The Montreal strike, or Black Tuesday as it was later dubbed, occurred when the city

authorities, cash strapped from hosting the popular World Expo of 1968, offered a salary

raise to their police that lagged $800 behind Toronto police salaries. In response the

police union declared a 24-hour strike that resulted in wide-spread social disorder. Six

banks were robbed, over a 100 shops were looted, twelve fires were started, and two

people were killed including one police officer. That night the provincial government

passed an emergency law ordering police to return to work or be fined $100 a day per

striker. The final cost of the damages was totalled at three million dollars not including

the costs of deploying 600 soldiers and 300 RCMP officers to restore order.

In contrast the Finnish strike was much longer and larger—with over 70% of the

nation’s total police force on strike—yet the results were minor. Researchers using

emergency room data and surveys found a small increase in most crimes but concluded,

the police strike did not contribute to a radical breakdown in crime

control and public order… while other police strikes are cited as having

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 25

led to anarchy within the affected jurisdictions, such a general scenario

for police strikes is not supported by the consequences of the Finnish

police strike. (Makinen & Takala, 1980)

The largest lesson taken from comparing the two strikes is that attention must be paid to

the community involved not just the presence or absence of policing. In Montreal the

chaos began when “a relatively small band of thugs, militant students and separatists”

attacked upper-class Anglophone restaurants and stores like the Queen Elizabeth and

Windsor Hotels and expensive shops along St. Catherine’s Street (Time Magazine,

1969). Such attacks must be put in the context of English-French tensions

and the rise of Quebec nationalism in this era. The Montreal police officer killed after

returning to work in obedience to the emergency legislation was accidentally shot when

he intervened in a war that broke out between rival taxi and limo companies. Such a

'war' can emerge in the absence of police but the tensions causing it are to be found in

capitalistic struggles and unfair monopolies. The peacefulness of the Finnish strike has

been attributed to cold weather, the fact that the Winter Olympics were on TV and, most

importantly, the fact that Finland had no organized crime, simmering internal tensions,

or political discontents waiting to erupt in the absence of police.

Such ambiguous results do not support the popular belief that without a constant police

presence every modern city would rapidly descend into anarchy. It also does not support

the underlying philosophical and theological views that humans are essentially sinful

and in need of continuous discipline. Such a view is well expressed by an American

clergyman’s perspective on the Montreal strike,

For 24 hours, Montreal, one of the larger cities of the world, was without

law enforcement. It was a day of anarchy, of freedom from all restraints,

because there was no authority, no enforcement of the law.

Can you imagine a baseball game with no umpires? With no rules, no

regulations? [..] Everything would be flexible and total anarchy would

prevail on the baseball field unless there were rules and regulations and

people to enforce those rules. When we demand freedom to do as we

want, the right to disobey God’s law and rebel against His authority,

anarchy is the result. (Newland, n.d.)

Two sources make up a very small sample but an initial hypothesis would be that in the

sudden absence of policing, populations that are on the whole politically and

economically content do not suddenly become violent or criminal; it is groups who are

already in conflict that use the opportunity to act or settle scores. The major causes of

violence in Montreal were separatists already fighting what they saw as unjust English

control of their province and taxi services already in economic competition.

26 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

Police Unions

There are some similarities between modern police officers now and their counterparts

from 100 years ago, such as, long shifts, paperwork, and dealing with drunks, but in

terms of salary and benefits they are worlds apart. A modern Canadian police officer after

five years of employment can expect to be paid over $70,000 a year ($72,125 with the

RCMP, $75,926.00 with the OPP, $71,522 with Toronto police and $74,619 with the

Vancouver police) with a package of benefits—including a family health plan, dental

plan, life insurance, pension, and paid vacation—that would astonish earlier generations

of officers.

Since the police strike in the wake of the First World War becoming a police officer has

become a fairly reliable method for unskilled labourers, including many immigrants and

rural poor, to enter the middle class—and increasingly the upper-middle class. In 2004,

250 Toronto police officers earned more than $100,000 and by 2010 that number was

1,329 (Powell, 2010).

One force driving the increase in police wages was that Anglo-American governments

learnt in 1918-1919 that not paying the 'main arm of the state apparatus' could lead to

dangerous revolts. The other force driving this increase, especially since the end of World

War Two, was that police unions demanded wages comparable to the wages of other

workers—and were able to successfully use collective bargaining to get it.

The Rise of Police Unions

Technically, police 'unions' don’t exist; there are only police 'associations' that function

as if they were unions in collective bargaining arrangements. This compromise reflects

the historical hostility of the Anglo-American ruling elites, stretching down from Prime

Ministers to chiefs of police, towards police unionization. Such police associations have

their origin in the common industrial tactic of employers’ funding 'company unions' to

placate workers and prevent the creation of real unions. Employer-controlled company

unions are derisively referred to as yellow dog unions 21

or nickel-rashers in labour circles.

An extreme example of this can be seen in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

RCMP management has successfully resisted all unionization attempts despite multiple

court challenges. Instead RCMP officers are represented by elected members in a Staff

Relations Representative Program (SRRP) which is funded by the RCMP (not union

dues) and does not have the power to negotiate a collective agreement nor regulate

working conditions. A less extreme example is the origin of the Police Association of

Ontario (PAO) which represents Ontario’s 68 municipal police associations. The PAO

was founded by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) in 1933 and the

CACP has both strong ties to the Canadian and American ruling establishment and a deep

21

yellow dog unions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-dog_contract#Yellow-dog_union

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 27

antipathy to organized labour. The PAO in turn founded the OPP’s ‘union’ in 1954, the

Ontario Provincial Police Association (OPPA), and was instrumental in guiding the

Toronto Police Association (TPA).

This successful chain of company unions was created as a firewall between the Ontario

police associations and the larger trade union movement. Yet not all police unions started

as company unions and even some of those that did grew independent of their origin. In

1944 “the PAO, ignoring its roots, became a rank-and-file organization” that was “no

longer dominated by Chiefs and Deputies” (Toronto Police Association, 2006). This

move to independence was tied into the Toronto Policing Association (TPA) own

decades-long struggle to be recognized which was finally successful in the same year.

The militancy of police unions grew even stronger in the late 1960s and 1970s as this

historical summary from the Toronto Police Association’s (2006) documents:

A 1967 arbitration decision that was extremely favourable to the

Association led the way for future militancy. President Syd Brown, who

also served terms as President of both the Police Association of Ontario

(PAO) and the Canadian Police Association (CPA), spearheaded the

charge. During the period from 1964 to 1971, the salary of a First Class

Police Constable increased from $5,904 to $10,750, benefits increased

dramatically and working conditions improved.

The TPA’s aggressive tactics led the way for other associations and police unions to take

similar action such as the Montreal Brotherhood’s strike in 1969. By 1976, police labour

unrest had spread across the country. In Sydney, Nova Scotia, officers refused to cross

the picket lines of a strike with which they sympathized. Metro police went on a

slowdown over two-man cars. Regina went on an illegal strike to speed up contract

negotiations.

In many ways the police unions could not lose during these turbulent periods of time. As

social unrest grew out of various protest movements, the necessity of keeping the police’s

loyalty, and their ability to enforce domestic order on the streets, was clear if the ruling

classes wished to avoid a repeat of 1918-1919. Every demonstration (by feminists,

organized labour, First Nation nationalists, anti-war groups etc.) increased the market

value of police officers. Yet as leftist groups, especially organized labour, gained

government concessions on wages and employment conditions through their struggles,

police unions were also able to demand similar concessions from their government

employers. The militancy of the era seemed to be contagious.

During the 1980s, many unions found themselves in a much weakened position as

strongly anti-union, right-wing governments came to power in most Anglo-American

countries. Organized labour suffered several high-profile defeats like Ronald Regan’s

breaking of the air controller’s strike in 1981 (a union whose militancy came from the

large number of Vietnam War veterans in its ranks) and Margaret Thatcher’s violent

28 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

suppression of a bitter coal miner’s strike in 1984. Yet such anti-union clashes only again

increased the market value of the police forces needed to break these strikes—and so

gave more bargaining clout to police unions. This paradoxical dynamic recently

expressed itself again in the 2011 British riots following the fatal police shooting of an

unarmed teenager when just one day after the riots began British police unions were

already “clearly shaping police reform debate by suggesting riots mean you cannot cut

manpower, pay, pensions, etc.” (Hinsliff, 2011).

The increased power of police unions in the modern era meant Toronto police officers

were not afraid to engage in a lengthy job action to protest low wages in 1985 and, more

ominously, a province-wide job action when new use-of-force reporting requirements

were legislated in 1991 (Toronto Police Association, 2006). Police unions had grown to

the point where they were no longer just protesting low wages but exerting political

control over how they used force. This was a new and unsettling development in Ontario

democracy. Nowhere was this danger more clear than in the Toronto Police Association

under the presidency of Craig Bromell during the 1990s.

IN FOCUS

Major Police Unions

‘Rank And File’ Unions

Toronto Police Association (TPA)

Founded: 1944 (Incorporated as a non-profit 1956)

Members: 5,400 officers and 2,700 civilians

History: Withdrew from PAO in 1998

https://www.tpa.ca/about-us/history/

Police Association of Ontario (PAO)

Founded: 1933

Established full-time Ottawa lobby group: 1988

Members: 13,000 police and civilian members from 68 municipal police forces

History: Formed by the Chief Constables of Canada

http://www.pao.ca/public_interface_1.php?page=../secure/library/000-history.html

Ontario Provincial Police Association (OPPA)

Founded: 1944

Members: 5,443 non-commissioned offices; 2,437 civilians (“raided” from CUPE)

History: Founded by PAO and rejoined PAO in 2003

https://www.oppa.ca/about/our-history

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 29

Canadian Police Association (CPA)

Founded: 1962

Members: 41,000 members from 170 police services nationwide

History: Formed when the Western Canadian Police Association (est. 1948)

absorbed Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia police unions

http://www.cpa-acp.ca/

International Council of Police Representative Associations (ICPRA)

Founded: 1996 (by CPA at their Annual General Meeting in Windsor, Ontario) /

Members: the leadership of the “Anglo” police unions (Australia / England and

Wales Northern Ireland / Scotland / Canada) and the USA’s National

Association of Police Organizations (NAPO)

Mandate: to “assume the International Policing Voice”

Senior Officers Unions

OPP Commissioned Officers Association (COA)

Founded: 1974 (King Edward Hotel in Toronto)

Members: 143 Commissioned OPP Officers (i.e., Inspector, Superintendent and

Chief Superintendent)

Mandate: “establish a communication link between the Commissioned Officers

and the Senior Executive of the OPP”

Ontario Senior Officers’ Police Association (OSOPA)

Members: 590 police officers and managers (as well as the interests of other 33

Ontario Senior Officer associations)

Management Associations

Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP)

Founded: 1951 (as Chief Constables Association of Ontario)

Members: 1000 (Active, Honorary, Life, Associate, and Affiliate)

Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP)

Founded: 1905 Toronto (as Chief Constables Association of Canada)

Incorporated as a non-profit in 1968; Established full-time Ottawa

lobby group: 1970s

Members: 300 active Senior Law Enforcement Executives (and 786 retired)

(90% of Canadian police chiefs and senior executives)

30 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)

Founded: 1893 in Chicago (as “National Chiefs of Police Union”); Moved

headquarters to Washington, D.C. in 1940

Bromell’s Kingdom

Most Canadians first heard of Craig Bromell and the frightening power the Toronto

Police Association (TPA) had under his rule when he appeared as the subject of CTV’s

program The Fifth Estate 22

in 2000. In the investigative documentary, the TPA appeared

less like a police union than an organized crime outfit with Bromell as its menacing

godfather:

Mr. Bromell accepted the bully label during a television interview in

which he discussed his association’s campaign to “target our enemies”—

defined as any politician his association considered to be “an enemy of the

police”—and try to get them kicked out of office. “All the other

loudmouths, they’re going to keep their mouths shut.” (Barber, 2002)

Just as disturbing was the footage of a Toronto Deputy Chief of Police discussing his fear

of TPA’s power: their private investigators, political ties, and influence over rank-and-

file officers. When the same Deputy Chief was later forced to leave Toronto following a

successful TPA campaign to remove him, it only increased people’s fears that the TPA

under Bromell was becoming a power unto itself.

22

The Fifth Estate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkZHtPm2amY

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 31

Craig Bromell wanted to join the police because he had grown up “watching cop shows

on television” and he became an officer assigned to Toronto’s infamous Division 51,

sometimes known as 'Fort Apache' due to the hostile relationship it had with the

surrounding predominately non-white neighbourhoods (Fine, 1999). As an officer at

Division 51, Bromell’s militancy was already clear. Bromell came to prominence in 1995

when he organized officers at a downtown precinct to lock themselves in their police

station to protest the laying of charges against police officers who had been involved in

the brutal arrest of two innocent black men. When some officers were disciplined for

being overly aggressive, Bromell lead a wildcat strike in protest. Later when an officer

was injured by a homeless man he was arresting, Bromell and eight other officers took

the homeless man to a deserted lot and “severely beat him” (Robson, 2009). If such

actions made Bromell disliked by his superiors, they made him a hero to the other

officers and he was elected TPA president in 1997 despite a lawsuit regarding the beating

of a homeless man hung over his head.

One of his first acts in his TPA presidency was to conduct fact-finding missions to

notoriously tough Los Angeles, Texas, and Las Vegas police unions. Bromell would later

state he “learn[ed] a lot” from the American police unions. What Bromell learned seemed

to be the ‘the legal-political model’ of police union bargaining promoted by the Los

Angeles Police Protective League. The core tactics of this model can be summarized as;

confrontation works, build a war chest, and flex political power. An examination of how

Bromell put these three tactics into practice also provides us with a critical history of the

TPA in the 1990s.

Three Key Tactics of 'Legal-Political' Police Union Bargaining

i) Confrontation Works

If the Toronto police who elected Bromell to act as their union representative expected

him to bring his aggression and disdain for authority to the bargaining table, they were

right. Bromell “press[ed] hard in negotiations, rather than depending on arbitration” and

his willingness to be confrontational quickly established Bromell “as the most successful

labour leader in Canada” (Barber, 2002). After three hard-fought contracts bargained by

Bromell, the Toronto police were the highest paid police in the country “with a pretty

good pension, and rights that are second to none” and the Toronto police budget had risen

by $90-million (Barber, 2002). Bromell’s confrontational nature did not apply to just

contract negotiations; it also applied to the civilian oversight of the Toronto Police

Services Board (PSB), the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), and the media.

A municipalities’ Police Services Board (PSB) is the main civilian body for overseeing

the police and it became a prime target for the TPA. 'Pro-police' members were given

special treatment from the union, like free bullets at a local firing range, but 'anti-police'

members, like Judy Sgro and Olivia Chow, suffered a relentless campaign of lawsuits,

harassment, and petitions until they left the board. The fact that Sgro and Chow belonged

32 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

to the Liberal and NDP parties respectively while the 'pro-police' members were

Conservatives reflected a deeper political alignment. Yet even 'pro-police' member

Jeffrey Lyons, a prominent Conservative politician, said he felt “intimidated” by the TPA

and “ordered his office swept for electronic eavesdropping devices on learning that the

police association was investigating his activities” (Jones, 2000). The TPA’s blunt

interference in the PSB seemed to have the desired effect of rendering it ineffective as

Julian Falconer, representing the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and the Chinese

Canadian National Council, stated, “Everyone is running scared. This [police services]

board is in disarray” (Duncanson & Quinn, 2000).

The TPA’s next target was the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) which is called in by

police departments to investigate any situation where a civilian is seriously injured by the

police. To undercut the SIU, the TPA printed posters advising its members not to speak

with SIU investigators and launched an ad campaign denouncing SIU decisions. Private

investigators were also hired to shadow SIU investigations. The relation between the

TPA and SIU reached a nadir when the union sued the director of the SIU for $3-million

alleging malicious persecution.

Any local media critical of the police was also subject to similar treatment. When the

Toronto Star ran a series examining the subject of racial profiling in the Toronto Police,

the TPA responded by encouraging police officers and police supporters to cancel

subscriptions to the newspaper in order to “send the clear message that principles are

more important than profits” (Adelaide, 2002). Even the prominently pro-police Toronto

Sun found itself on the receiving end of a TPA lawsuit when they ran a story the TPA

thought was too critical of Toronto police.

With no social or political institutions seemingly able to check the TPA’s power during

this era it is perhaps no coincidence that the height of Bromell’s uncontrollable reign was

also called the “low-water mark 23

” for the Toronto Police's behaviour.

ii) Build a War Chest

In politics a 'war chest' refers to a stockpile of disposable money that can be used to pay

for the various expenses incurred in political campaigns. The TPA’s war chest would be

used to launch lawsuits, defend themselves from lawsuits, hire private investigators, fund

media campaigns, and unseat 'anti-police' politicians. Despite the already sizable war

chest available from the union dues of over 7,000 officers, Bromell’s ambitious plans

required even more cash and so he launched the Operation True Blue campaign which

became the TPA’s most infamous endeavour.

23

low-water mark http://forum.dancehallreggae.com/showthread.php/122281-Babylon-Crooked-%28Gr-5-

reading-skills-necessary%29?s=229496461a397a51e26ec13635876ede&p=2074099#post2074099

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 33

The premise of Operation True Blue was simple, the TPA hired a telemarketing agency

to call Torontonians and read the following script: “You do agree that it is important to

support the police, don’t you Mr./Mrs./Ms. [NAME]?” and then asked them if they would

like to buy a car decal to show their support. The decals cost $25 for a bronze one and

$100 for a gold one. The TPA claimed that the decals symbolized a person who “supports

tougher laws for juveniles and repeat parole violators” but everyone else wondered if

someone who had a gold $100 TPA decal in their rear-window would receive the same

police treatment as someone else who did not? To too many Torontonians, Operation

True Blue appeared to be a chance to buy favourable police discretion (Duncanson,

2000).

The political uproar caused by Operation True Blue caused both Toronto’s mayor and

Chief of Police to order the TPA to end the campaign, but Bromell was defiant,

responding to Chief Boothby’s order to stop, by stating, “he doesn’t have any power over

us.” The exasperated mayor, Mel Lastman, stated that “there is no way this police union

executive is going to hold our city hostage” and urged rank-and-file officers to vote out

the entire union executive to no avail (Duncanson, 2000). This was a surprising act by

Lastman who had received the TPA’s political endorsement as a pro-police candidate, but

“the police’s defiance of civilian authorities was disrupting the police’s established chain

of command and threatening to discredit the legal system” (Jones, 2000).

When the city threatened to pass a by-law outlawing telemarketing by the TPA, Bromell

threatened to take “the ultimate step by joining the [TPA to] Washington, D.C.’s based

National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO)”. Ontario’s Solicitor-General

(a.k.a. the Minister for Public Safety) was forced to intervene because,

whatever the outcome of the various legal cases arising from Operation

True Blue, the Toronto Police Association’s assertion of police political

power and its readiness to defy civilian authorities raise disturbing

questions about the state of democratic rights. (Jones, 2000)

In a compromise, the Chief of Police dropped the misconduct charges against the TPA

while the TPA stopped the telemarketing campaign, but the TPA kept the $300,000 they

had already collected.

iii) Flex Political Power

A key foundation of modern policing has been their political neutrality. As Paul

Copeland of the Law Union of Ontario bluntly puts it, “It has been a constitutional

condition that army, police, and judiciary be politically neutral. When they’re not, the

term is ‘police state’” (Copeland, 2002). This separation between politics and policing is

enshrined in section 46 of the Police Services Act that states: “No municipal police

34 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

officer shall engage in political activity, except as the regulations permit 24

.” These

regulations allow a wide range of political activity by off-duty officers as long as they do

not claim to be representing the police force.

When an OPP officer in Marathon was elected mayor in 2003 he was charged under the

Police Services Act by the OPP with discreditable conduct and insubordination. The

same punishment was given to Constable Dennis Tappenden, a failed Progressive

Conservative candidate in the riding of Nickel Belt during the 1980 federal election.

When the Nickel Belt constable claimed he was entitled to run under the Public Services

Act his Staff Sergeant said “that the Police Services Act has precedence over the Public

Services Act” (Lavigne, 1980). Police unions, on the other hand, claim that the Police

Services Act has no jurisdiction over them because union executives are not acting as

police officers and some unions have no qualms about blurring the line between policing

and politicizing.

Even before Bromell came to power, the TPA had begun the practice of endorsing

candidates, and in 1993 the TPA sent 300 officers on paid leave to campaign for

Conservative candidate, Mike Harris’ campaign. Bromell maintained this political

alliance by supporting Premier Harris’ reelection campaign through cash contributions

(such as attending his $500-a-plate dinners) and running scare ads against Harris’

political opponents that featured pictures of serial killer Paul Bernardo. In his victory

speech after winning a reelection, Mike Harris acknowledged Bromell’s support by

referring to him—and not the Chief of Police—as ‘head of the Toronto Police’.

Bromell then expanded the practice of the TPA endorsing candidates to local Toronto

municipal candidates. In 2000 they endorsed Mel Lastman for mayor and endorsed 17

city councillors who advocated curtailing the oversight powers of the police services

board. In the same election the TPA also paid for an ad featuring the home phone

numbers of anti-police politicians. Perhaps the clearest example of the TPA’s political

muscle was in the 2003 provincial election where the Globe and Mail stated that “Craig

Bromell said that a Liberal victory in next month’s provincial election would result in

massive demonstrations by police at the doors of Queen’s Park” (Globe and Mail, 2003).

Despite the fact that at least two Ontario legal opinions had “reached the same

conclusions: political endorsements by the Police Association were contrary to the law”

(Sewell, 2003), the TPA had boldly moved from endorsements to open threats of police

‘demonstrations’ in Queen’s Park if the citizens of Ontario did not vote the way they

wanted them to. If Ontarians were uncertain which way the TPA wanted them to vote the

union also ran a full page ad in the Globe and Mail (2003) stating that, “the TPA proudly

endorses Ernie Eves and his fellow Conservative candidates.”

24

except as the … http://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/regu/o-reg-554-91/latest/o-reg-554-91.html

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 35

The endorsement (or condemnation) of a police union is a very powerful bargaining chip

because in the North American political environment to be seen as soft on crime or anti-

police can cost you an election. Even Bromell admits he was 'surprised' at how willing

politicians were to comply with his demands and Columnist Keith Jones (Jones, 2000)

has noted that,

The media has made much of the fact that the Toronto police union has

borrowed its tactics from US police unions and has been taking advice

from the Texas-based Police Labour Institute. Certainly, these links

warrant scrutiny. But if the Police Association has become politically

emboldened, it is above all because of the law-and-order campaign

mounted by the political right in recent years.

This campaign, which portrays the police as society’s embattled last line

of defence against chaos, has been spearheaded by the Reform Party and

in Ontario by the Harris Tory government. By whipping up fear over

crime and promising to get tough on criminals, the right seeks to channel

growing social anxiety and discontent in a reactionary direction, obscure

the social roots of violence, substance abuse and crime, and secure support

for expanding the repressive powers of the state.

In recent years, both Ontario Premier Mike Harris and Toronto Mayor Mel

Lastman have used endorsements from the Toronto Police Association to

tout their law-and-order credentials and paint their political opponents as

“soft on crime.” They have specifically praised Police Association

President Craig Bromell, who not only has pressed police demands for

increased legal powers and weaponry, but whose own rise to power in the

police union was directly associated with opposition to civilian oversight

of police activities.

The police’s growing political aggressiveness is a product of mounting

social tensions in the face of increasing social inequality and social

polarization. Unable to offer any progressive solution to the social crisis,

big business is increasingly reliant on the cultivation of political reaction

and state repression to maintain social order.

In such a “social[ly] polarized” state, the mutual, beneficial alliance between the police

unions and the Conservative party has now extended itself to the national level. In the

2006 election, Conservative candidate Stephen Harper openly courted the endorsement of

Canada’s national police union marking “the first time a PM had ever addressed a

conference of the police association 25

” (CBC News, 2006). In return for their support in

25

the first… http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2006/04/03/harper-policeconference04032006.html

36 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

winning the election Harper appointed the president of the Ontario Provincial Police

Association (OPPA) and the former head of the Toronto Police Association (TPA) to a

committee that selects federal judges (Kaplan, 2007 26

).

This disturbing trend has grown so dramatically that the head of the RCMP publicly

warned Canadians that even “ministers and high officials are scared to take on the unions

because the unions run policing in a lot of ways in Canada” (Zaccardelli, 2008). If this is

true then Canadian police have left any semblance of democratic control, but the true

culprit behind this situation is the voting public who have made being pro-police an

essential qualification for a candidate. The rise of police unions across Canada could not

have happened without a broader right-wing shift in Canadian political discourse or as

Craig Bromell puts it, “We’re finding a lot of people share the same views as us when it

comes to the justice system” (Duncanson, 2000).

In Bromell’s Wake

Bromell retired in 2003 to work in the corporate media hosting a radio show on MOJO

640 Toronto ('Home of the Toronto Maple Leafs') and co-producing the CTV police

drama The Bridge, but the 7 years he served as TPA president radically changed Toronto

policing. As John Barber of the Globe and Mail puts it:

Craig Bromell may be retiring, but he’s staying on message. And as usual,

the message in the mouth of Toronto’s most notorious police constable,

the self-confessed bully and always dangerous political blunderbuss, is

blunt and infuriating. To wit: I won. The message is infuriating because it

is so obviously correct. (Barber, 2002)

Bromell’s alliance with the Ontario Conservatives paid off when Premier Mike Harris,

“quietly and deliberately” passed a regulation allowing police to organize fundraising.

Additionally, Harris’ Solicitor General unsuccessfully tried to legalize the right of police

unions to endorse candidates. Harris also dismantled part of the civilian complaints

framework, returned the complaints system to police control and funded the construction

of the Ontario Police Memorial and Wall of Honour (van Run & Moloney, 2000).

Toronto police are now the highest paid police in the country with wages and benefits

accounting for 90 per cent of the police budget—which is the single largest item in

Toronto’s $9.2 billion operating budget. Toronto’s former city budget chief noted that the

current “spiralling upwards” of police budgets were because,

26

Kaplan, 2007 http://www.williamkaplan.com/wp-

content/uploads/2007/02/Reconsider%20Giving%20Police%20a%20Say%20in%20Judicial%20Appointme

nts.pdf

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 37

politically it’s toxic to question whether the city can afford to pay policing

costs. When money comes up for police, it’s very, very difficult to push

back. It’s difficult to say you’re for public safety, you’re for having a safe

and vibrant city but, at the same time, we can do things better in public

safety [than just policing]. (Powell, 2010)

This desperate need to be seen as pro-police by Toronto politicians is now so fanatical

that even police departments and unions are beginning to wonder about the trend:

Following through on a campaign promise, Mayor Rob Ford has vowed

to hire 100 more police officers as soon as he finds the cash. But there’s

one problem: the Toronto Police Service doesn’t want them.

Police officials are reluctant to publicly refuse additional manpower, but

those in high-ranking circles are questioning why the tight-fisted mayor

made the costly pledge without consulting the service, its union or its

board, about whether more officers are needed.

“At this point, I’m not advocating for 100 police officers. I am pleased

that the mayor has an interest in adequate staffing levels,” said police

association president Mike McCormack. (Doolittle, 2010)

In such an environment police unions are in danger of becoming victims of their own

success. Currently, 60% of the Canadian federal justice budget is devoted to paying for

police salaries and pensions and up to a quarter of some municipal budgets are spent on

police salaries. In the current economic situation,

police departments are under the gun to cut costs. Some are disbanding

special units. Some are shedding other personnel. And some small

jurisdictions are doing away with their police forces altogether. The

closure of small-town police forces is part of a broader consolidation of

services in communities across the U.S. Keeping the peace is rarely a

revenue-making operation and it is easier to outsource than other

responsibilities such as utilities. (Campoy, 2010)

No one should begrudge police or any blue-collar worker their salary (many white-collar

workers make much more for doing much less) but in the current Canadian environment

where attempts to reduce police budgets are political suicide then every municipality will

find themselves with 'spiralling upwards' police budgets—unless they out-source policing

to cheaper private security firms or the RCMP (who as of May 2015 were still union-less

although the Supreme Court in January 2015 struck down the law that forbid RCMP

officers from unionizing because it violated their charter rights to freedom of association;

the government was given a year to create a new regime that guarantees Mounties' rights

to collective bargaining and freedom of association) (Fiz-Morris, 2015).

38 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

Bromell’s political victories of loosening police oversight and legalizing police union

commercial enterprises have had a drawback—rampant corruption. Bromell’s

handpicked replacement as union president was forced to step down after being

criminally charged over financial dealings with downtown nightclub owners. His

replacement was also criminally charged and accused of breach of trust by a public

officer, being an official accepting a benefit, influence peddling (two charges),

obstructing justice, and possession of an unregistered firearm. Police Service Board chair

and self-confessed 'police groupie', Norm Gardner, resigned after being suspended for

taking bribes from the union.

Ron DeLord of the Texas-based Police Labour Institute once bragged that “Craig’s

moved all of Canada to the next level”—it’s just not clear that Canadian democracy can

survive this move.

If you want to know more about how the American police union influenced Bromell’s

TPA read Armed and Dangerous 27

(pdf).

Guardian Institutions

When the TPA first applied to become a recognized union in 1918 they argued that “there

[was] no fundamental difference between an ordinary wage earner and the policeman,

both are producers in the economic sense—one produces goods for the community’s use

and the other produces services for the community’s use” (Toronto Police Association,

2006). This argument was rejected by the government of the time who ruled that “the

labour man is a producer—the constable is not... though he performs valuable services,

[he] produces nothing” (Toronto Police Association, 2006). These thoughts were echoed

that same year by the Boston Police Commissioner who said that police were not “an

employee, but a state officer” (Toronto Police Association, 2006).

It was not just governments that thought this way—so did some police officers. When the

Ontario Public Service Act of 1972 considered dissolving the OPPA, the OPP’s company

union, and including OPP officers in civilian public collective bargaining, the OPPA

argued successfully that:

[common law] unequivocally sets out that the basic position of any

policeman is that he is the holder of an office of trust under the crown...a

policeman is not a servant, employee or agent.... He is, in essence, an

officer of the law and not an employee.

Whether someone paid by the government to police is really an ‘employee’ or an ‘officer’

may seem trivial or semantic but it has profound implications. Jane Jacobs, in her book

System of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics

27

Armed and Dangerous http://users.vianet.ca/beckettt/armed_thismag.pdf

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 39

(1992) observes that businesses and police departments have incompatible purposes that

should not be mixed.

According to Jacobs’ theory there are two basic types of organizations in modern society:

commercial enterprises and guardian institutions. Commercial enterprises take risks,

innovate, and pursue efficiency in the name of profit. Guardian institutions, such as

governments, police forces, and journalists are expected to defend a 'greater good' and

operate with a sense of public duty. If commercial enterprises acted like guardians they

would go out of business and if guardians worried solely about profit they would abandon

the greater good. As Paul Palango (1998) writes in his book The Last Guardians: The

Crisis in the RCMP and in Canada,

Jacobs’ points out a successful commercial enterprise might have a moral

ethical code but businesses by their very nature are not necessarily moral

or ethical. A business may claim to believe in tradition, loyalty, and

honour, but it is usually only paying lip service as a way to improve sales.

This is not intended as a slight towards business. That is just what

businesses must be: the bottom line is the bottom line.

Guardian organizations must shun trading, exert prowess, be obedient and

disciplined, adhere to tradition, respect hierarchy, be loyal, take

vengeance, deceive for the sake of the task, make rich use of leisure,

dispense largess, be exclusive, show endurance, and treasure honour.

When a guardian tries to think or act like a business-person the message

gets confused and distorted.

Jacobs’ warns that North American society may well be making a mistake in bringing the

mindset of business to every institution because this creates 'monstrous hybrids' which

attempt to subscribe to both sets of values. For example, since Craig Bromell’s retirement

he now claims that his bully-boy image was just an act but he admits having taken

advantage of the image: “We just sat back and really benefited about what was being said

about us, and we didn’t have to say anything or do anything” (Barber, 2002). If we take

Bromell at his word, that his aggressive posture was just a business tactic to leverage

higher wages, he has dangerously blurred the roles between 'commercial' and 'guardian'

agencies. As Jane Jacobs (Palango, 1998) writes:

A business can say he is going to “kick butt” and not offend anyone,

because he is speaking only for himself and his business. When a

politician—or a police officer, for that matter—talks tough like a

businessman, the words, backed by the power of government, come out

stronger than they might expect.

It is this blurring that has become a major problem with police unions because such

organizations combine the role of a commercial enterprise trying to maximize their

members’ wages and benefits and a guardian institution given state power to protect the

40 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

public good. As guardian institutions police departments and officers are bound by codes

of conduct, to fight to maintain political neutrality and to try to present an image of

honour and impartiality. Police unions, as commercial institutions, have none of these

limits. A manual entitled Police Association Power, Politics And Confrontation: A

Guidebook For The Successful Police Labour Leader candidly states: “We exist for one,

and only one purpose—the accumulation and use of power” (Schmidt, 2000). Executive

members of police unions may take temporary leaves from their role as police officers to

work full-time for the union but they keep all their former social ties and are expected to

speak for the officers they represent. For the average citizen there is little to distinguish

between police officers and the actions and statements of their union.

Another dangerous aspect of the 'monstrous hybrid' nature of police unions is that when

police officers succeeded in their long struggle to gain the rights due to them as an

'employee', they gained a new set of powers in addition to their police powers. As the

advocate for the new rights as an employee, police unions became a powerful third force

in the relationship between Chiefs of Police and their officers (Forcese, 1992). The

paramilitary, hierarchical lines of command in policing are now broken and re-routed

though union hearings and labour arbitration courts; 100 years ago police chiefs had

unchecked power to discipline officers whereas they now seem increasingly powerless.

For example, when OPP senior management wanted to dismiss an officer who shot an

unarmed First Nations man to death in the Ipperwash fiasco and then lied about his action

they were subjected to a lawsuit from the OPPA which was willing and able to spend

millions on legal fees. Even when that officer was found guilty in a court of law where

and judge ruled he had lied to the court, the officer was able to keep his job for another 5

years due to OPPA’s efforts. In an American example, the power of police unions was

seen when a rookie NYPD officer decided to 'text' his union representative before even

radioing for medical assistance when he shot a suspect in a Brooklyn stairwell

(Parascandola & Yaniv, 2014).

It is not just police unions that are dangerously hybridized; it is the whole institution of

policing that is being forced to adopt the values of commercial enterprises. Whether it is

the forcing of police departments to become 'corporations that offer policing services' or

changing police officers into 'police employees,' the result is the same: policing is

becoming one of the 'hybrids' Jacobs warned of. As we will explore in the next section

one of the primary duties of policing may be defending capitalism but it is not clear

whether the very institution of policing can survive being run as a business without

becoming 'monstrous'.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 41

SECTION 1.3: Policing Capitalism

Critical criminologists interpret state control and, in particular, policing in terms of their

relation to the requirements of capitalism (Hester & Eglin, 1992). Marxist criminologists,

for example, emphasize that police have been used, when necessary, to enforce capitalist

discipline and on a daily basis sustain the conditions under which capitalism functions.

Yet there is nothing intrinsic in the concept of policing that would make it support

capitalism. In Communist countries such as the former Soviet Union or the People’s

Republic of Cuba, the police forces enforce communism. What ties Anglo-American

police so deeply to capitalism is that they were historically designed to support

capitalism.

Glasgow, the Atlantic Trade and Policing Free Markets

The historical era that created modern policing was also the height of the Atlantic trade

when British ships took captured Africans to work at slave farms throughout the

Americas, returning with loads of cheap plantation-produced cotton, tobacco, and sugar.

The profitability of this trade was only limited by a lack of sailors and dockworkers.

Capitalism requires a pool of "free, unprotected and rightless" workers who can be

purchased in the "wage market" so British rural landholders had to be driven into urban

markets through a combination of disbanding monasteries, agricultural centralization,

debt foreclosure and privatization of public lands (Rediker, 1987). Soon landless rural

workers poured into cities to be hired by the shipping industries.

Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820) spent his youth in America compiling statistics on this

trans-Atlantic economy to maximize his profits as a share-holder in Virginian cotton and

Jamaican sugar plantations (Minor, 2007). Colquhoun realized that the largest ‘market

imperfections’ weredock-workers siphoning off nearly 1/10 of goods in British ports. In

1773 Colquhoun returned to Glasgow, Scotland - a vital port in the Atlantic economy -

and as a justice of the peace and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, he asked

wealthy tobacco importers to fund a customs office and a paid dock 'watch' to stop the

'great injury' of smuggling (Barrie, 2008).

In London, Colquhoun convinced the powerful West India shipping firm that he could

repeat this success and so he was able to create a privately-funded "river police" of 50

constables to replace the "Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees of the parish" who had

patrolled the docks and sometimes collaborated with smugglers. Armed with pistols and

the power to arrest anyone even suspected of stealing, the "river police" clashed with

both smugglers and the "London mobs ready to come to the assistance of a smuggler

hemmed in by custom officials" because the smuggler's black-market provided cheap

goods to locals (Rediker, 1987).

42 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

The largest confrontation occurred when Colquhoun attempted to end the "god-given

right of coalheavers to take several bushels of coal from each vessel for their own use"

(Minor, 2007). The battle with the stone-wielding mob left one dead on each side and

soon after the practice dwindled. The first year of the force's operation, 494 arrests were

made for unlawful possession and it was "estimated that the suppression of smuggling

and the protection of public stores had saved much more than £100,000." Colquhoun

soon expanded 'police' duties to the arrest of textile workers "who re-cycled waste

products to their own use" and began the organized surveillance of political groups that

opposed slavery through spies and informants (Linebaugh, 2015).

In 1800 the West India Company successfully lobbied Parliament to fund their "river

police" and the Marine Police Bill converted Colquhoun's private force into a state-

funded uniformed force. That same year Colquhoun published his Treatise on the

Commerce and Police of the River Thames which inspired the foundation of port police

forces in Dublin, Sydney (Australia), and New York (Linebaugh, 2015).

It was another Glasgow customs official, Adam Smith (1723- 1790), who would write a

treatise that contains one of the earliest modern usages of the term 'police.' Today Smith

is heralded as the 'father of the free-market' and he is invoked by those who wish to

prevent the government from regulating businesses. Smith's theories were influenced by

his association with French aristocrats who argued that the state had no place in

regulating markets, especially anti-slavery laws that would harm the profitability of their

colonial plantations, but that states should use violent 'Legal Despotism' to enforce order

and control workers.

Returning to Glasgow, Smith would write Lectures on Police (1763) promoting the idea

of 'police' to secure “cleanliness, security, cheapness and plenty," using the term 'policing'

to refer to both commercial and criminal regulation (D'Amico, 2011). A pamphlet by one

of Smith's contemporaries An Essay on Trade and Commerce (1770) was explicit in the

economic benefits of policing: “A multitude of people being drawn together in a small

territory will raise the price of provisions; but, at the same time, if the police be good, it

must keep down the price of labor. [To establish the six-day working week] a good police

must be established” (Linebaugh, 2015).

The development of the 'free-market' required much coercion: people had to be forced off

their land and into wage markets, colonies and slave trades had to be run, and workers

had to be prevented from siphoning off goods. Before Peel's colonial 'police' experiment

in Ireland, Scottish custom officials were experimenting with 'policing' to handle 'market

imperfections' like smuggling. This explains why a Columbia Law School professor has

found that the "ideal of a strict police state" was "born joined at the hips [with] cost-

minimizing efficiency-maximizing policies" (Harcourt, 2011) and why Karl Marx

observed that Britain “employs the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by

increasing the degree of exploitation of labour [and by preventing] infringement of the

eternal and so to say ‘sacred law of supply and demand’” (Harring, 1982).

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 43

IN FOCUS

Prime Minister Peel's New Conservatism

Robert Peel was not just the inventor of the 'Bobbies', he was also a British Prime

Minster. Peel led the Conservative Party that represented the interests of “the Bishops and

clergy, the great Aristocracy, the landed Interest, the Magistracy of the Country, the great

Merchants and Bankers.” Yet by the time Peel became Prime Minister these traditional

conservative powers were being replaced by “industrial capitalists largely from humble

origins” and Peel himself was the son of a cotton “spinning Jenny” entrepreneur

(Seymour, 2011).

With the loss of feudal aristocratic power, the Conservatives had been greatly weakened

and Peel understood there was little prospect of conserving this old order. If the

Conservative Party was to survive it had to come to terms with liberal economics and

find working class support. Peel responded by embracing 'free-market' economics where

government left capitalism largely unregulated and by transforming the Conservatives

into the "party of patriotism" that believed "the people of England, and especially the

working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to

maintain its greatness ... they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country" (Seymour,

2011).

This new Conservatism which could incorporate liberal 'free-markets' and 'patriotic'

working-classes had a great influence on Conservative parties throughout the British

Empire as they now were “explicitly conceived as a defence of capitalism.” It also had a

great influence on how Peel conceived of the Bobbies. Prime Minister Peel legislated

Bobbies into existence to support both the Empire and capitalism.

Anti-Labour Origins of Policing

As the British conception of policing spread throughout the Anglo-American world so

did their use as an anti-labour force. Police historian, Sidney Harring (1982), in his study

of policing in the Great Lake cities of Buffalo, Chicago, and Milwaukee during the first

half of the 20 th

century,

identified a strong anti-union bias of the police…arguing that the police in

these and other cities acted as shock troops for local capitalists, pacifying

and controlling local labour under the dictate of local businessmen.

Harring's study also noted that the 'weakness' of local police, either in lack of manpower

or unwillingness to attack fellow workers, meant that private police or state militia were

sometimes needed to break strikes.

44 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

It was the weakness of municipal police in labour disputes that helped spur the creation

of both a Canadian national police force, the RCMP, and an Ontario provincial police

force, the OPP. Unlike municipal police forces which had to maintain civil relationships

with the communities they operated in, provincial and national forces could be brought

into a strike, act forcefully to break it, and then depart without having to deal with the

angry emotions these tactics aroused. This social distance from the community helps

explain the good times many police officers record experiencing during otherwise bitter

disputes.

For example during the 1931 Estevan coal miners strike in Saskatchewan, a RCMP

constable remarked,

it was a strike enjoyed by everyone; in fact it seemed like a ‘get together’

to make new friendships and renew the old. It will be remembered by all.

(Brown & Brown, 1978)

The community of Estevan had a much different perspective because the RCMP had shot

three strikers dead and their tombstones were inscribed “murdered by RCMP” (Brown &

Brown, 1978). A modern example of the same phenomena can be found in the Toronto

G20 protest in 2010. Departing, imported officers left in a happy “atmosphere of hugs

and back pats, as police and soldiers began the process of saying good-bye” (Freeze,

2010). This joviality was likely not shared by the public who had to live with the

aftermath of what the Ontario Ombudsman called “a mass violation of civil rights

unprecedented in Canada” (Winnipeg Free Press, 2010).

A large push for the creation of the OPP in 1909 came from the mining business

community’s demand for a professional force to control the increasing labour hostility

occurring during the Northern Ontario mining boom. The first existing photographs of

OPP officers come from 1912 when two OPP units were called in to police a strike at the

Porcupine gold mine after overly-violent private strike breakers (composed of American

Civil War cavalry veterans) fired into striking workers. An OPP presence would remain

in Porcupine for a year to ensure that replacement workers (or 'scabs') could be safely

transported to the mines. Such strike-breaking duties substantially increased in the Great

Depression.

The year of 1930 was a turbulent time that saw “serious and violent clashes between

large groups of unemployed and police” in Sudbury, Timmins, Cochrane, Kirkland Lake,

Fort Williams, and Port Arthur. As the Depression worsened, the OPP were sent to guard

the various 'relief camps' that were set up to house the masses of unemployed. Despite the

fact that the OPP “in every case laid the blame on communist agitators” most of the

clashes were caused by a wide variety of sometimes petty reasons (Higley, 1984). A

violent clash in Port Arthur began when the OPP unit attempted to break up a parade of

unemployed men because they were marching “without the British Union Jack at the

head” of their march. In 1936 alone the OPP clashed with

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 45

 600 men gathered in Fort Francis looking for logging work;

 Strikers at the Dominion Glass Company in Wallaceburg;

 Mass picketing by 1,800 silk mill workers in Cornwall;

 Strikers at the Holmes Foundry, Point Edward, that saw OPP constables battling

the strikers’ wives and a ‘wild battle’ fought with ‘iron bars’ between replacement

workers and strikers.

Yet the clashes that occurred during the Depression were minor compared to the

unprecedented industrial unrest the OPP had to deal with during the Second World War.

In 1941 alone the OPP:

 arrested 46 striking workers in Windsor at the Chrysler automobile plant for

undermining the Canadian war effort;

 sent motorcycle escorts to protect replacement workers at Direct Winters

trucking company from being forced off the road by angry strikers;

 engaged in a 'pitched battle' with 6,500 sailors of the Canadian Seaman’s Union

at Port Edward when the strike threatened to shut down the whole of the Great

Lakes;

 were dispatched by the Ontario Attorney General to watch over strikes at

Prescott, Colborne, Goderich, Midland, Pt. Arthur, and Ft. Williams;

 escorted buses of immigrant workers at the height of the tomato harvest for

Campbell Soup to protect them from regular workers;

 confronted the Mine Mill union at Kirkland Lake when 4000 workers at 8

goldmines overwhelmed both local police and their hastily recruited 'specials'.

Both the OPP and Union held parades on Kirkland Lake’s main street as shows

of strength;

 investigated a walkout by disgruntled airmen at RCAF Training School in St.

Thomas.

The labour unrest of this era was heavily enflamed by the near fanatical anti-union bias of

Ontario’s Liberal Premier, Mitch Hepburn. Hepburn’s unwavering desire to prevent

certain unions from gaining a foothold in Ontario is best illustrated by his attempts to

break a United Auto Worker strike at a General Motors plant in Oshawa. After a picket-

line altercation, the mayor of Oshawa demanded that OPP reinforcements be brought in

but the Ontario Attorney General refused to send them because “there was no

lawbreaking to justify massive police intervention,” a decision seconded by the Labour

46 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

Minister who believed sending in the OPP would only aggravate the dispute (Higley,

1984). Infuriated, Premier Hepburn fired both of his Ministers and personally ordered the

OPP to recruit 200 ‘special officers’ comprised of veterans and university students to

operate under his personal control.

When the RCMP also refused to intervene in the Oshawa strike, the Premier responded

by hiring another 200 specials to serve under his control. This strange unit of 400

auxiliary OPP under the Premier’s personal control were sarcastically dubbed 'Hepburn’s

hussars' or 'sons of a Mitches' by the Ontario press. Hepburn then ordered the OPP

Special Branch to begin surveillance and infiltration of the Oshawa strikers. Despite the

Premier’s gathering of a small private police force, the General Motors plant owners were

more anxious to resume production than be pawns in Hepburn’s vendetta against unions

and came to a deal with the workers.

Labour unrest declined in the post-war period and the OPP were only attending an

average of 4 labour disputes per year in this era. It would not be until Mike Harris

became Ontario’s Conservative Premier in 1994 that the OPP would find themselves

again embroiled in continuing clashes with Labour. Premier Harris not only shared Mitch

Hepburn’s initials, he also shared his strongly anti-union attitude. Harris’s radical plan to

eliminate Ontario’s $9-billion annual deficit within five years while simultaneously

reducing provincial income tax rates by 30 per cent meant drastic cuts to social programs

and Ontario public employee unions—including the firing of 13,000 civil servants.

Ontario unions responded by holding walkouts and protests throughout the province

which the OPP often found themselves in the thick of. The bloodiest of these clashes

occurred at Ontario’s Provincial legislature in 1996 when angry Ontario Public Service

Employees Union (OPSEU) protesters blocked Conservative MPPs from heading into the

Provincial Legislature. The protesters were violently pushed back by an OPP riot squad

leaving “at least half a dozen” OPSEU protesters injured with one striking OPSEU

probation officer knocked unconscious.

Like the creation of the OPP, the RCMP owes part of its existence to the labour control

needs of a major Canadian industry. When the trans-Canada railroad was being laid, the

Northwest Mounted Police (as the RCMP was then called) supplemented Canadian

Pacific’s private strikebreakers with their own officers and in return enjoyed CP Rail’s

patronage which included cheap travel on the new lines which was an attractive benefit

for a nation-wide organization. Afterwards the RCMP would find widespread use for a

mobile strikebreaking force.

In 1919, during the Winnipeg General Strike it was a mounted RCMP charge into the

mass of strikers that ended the strike. Fifteen years later, in 1935, when hundreds of

unemployed men began an On-to-Ottawa march from British Columbia to protest the

Canadian government’s lack of response to the Great Depression they made it as far as

Regina, home to the RCMP headquarters. There they were ambushed and violently

dispersed by a large RCMP force. In the modern era, the RCMP have been in charge of

security for all the major summits that have seen anti-capitalist protests occur (i.e., G8,

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 47

FTAA, G20) and local RCMP riot squads are active in policing fishery labour disputes on

the east coast and university protests on the west coast, but it has been the RCMP’s

counter-intelligence work and mass deportation of 1000s of Canadian labour activists and

leftists per year between the 1920s and the 1940s that has probably had the largest effect

on the nation’s history.

IN FOCUS

COINTELPRO

In 1971 anti-war activists broke into an FBI office and took over 1000 classified

documents which they released to the media. The group was lead by a professor of

religion who later explained, “By breaking a law — entering & removing files — we

exposed a crime that was going on. … When we are denied the information we need to

have to act as citizens, then we have a right to do what we did” (Isikoff, 2014). Despite

over 200 FBI agents put on this case the group was never caught—in 2014 they felt safe

enough to reveal themselves.

The stolen FBI files provided a glimpse inside the secretive police force, of those files

30% were bureaucratic matters and 15% were on organized crime and violent crimes -

but 14% were about AWOL soldiers and draft resisters, and 40% were concerned with

"political surveillance." What the activists had unwittingly uncovered was the FBI's

massive 'counter-intelligence' program (CO-INTEL-PRO).

It is hard to capture the scope of the police war against leftist and activist groups between

1950 and 1970 which included RCMP surveillance, infiltration, and disruption of 100s of

Canadian peace 28

groups and labour organizations as part of a larger FBI

COINTELPRO 29

(COunter INTELligence PROgram) campaign against a wide variety

of citizen movements including (Wikipedia):

 civil rights movement and black nationalist groups;

 the American Indian Movement;

 “New Left,“ including all groups protesting the Vietnam War;

 10,000 individual university student demonstrators “regardless of their past or

future participation in disorder”;

 National Lawyers Guild;

 women’s rights movement;

 Puerto Rico, Irish and Cuban nationalist groups.

28

peace http://www.peace.ca/peacegroupsmonitored.htm 29

COINTELPRO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

48 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

When publicly exposed later it was not just the scope of the COINTELPRO campaign

that would lead to civic outrage and a congressional investigation, it was the methods

used which included using agents and paid informers to covertly join these groups and

then according to the FBI’s COINTELPRO mandate “increase factionalism, cause

disruption, and win defections.” Some of the means used to cause such in-fighting to

stated 'Apostles of Non-Violence,' 'New Left,' and 'Advocates of New Lifestyles' were

described in a now declassified document entitled Summary of FBI Counter Intelligence

Operations (1976) which states:

Gather information on their immorality. Show them as scurrilous and

depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions. Explore

every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up

marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate

personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the

newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap.

Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank

accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into

rivalries that may result in death.

This police campaign of destroying social movements and citizen’s lives would

grow to include “eviction, job loss, break ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas,

false arrests, frame-ups, and physical violence [...] and in the case of the Black

and Native American movements, these assaults included outright political

assassinations” such as the ‘police assassination’ of Black Panther leader Fred

Hampton 30

. One FBI memo, under the heading “Tangible results.” boasted that:

Shootings, beatings and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the

ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific

counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-

all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly

attributable to this program. (Bovard, 2004)

Historically, the level of police violence was much less in Canada but the amount of

RCMP infiltration is staggering with an estimated 1 in 30 Canadians having an RCMP

file. Such surveillance would not only lead to many leftist Canadians being fired after the

RCMP quietly informed employers about ‘un-Canadian’ employees but it also may have

had a profound psychological effect on Canadian culture (Kinsman, Buse, & Steedman,

2000). As Michel Foucault notes “an inspecting gaze becomes a gaze which each

individual under its weight will interiorize to the point of becoming their own overseer,

thus conducting surveillance on themselves” or in simpler terms, a little police

surveillance can cause sizable paranoia in a community.

30

Fred Hampton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 49

Sudbury was one target of the RCMP’s gaze when its strong union movements “became

large enough to pose a threat to the stability of capitalism” and many informant reports

were passed onto the RCMP desk in North Bay before being forwarded to Ottawa for

analysis and storage (Kinsman, Buse, & Steedman, 2000). The surveillance would

include phone-tapping a Sudbury NDP politician, and recent mayor, John Rodriguez 31

and an RCMP infiltration campaign against the local Mine Mill union to became so

extensive it included reports on ‘tupperware parties’ held by the Ladies Auxiliary.

Declassified documents also show that during the mid-seventies, [RCMP] political

surveillance of the Laurentian University campus occurred against student organizations,

the Native studies program, a Marxist study group, teach-ins, demonstrations, and the

Canadian Association of University Teachers among others. The RCMP had student-

informers on campus, conducted surreptitious surveillance operations, and collected

publicly available information (like the campus newspaper) (Kinsman, Buse, &

Steedman, 2000).

Despite the official end of the COINTELPRO campaign in the 1970s after it was publicly

revealed through a combination of stolen FBI documents and disillusioned FBI whistle-

blowers and informants, COINTELPRO-style campaigns continued. Modern targets

include environmental groups 32

, Islamic organizations 33

and anti-globalizations 34

protesters.

Private Policing

Private security firms are sometimes said to be the ‘future of policing’ but such forms of

policing actually pre-date state-funded and state-run policing. When the Bobbies were

first deployed Britain was already a nation full of private ‘thief-takers’ who were paid to

recover stolen property and ‘wharf patrols’ paid by local merchants to guard certain

commercial districts in London’s harbours. Even as state police began to replace many of

these private policing practices there still existed multiple reasons why businesses and

wealthier neighbourhoods would want to maintain their own privately controlled security

31

John Rodriguez http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rodriguez#cite_ref-9 32

environmental groups http://www.sott.net/articles/show/221604-COINTELPRO-in-the-UK-Undercover-

British-police-officer-was-pivotal-in-extreme-actions-of-environmental-campaigners 33

Islamic organizations http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336166/FBI-informant-Craig-Monteilh-

scares-Muslim-suspects-report-HIM.html

34 anti-globalizations http://snitchwire.blogspot.com/search?q=Kitchener+

50 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

force. Thus, when twenty businesses in the Centretown area of Ottawa hired a private

firm to patrol the 15-block area around their businesses in 1996 they were following in

the steps of many Victorian-era businessmen. According to Karen Swol (1999),

private security works for clients who pay them for services rendered. Their

jurisdiction is the protection of their client and/or their client’s property and

it is the interests of the client that determine the duties of private security

personnel.

Private policing is a class-based institution because it enables the rich to buy additional

protection, and so “in a sense, therefore, private police bear a resemblance to the initial

nineteenth-century conception of policing” (Dantzker & Mitchell, 1998). Thus private

security has maintained a large niche for themselves in the law enforcement world

because they can respond to the specific needs of private enterprises such as bouncing at

a nightclub, dealing with dangerous hospital patients, handing out tickets at university

parking lots, preventing shop-lifting at stores, and a host of other security jobs. For

example, the Ottawa merchants stated that municipal police were not visible enough to

deter street prostitution and charged too much to respond to false alarms while the

security firm could be given instructions tailored to their needs. The insurance industry is

also a major economic driver of the security industry because they “give substantial rate

discounts to sites which have a 24-hour presence; for a high risk or high value venue, the

discount can often exceed the money being spent on its security program” (Wikipedia).

Private policing also serves class interests by providing security at a cheaper cost than the

taxation required to employ unionized public policing. When the Ottawa businesses hired

a private firm they noted that the private firm was available at a “substantially reduced

cost” compared to public police. Unlike public policing which has had a substantial rise

in wages and hiring criteria, security wages remain low and security firms still draw

many of their employees from the pool of unskilled proletariat and those veterans from a

lower economic class. For example, in 2011 the security industry minimum wage in the

USA was $5.16 per hour while the poverty rate was $9 per hour—guards are expected to

make up the difference through overtime work.

In contrast, police officers and their state-derived power have a high market value and

some off-duty officers, paid by private companies, can earn $60 to $70 an hour to

perform duties such as directing traffic around construction. This situation may be slowly

changing as “many security guards in Canada are unionized”(Wikipedia) and the

concessions recently gained 35

by Quebec security guards represented by the United

Steelworkers led to an Ontario petition for an Ontario Security Guard Fair Wage Bill 36

to

increase security guard’s pay to a minimum of $15.00 per hour.

35

concessions recently gained

http://www2.publicationsduquebec.gouv.qc.ca/dynamicSearch/telecharge.php?type=3&file=/D_2/D2R1_A

.htm 36

Ontario Security Guard Fair Wage Bill http://www.fairwagebill.com/

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 51

G4S and the rise of global private security

The Canadian security industry has experienced massive growth in the last half a century

and “between 1971 and 1991 the number of private security personnel in Canada grew by

126 percent and now outnumbers public police by a margin of 2 to 1” (Shearing &

Stenning, 1983). This ratio is dwarfed by the gigantic American security industry that

employs 7 security guards for every police officer. This massive growth is an Anglo-

American trend as Britain is now home to some of the world’s largest security

corporations.

The enormous British security firm Serco, called “the biggest company you’ve never

heard of,” runs everything from Australian immigration detention centres to the majority

of British private prisons to automobile driver’s licensing facilities in Ontario (Martinson,

2010). Even bigger is the British security firm G4S, the world’s largest security service

provider and second largest private employer in the world after Wal-Mart. G4S (formerly

Group 4 Securicor) is a composite of Danish, Belgian, and British security agencies that

merged into a global transnational corporation with 625,000 employees spread across

more than 110 countries.

Despite close ties to the British government in the 1980s, when G4S scored a series of

lucrative government contracts, the company divested itself of European clients to focus

on the United States and developing nations where profits are 20% higher because few

labour rights means the G4S “is not challenged by strong unions, [does not] have to pay

overtime [and] in at least one country was able to cut workers’ pay in half” (Caron,

2008). This trend might explain why G4S’s already substantial profits doubled in 2007.

Labour activists and some legal scholars alleged that the company’s treatment of its

security guards “unquestionably amounts to violations of its employees’ human rights”

because G4S (Caron, 2008):

1. Infringed on workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining through instigating police and military intimidation;

2. Failed to pay workers a living wage in Africa leaving workers unable to pay for basic food or transportation;

3. Regularly denied African and American workers their legally required breaks for food and rest and required some staff to work eighty-four hours a week without a

day off;

4. Deflected responsibility for providing basic social security to the states where it operates.

For example Wackenhut, an America subsidiary of G4S run by 'many ex-FBI' agents has

benefited from numerous profitable government contracts but still suffers from long-

standing charges of low pay, minimal benefits, unsafe working conditions, racial

52 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

discrimination and poor training. Since 2005, G4S employees in Indonesia, India, and

Panama have been involved in labour disputes with their employers when “G4S was the

subject of a global campaign by union workers alleging that subsidiaries undermine

labour and human rights standards” (Wikipedia). G4S unions in Kenya, South Africa,

Uganda, and Zambia have recently achieved recognition agreements.

Part of G4S’s poor labour reputation comes from its past use of illegal acts when

employed in labour disputes. In 1981, Securicor (the ‘S’ in G4S) planted an agent

provocateur 37

on the picket line during the Automotive Hardware Ltd. strike at

Etobicoke, Ontario. The infiltrator’s job was to incite the strikers to violence by calling

on union members to smash windows and blow-up railway tracks. He was reported to

yell at the workers, “What are you going to do about the railway cars going in and out of

the plant? We’ve got to go in and stop them” (List, 1982).

The United Steelworkers Union which represented the workforce uncovered the spy, who

had already received $2,000 in strike relief benefits, and then successfully sued Securicor

and Automotive Hardware in a one million dollar judgment for unfair labour practices.

Documents uncovered by the union’s lawyers revealed that the Securicor spy was

sending daily reports to the company. This legal decision against Securicor led to the

banning of agent provocateurs during strikes in Ontario (Livesey, 2000).

Pinkertons and the History of Strikebreaking

The actions of the Securicor spy at Etobicoke must be put in the larger context of private

security’s anti-labour history. Before G4S became the globe’s largest security firm, the

position was held by the American firm known as the Pinkerton National Detective

Agency for over a century and the term 'Pinkertons' remains synonymous with brutality

and cunning in labour circles.

Allan Pinkerton founded this private police agency in Chicago during the 1850s and his

business plan was, first, to provide additional security services to those who could afford

it and, second, to supplement the Chicago police force. Those who could afford

additional police protection often had industrial interests to protect and from this early

class alliance the Pinkerton agency evolved into a primarily anti-labour organization. Its

early anti-labour practices began with spying on employees so that employers could fire

potential union organizers but when the depression of 1877 struck and strikes became

more common, Pinkertons began to specialize in ‘strong-arm tactics.’ By 1892, the

Pinkerton agency had participated in the repression of more than 77 strikes throughout

the USA and Canada. Pinkertons’ reliance on violence was largely successful but it also

drew many detractors who denounced the agency’s aggressive methods.

37

agent provocateur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 53

In response to Pinkertons’ overtly repressive style, several US states attempted to

legitimize the repression of striking workers by establishing less violent state-run police

forces to do the same task. Many early American state police originated as “legalized

state strike-breakers” and “with their creation, capitalism gained an efficient tax-

supported military force invested with public authority” (Lynch & Groves, 1989).

Pennsylvania’s legislature, for example, formed the ‘Coal and Iron Police’ in 1886 and

the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905 to deal with striking coal miners and iron workers

in manners less provocative than the Pinkerton’s violent strike-breaking methods and

thereby keep strikebreaking as a legitimate activity.

In comparison to the private strikebreaking firms, the state-run police were often better

disciplined, less brutal, and had the appearance of neutrality. There were also publicly-

funded, a fact that some industrialists exploited by attempting to use them as their

personal army against strikers. In response, some states began demanding that employers

at least pay for the police’s transportation and lodging during long strikes. But the hope

of a more peaceful era was largely dashed when state police forces adopted Pinkerton-

styled 'cossack' methods to break strikes (i.e., mounted charges into strikers).

The American federal government would try a similar experiment in 1871 when the

newly created Department of Justice was legislated to create its own police force devoted

to “the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law.” Realizing that

the US Congress had only allocated them $50,000 to form a federal police force, the

government department opted to contract out to the private sector and hired the

Pinkertons instead (Churchill, 2004). By the time the Department of Justice could

properly afford its own federal police—what would eventually be called the Federal

Bureau of Investigations [FBI]—the Pinkertons’ had already set the template for the

future force.

By 1940... much of what [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover had done for the

public and the police 38

, however, had been done earlier by Allan Pinkerton

and his two sons. Murray Kempton believed that Allan Pinkerton had

invented most of the police tactics used by Hoover. The director of the

Federal Bureau of Investigation found the tablets already engraved; no

further exercise was demanded of him except some tracing at the edges.

(Morn, 1998)

The Pinkertons, remained the largest firm of its type in North America until the 1980s

when it was overtaken by new US firms like Wachenhut but the Pinkertons imprint on

North American policing lives on—as do some of its ‘strong-arm’ tactics (Hougan,

1978).

38

Hoover had done… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4638275/ns/dateline_nbc/t/secrets-j-edgar-hoover/

54 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

IN FOCUS

Pinkertons North

Unlike American history “the use of professional strike-breakers, labour spies, ‘goon

squads,’ ‘vigilante’ groups, armed militia and other spectacular features of industrial

warfare in the United States . . . have been absent from the Canadian scene” (Ross &

Hartman, 1960) but this has begun to change recently.

A modern Canadian 'labour dispute' security firm that appears based in the

aggressive Pinkerton model is the London, Ontario, based firm London Protection

International Inc. (LPI). LPI employs 175 investigators and security guards with branch

offices in Alberta and B.C. and provides “companies with the protection of their assets

during a strike” (Livesey, 2000). LPI also “generates the most complaints” about guard

conduct during strikes than any other Canadian security firm.

LPI is infamous for employing “nasty-looking, 6 feet tall, burly young security guards

with close-cropped hair or shaved heads, dressing head to toe in black paramilitary

uniforms” (Livesey, 2000). Some union officials also claim that “some LPI guards

carried kubotans—metal rods used in martial arts—in their jackets but never used the

sticks or carried them openly” (Livesey, 2000). Yet, it was not just the intimidating

looks of LPI guards that caused complaints, it is their actions.

LPI’s aggression was visible during the hard-fought 15-month lockout at

Insurance Courier Services [ICS] in Toronto. ICS’s 141 drivers were

organized by the Communications Energy and Paperworkers [CEP]

union in 1994. After attempts to negotiate a first contract failed, the

company locked out the drivers in February of 1996.

Four days into the strike, ICS fired its first security firm, replacing it with

LPI. Vic Morden, a CEP national rep, says, “I got a call from a Peel

Regional Police officer who warned me that these LPI guys were

strikebreakers and would use all kinds of methods to break the strike. It

proved to be true”.

The ICS strike soon became a war of attrition. At one point, members of

the Vagabond biker gang escorted scabs across picket lines. Ken Cole,

president of CEP Local 333, which represents the ICS workers, says 20

scabs jumped him and a handful of picketers one night. “They were all

dressed in black and wearing balaclavas,” he says. The attackers were

chased away by a picketer wielding an axe.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 55

The union says the security company’s guards baited and taunted the

strikers, coming up to the picketers and saying things like, “I’ll break

your f**king face.”

“They would threaten your family, threaten your wife, threaten your

children,” says former ICS driver Ian Porter. “They would say it very

close to you when no one was in earshot. They would say, ‘When you are

on the picket line, we will be with your wife and kids,’ or something to

that effect.”

Eventually, Porter and a handful of other burly CEP members took it

upon themselves to face down the LPI guards. At one juncture Ian

Porter’s brother, David, was confronted in a parking lot by an LPI guard

who was a former CFL football player. David Porter, an ex-soldier, made

short work of him. (Livesey, 2000)

LPI’s aggressive Pinkerton-like tactics have been used by other security firms that

specialize in ‘labour disputes’ and similar tactics were seen in Sudbury during the 2001

Falconbridge strike when the Accufax security firm was brought in by Falconbridge’s

management:

Jerome Stricklen was one of 1200 workers on strike at Falconbridge’s

nickel operations in Sudbury. Stricklen says Accu-fax was following

workers all the time, and that he couldn’t pull up to a traffic light without

them trying to video-tape him. Other striking workers say their cell phone

calls were monitored. Some claim their residences and families were

videotaped. They say there was intimidation off company property.

(Angus, 2011)

Twenty-seven strikers at a non-profit daycare centre in Toronto also experienced similar

behaviour from Accu-fax security guards:

There was really no need for this kind of muscle,” [strike head] Diane

Dobusz said, “But there they were, two or three guards every day, video-

taping us. It got pretty nasty. Sometimes they would say lewd

things about the women workers. The head guy, a guy called Oliver,

would follow us around the neighbourhood, and he was seen by some

parents casing the neighbourhood. Finally, after enough complaints from

our neighbours, they moved inside the building. (Angus, 2011)

As these examples show it is now video cameras and not mounted charges that modern

Pinkertons use to intimidate strikers and thin picket-lines. Video-tapes have proven to be

'an invaluable tool' in limiting the number of workers. During the Pittson Coal Company

strike involving the United Mine Workers literally thousands of hours of video-taping

56 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

was taken by a security firm in an ultimately unsuccessful $60 million lawsuit against

the union (Bacon, 1997).

Ontario 'labour dispute' security firms became a boom industry when a 1995

Conservative provincial government overturned the existing ban on 'replacement

workers' (or 'scabs'). The use of replacement workers to undermine a strike heightens

overall hostility and creates potential flash-points when replacement workers are bused

across the picket-line to do the strikers jobs. This makes for bitter strikes but plentiful

work for security guards. The owner of Accufax, referring to the boom in strikebreaking

contracts in Ontario since 1995 said,

Businesses have a right to continue operations and have a right to use

replacement workers and they are taking advantage of that. All we do is

allow companies the right to maintain operation under the current

legislation. They want to control their business. [We] are a counterweight

to the power of organized labour. (Livesey, 2000)

By referring to private security as a “counterweight to the power of organized labour,”

the president of Accufax succinctly summarizes a key aspect of private security’s

historical purpose.

The Relationship Between Public Police and Private Security

Police officers and security guards often have a symbiotic relationship. Security

companies cut down the amount of routine security services that local police have to

handle and act as a useful source of information for police. Guards are also freed from

many restrictions that police have, allowing them, for example, to enter their clients’

property to shut-off an alarm while an officer would need a warrant or permission.

Conversely private guards rely on police for many situations, as private security guards

only have the same powers of arrest, search, and detention as an ordinary citizen; but they

are better informed of these powers and much more willing to use them.

Sometimes these shared security concerns overlap in unsettling ways as the case of the

2001 Falconbridge strike in Sudbury illustrates,

He was driving home in his van with his two young children, Stricklen

recalls, “Suddenly, my little girl yelled out ‘watch out.’” Right in front of

him, coming from the opposite direction, was a vehicle belonging to

Accufax, the private security firm hired by Falconbridge. The vehicle cut

him off, causing him to slam on his breaks. Another Accufax vehicle

pulled up alongside him.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 57

“It was a good thing I wasn’t going too fast, or I would have hit him,” says

Stricklen. Within seconds a police cruiser pulled up. “Out came the guns

and I was pulled out of my van. They slapped on the hand-cuffs. I didn’t

know what was going on.” The police took Stricklen to their cruiser while

Accufax blocked off the road. The children were left in the van. Stricklen

says he could hear them yelling for him.

Stricklen says he was held for a number of hours while the children were

left crying in the van. Sergeant Wayne Foster with the Greater Sudbury

Police Services says the police were trying to locate Stricklen’s wife

during that time.

According to Foster, Accufax had phoned the police saying they believed

that Stricklen had a weapon in his van. No weapon was found. Foster

suggests that it was an honest mistake as an object found in the vehicle did

resemble a weapon. Stricklen says the object was his kid’s bicycle horn.

(Angus, 2011)

The similarity of duties can also lead police and security agencies into economic

competition and confusion for the general public. This distinction between a uniformed

guard and police officer is not always clear to other citizens and some security guards

will “dress like, act like, and pretend to be police officers” to capitalize on this confusion

(Robertson, 2008).

In response to this blurring of roles, Alberta and Ontario now prohibit the use of the

American term 'security officer' to keep a distinction between security ‘guards’ and

police ‘officers’. The Private Security and Investigative Services Act (PSISA) was also

changed in 2010 to insure that the uniforms, vehicle colours, and markings of private

security personnel were clearly distinctive from police personnel. Some sources feel that

these restrictions were put in place to satisfy Canada’s powerful national police union—

the Canadian Police Association (Robertson, 2008).

The new PSISA changes have been vigorously enforced by Ontario police. In 2011, the

OPP Anti-Racket branch conducted over 20 'pro-active' enforcement efforts to enforce

the new Private Security and Investigative Services regulations including laying 76

charges in connection with Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) venues and 142

charges during the International Indian Film Academy awards. The main violations were:

working as an unlicensed security guard, employing an unlicensed security guard, and

improper uniforms. In an interesting intersection of money, race, and politics a new

regulation has been introduced that would exempt out-of-province bodyguards who are

employed by “individuals in the recorded video and audio-visual production industry”

from provincial PSISA regulations in anticipation of Toronto’s Hollywood star-studded

International Film Festival (Babbage, 2011).

58 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

The new PSISA regulation also mandates Ministry of Community Safety and

Correctional Services training and testing requirements for security guards (including

bouncers) and for private investigators. As of April 15, 2010, anyone wishing to work as

a security guard in Ontario is now required to take a 40-hour course (approx. $250), pass

a multiple-choice test ($60), and apply for a license ($80 yearly). Despite the introduction

of fees, security training still remains a largely unregulated field with no oversight of the

teaching materials or methods. Even accredited colleges’ 'Police Foundation' programs

can outsource the teaching of security guard courses to third-party companies.

It not just the lack of training that disturbs many sociologists and criminologists about

private security guards; it is the fact that they are not subjected to public oversight of their

actions (Dantzker & Mitchell, 1998). With the growth of private policing, there is shift of

social control from the public to the private sector, from government control to corporate.

As private institutions gain more control of various aspects of law enforcement formerly

the domain of governments, they considerably enhance their power without any

corresponding duty to the ‘public good’. Forcese (1992) notes that as private police only

serve those who can pay for it thus:

[s]uch policing is a form of retainer to large corporate interests. It has

arisen in large measure because public police have been perceived to be

inadequately responsive. The challenge to Canada’s future police is to re-

establish a local legitimacy, trust, and public control and integration of our

public police such as to obviate the need for a domestic, secret, or private,

police establishment.

If state police fail to do so then the rapid emergence of security industries and the

growing acceptance and use of private military companies (PMC) such as Blackwater

and Aegis Defence Services “raises the question of whether the growing recognition of

private security companies marks a fundamental shift in the norm of the state monopoly

on violence in Western democracies” (Krahmann, 2009). Such a loss of the state’s

monopoly on violence could mark the beginning of a very unstable period in global

history.

Policing for Profit

As discussed earlier, police are ‘guardian institutions’ and not ‘commercial enterprises’

and should not be concerned with making profits. In those areas where policing overlaps

with profit generation, like traffic ticket quotas or traffic enforcement cameras wide-

spread public disapproval and loss of police legitimacy can result. For example, despite a

2001 RCMP report that mobile speed cameras in British Columbia were generating $1.2

million in revenue. Liberal leader Gordon Campbell campaigned on a promise to ban

them. Similarly Ontario police watchdog groups were “furious after learning of a ticket

quota scheme that a Rexdale platoon commander set up to let cops go home early if they

wrote 25 traffic tickets” (CBC News, 2006). The profits involved in such fines can be

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 59

substantial and this can lead to pressure 39

to increase such policing activities. Even the

awarding of procurement contracts that involve large sums can quickly lead to

accusations of corruption 40

and impropriety 41

.

Historically policing has never been completely separate from producing profit for their

state employers. The Canadian federal government generates revenue by selling RCMP

services to provinces, territories and municipalities without their own police force.

During the 1950s the OPP and their employer, the Ontario government, found itself in

heated battles with municipalities over the cost of their contracts and it even

experimented with offering the OPP to municipalities at no cost during the 1970s in order

to 'attract more customers'.

IN FOCUS

Ferguson-A City Funded by Fines

The social upheaval that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, following a fatal shooting by

police captured the focus of the media and started many discussions. Most commentaries

situated this shooting in a racial context and sociologists have noted that the historical

foundation of many southern U.S police forces are rooted in Civil War-era slave patrols,

a concept they "borrowed from British practices in the Caribbean, especially Barbados,

were slave owners used professional slave catchers and militias to capture runaways,

while overseers were responsible for maintaining order on the plantations" (Williams,

2007).

American has had a turbulent racial history with an average of 5 African Americans

'lynched' to death every year between 1880 and 1950 - often by a group of armed white

racists performing 'police functions', such groups have including militias, lynch mobs,

vigilante posses, the Klu Klux Klan and slave patrols. This dark racial legacy is hard to

ignore when 48 of 53 Ferguson's officers are white in a population nearly two-thirds

African-American. This racial analysis should be linked to a crucial, but much less

discussed, economic fact that Ferguson, like some other small population towns, had

begun to rely on criminal fines as a source of town revenue.

39

pressure http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=0d58b5a1-2d80-42c7-b5a1-

9efdd4e077e2 40

corruption http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/story.html?id=1a5c6b0b-5a7e-4bd7-ba17-

b53ccc635c42 41

impropriety http://truthnottasers.blogspot.com/2009/04/police-freebies-spark-resignation.html

60 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

Fines and court fees are Ferguson's second largest source of revenue,

bringing in just over $2.5 million last year. In many cases [southern US]

populations are too small to provide the tax base for a city, and so some of

the tiniest towns have the most highly aggressive policing. They try to

make up in traffic fines what they can't generate in property or sales taxes.

Bella Villa, for instance, a city with a population of about 800, is a tiny

little speed trap. It has reportedly collected almost 60 per cent of its yearly

budget through traffic fines. [...]The burden of such hyperactive traffic

policing falls most heavily on the poorest. It's they who have trouble

finding the money to pay fines. It's they who may have to choose between

driving illegally to work or not working. It's they who may be struggling

just to feed a family.

A Washington Post investigation found community police and courts

issuing minor traffic violations, then piling court fees on top of them, then

arrest warrants, more fees, and eventually, though not finally,

imprisonment. All that for a traffic offence. What the shooting death of

Michael Brown did was put a big, bright national spotlight on this

municipal racket. (Boag, 2014)

In the post-Civil War Missouri slave patrols would "enforce white supremacy largely by

arresting black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labour

systems" (Williams, 2007) and the modern method of fines has the advantage of not even

needing to pay for the convict's food and lodgings.

The First Prohibition Era

The official OPP history states that a decade after its creation in 1909 the police force

was less a police force and more of “a widespread commercial enterprise” that would

take a succession of English-born military commissioners to finally “develop a quasi-

military character” in the force (Higley, 1984). A listing of the OPP’s first duties bear out

this description, including such commercially-orientated tasks as

 enforcing the Weapons, Games, and Fisheries Act by stopping fraudulent wolf

bounties and arresting Hudson Bay agents with illegal pelts;

 the 'unpopular job' of maintaining peace in 'wild mining and railway

construction camps in the north' by suppressing local bars and brothels near

labour camps;

 enforcing liquor licenses and collecting fines.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 61

Of the three tasks it was the last one, collecting liquor license fines, that was by far the

most profitable, and in its first year of existence the OPP collected $15,000 in such fines.

Controlling liquor licenses had been a job of pre-OPP Provincial Constables when

Ontario amended, in 1871, Section 8 of the Act Respecting Tavern and Shop Licenses to

empower those Provincial Officers to enforce liquor laws throughout the province. The

OPP simply incorporated this 40 year-old tradition.

Despite the tidy profit that came from liquor licensing the OPP would never have been

considered “a widespread commercial enterprise” without ‘The Great World War’ and

the prohibition it engendered. In 1916, Ontario elected a new provincial government with

a mandate to make “any sacrifice necessary to win the war” and one of those ‘sacrifices’

was the banning of alcohol throughout the province. With the passing of the Ontario

Temperance Act (OTA), Ontario joined Alberta and Manitoba in becoming a 'dry' 42

province (Ross & Hartman, 1960). Though temperance was viewed as a patriotic duty it

was primarily the result of decades of temperance protesters who, often rightly, rallied

against the “evil effects of liquor” such as violence, family abuse, and political

corruption.

The temperance movement was largely composed of religious women influenced by

American Methodist anti-alcohol religious fervor (Barron, 1980), but the movement also

had a strong ally in almost every political party outside the ruling Ontario Conservatives

(a.k.a. Tories) and their loyal ‘police gangs’ as Vronsky (2004) explains:

The administration of liquor licensing was one of the duties of the Toronto

Police. Those tavern owners who did not cooperate with the Tory

politicians soon found that their liquor licenses were not renewed upon

expiry. Mixed into this formula, were also all the ‘beer dispensing’

licenses, and unlicensed facilities, which the constables would see fit to

handle at their “discretion… to seduce, reward, punish.” Making matters

even worse, some liquor licenses were held by constables themselves.

Numerous witnesses testified how their establishments were denied liquor

licenses or had their licenses revoked when they failed to support the Tory

party.

Toronto’s taverns were the central focus of vote gathering power.

Dispensing intoxicants and gathering together a consensus, a tavern in

19th century Toronto was as powerful a political tool as television is

today.

It is for this reason, that the Reform movement took an anti-alcohol stance

in its early political platform. By breaking the tavern-based vote-focusing

machinery of the Tories, the Reform movement hoped to seize power for

42

dry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county

62 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

itself in future elections. However, once the Reformers aligned themselves

with the religious Temperance movement in their bid for power, they

found themselves permanently locked into an anti-alcohol platform on

moral grounds, rather than political or strategic. It is in these events, that

we find the roots of today’s stringent liquor laws in Ontario and the

foundation of the future puritanical ‘Toronto the Good.’

Despite the good intentions of the Temperance movement the law proved unenforceable

and the sale of alcohol flourished in illegal drinking establishments, known as

speakeasies, and through fraudulent doctor’s prescription to buy alcohol. The prescription

system was widely abused, a point noticed most during the Christmas season when long

line-ups formed at drugstores to buy doctor-prescribed bottles. Soon the Great Lakes

were full of ‘rum-runners’ and other forms of alcohol smugglers operating between

Canada and the USA.

By 1919 the OPP could boast that “the force more than paid for itself” in liquor fines

which occupied the bulk of their work. Despite the growing problems with prohibition, a

referendum held that year saw the war-time prohibition passed into provincial law with a

60% vote. Yet the underground trade in alcohol continued to swell and soon the

government was spending more on OTA enforcement than all other law activity

combined with the OPP making 4,500 OTA prosecutions, raking in $500,000 in fines and

seizing (and re-using) 72 cars and boats used for smuggling in a single year. Only six

OPP officers were manning the forces’ Criminal Investigation Branch while 85 officers

did OTA enforcement.

Prohibition came at a high human cost as dozens of people died from poisonous bootleg

liquor, 'over-energetic' police enforcement resulted in both civilians and officers being

killed, and massive corruption occurred in the Ontario political system. The corruption

revealed through press reports about bribed officers and border officials occasionally

reached to the highest levels of Ontario Ministers. The methods used by the OPP to make

busts, such as using high-school students as undercover agents, also made the headlines,

and 'good officers' began resigning as the OPP lost legitimacy. The OPP official history

openly states that “the public were beginning to see the OPP as little more than a liquor

suppression agency, ridiculed like the Keystone Kops” (Higley, 1984).

Thus, despite the strong moral arguments in its favour, Ontarians voted in 1924 to end

prohibition by a slim 51.5% margin and the LCBO was created in 1927 to license alcohol

distribution. Nearly forgotten today, between 1927 and 1962 “the LCBO kept records on

every licensed drinker, every purchase made, every employee, every drinking

establishment and every bottle of booze in Ontario” and if an Ontarian was found to be

“abusing their privilege” their license to drink was revoked (Thompson & Genosko,

2009). To the south the US prohibition continued until 1933, with machine-gun armed

US boats patrolling the Great Lakes leaving groups of “frozen dead American

rumrunners” to wash up on Canadian shores.

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 63

Despite the loss in alcohol fines (which soon dropped from half a million dollars to

$25,000 per year), the Ontario government was easily able to bounce from deficit to

surplus through liquor taxes. More importantly, organized crime shrank dramatically,

gangland wars to control the black-market ended, massive corruption dwindled to normal

proportions and the OPP became transformed from a 'commercial enterprise' into a

policing force.

Alcohol was, and remains, a dangerous drug that leads to many social ills in Ontarian

society but prohibition had proved itself an even worse cure. The drawbacks of

prohibition are well documented:

 The creation of a giant black-market that provides steady funding for organized crime allowing them to corrupt both policing and politicians;

 The creation of more powerful versions of the banned drug whose increased potency made them easier to smuggle in smaller quantities;

 Diminished respect for the law and police;

 Legal decisions that enhanced police power (like the abilities to use undercover agents, spying, and warrant-less raids) which would bring their actions into

disrepute;

 A majority of police resources dedicated to an un-winnable ‘war’ rather than other policing tasks;

 A cross-border smuggling trade leading Canada and America to constantly blame each other for not doing enough to stop the smuggling;

 Waves of violence as organized crime gangs warred over distribution, border police chased desperate smugglers, and police raided suspect establishments with

guns drawn.

Yet in the late 1960s Canada would once again try prohibition, this time without even a

democratic referendum to initiate it—and every single one of those earlier problems

would again reoccur.

64 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

History of Marijuana Prohibition

Marijuana had been illegal in Canada since 1923 but even then opponents criticized the

harsh penalties imposed for its possession. There still remains a mystery about why

cannabis was added to the schedule of prohibited drugs in the first place in the complete

absence of debate in Parliament. 'Cannabis indica' was simply added to one of the carbon

copies of a Schedule draft before it was enacted. It would be two decades before any

charges were laid for cannabis possession in Canada, and between 1945 and 1965

cannabis charges in Canada ranged between zero to 10 a year.

In 1966 Canada first exceeded 100 cannabis related charges per year. The next year this

quadrupled to 447. This was the same year that The Beatles 43

ran a full page

advertisement signed by 60 British dignitaries stating: “The law against marijuana is

immoral in principle and unworkable in practice” (Christopher, 1995). In 1970 the arrests

had mushroomed to,

5,399 Canadians arrested for marijuana usage and by 1972 the number had

doubled to 10,695. Whether the Canadian public knew it or not another era

of prohibition had begun. (Christopher, 1995)

Throughout the 1970s both Canadian and American politicians toyed with the idea of

decriminalizing marijuana and in his 1980 throne speech Prime Minister Trudeau stated it

was time “to move cannabis offences to the Food and Drug Act and remove the

possibility of imprisonment for simple possession” but he was on the wrong side of

history. Something ominous had occurred in U.S. politics and a reactionary attitude to

marijuana and 'drugs' emerged in the 1980 presidential election. Both American

candidates used a new phrase: “No one to the right of me on the drug issue.” When

Republican candidate Ronald Reagan won he committed his administration to a 'war' on

drugs:

The mood towards drugs is changing in this country and the momentum is

with us. We are making no excuses for drugs—hard, soft, or otherwise.

Drugs are bad and we are going after them.

From 1980 onwards (see figure 1.1) America would wage a ‘War on [some] Drugs’ and

“drug-control legislation was proposed, almost like clockwork, during every

congressional-election year in the 1980s” (Schlosser, 1997). American Supreme Court

Justice Reinquist wrote in 1981:

The history of the narcotics legislation in this country reveals the

determination of Congress to turn the screw of the criminal machinery—

detection, prosecution and punishment—tighter and tighter.

43

The Beatles http://www.rotten.com/library/culture/beatles/

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 65

Figure 1.1: Go to the following website to view the graph

Timeline of Drug Offenses in North America

(http://www.thestar.com/specialSections/crime/article/460849)

Congress fell right in step with the drumbeat of this new war and it repeatedly raised and

re-raised the drug enforcement budget from $1.2 billion in 1981 to nearly $11.7 billion in

1992. This became the greatest build-up and mobilization of law enforcement resources

in American history. The whole American state apparatus was engaged in this new ‘war.’

Not only were the obvious law enforcement agencies- the Drug Enforcement Agency,

FBI, Coast Guard, and Customs Service, to say nothing of state and local police forces-

pressed into greater anti-drug service, but a vast number of other agencies were mobilized

as well:

 the CIA gathered drug intelligence that was declared by presidential order to be a matter of national security;

 the State Department negotiated crop destruction initiatives throughout South America;

 the U.S. Navy provided aid to Coast Guard boarding parties;

 NASA completed satellite surveillance of coca and marijuana fields.

Ronald Regan created a new federal post of Drug Czar 44

to oversee this massive

mobilization. Carlton Turner, the first drug czar, believed that marijuana use was

inextricably linked to “the present young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military,

anti-nuclear power, anti-big business, anti-authority demonstrations” (Schlosser, 1997).

Turner was later quoted in Time magazine as saying using marijuana led to

homosexuality.

The next drug czar was a chain-smoking, Roman Catholic, with a video-poker, gambling

addiction that cost him eight million dollars before he quit. He pondered ‘beheading’

drug dealers but acknowledged that “legally, it’s difficult.” Los Angeles Police Chief

Daryl Gates, who created Drug Abuse Resistance Education, better known as DARE,

which asked students to sign a pledge to never use drugs, proposed that casual drug users

should be “taken out and shot” (Ostrow, 1990).

America’s new 'war' was not a rational policy but was closer to a state-funded moral

panic. For example, when Ronald Regan passed a 1986 crime bill stating that “America

would be ‘Drug Free’ by 1995” it was clear that religious fervour and political

44

Czar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czar_%28political_term%29#United_States

66 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

considerations were more important in this war than anything resembling a realistic

perspective. The standard market model for illicit drugs predicted that tougher

enforcement against sellers would raise prices; yet cocaine and heroin prices have fallen

substantially during a period of massive increase in enforcement. The insanity of the drug

war was often clear to those police officers forced to fight it.

When OPP undercover agents began making larger busts in the late 1980s they were

“amazed at the amount of money in the drug trade” and there was no end in sight (Globe

and Mail, 1988; The Windsor Star, 1988). An OPP spokesman noted that provincial

police seizures of illicit drugs in the first six weeks of 1988 (totalled at $13 million)

equalled the total for all of 1986. After participating in several high-profile drug busts,

including the seizure of tens of millions of dollars of cocaine, Toronto officer Bill Blair

knew that such enforcement efforts did little to staunch the flow of contraband: “It’s like

a salamander—you cut off an arm and it grows back. It’s going to continue” (UofT

Magazine, 2010). So in 1989, Canadian police starting doing what the American

government had long pressured them to do. They started taking their cut of the drug

trade.

Forfeiture

In 1978 the American government amended the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention

and Control Act to allow law enforcement to seize all money 45

and/or:

other things of value furnished or intended to be furnished by any person

in exchange for a controlled substance [and] all proceeds traceable to such

an exchange.

The goal of seizures was to remove some of the profitability of the drug trade by

confiscating property bought with drug money, but the power blended civil and criminal

law in a troubling manner. Simon Fraser University criminologist Neil Boyd, notes that

one blurring was that the burden of proof in a civil case is a “pretty flimsy threshold” on

which to decide whether to take the property of somebody not convicted of a crime. An

even more bothersome aspect of forfeiture laws was that this made the government a

beneficiary of the drug economy.

The United States found it necessary to encourage Canada and Mexico to adopt similar

measures to prevent neighbouring countries from becoming a ‘safe haven’ from asset

seizures and in 1989 Canada passed amendments to the Criminal Code which allowed the

RCMP to seize suspected proceeds of crime without the laying of criminal charges. The

dangerous hybrid nature of this power was exemplified by the fact that it was Canada’s

Revenue Minister and not the Attorney-General that fought to have the amendment

passed.

45

seize all money http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/forfeiture.html

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 67

Even before the amendment was fully passed the Canadian Press reported in December,

1988, that RCMP departments across Canada were,

eagerly gearing up to seize tens of millions of dollars in cash, homes, cars,

boats [and] planes” with one RCMP officer boasting, “Conceivably, there

could be a cleaning up of property… It’s conceivable that drug

enforcement will not cost the taxpayer a nickel.”

Once the gate had been opened by the RCMP, the chance to legally take a share of the

massive profits created by the prohibition black-market economy was very tempting to

other police forces. In January 1993, the Canadian Press reported that according to a

police superintendent, “Edmonton police will do fewer high-level drug investigations

unless they get a cut of the money they seize in busts” but it would be Ontario police that

would become the next police force to gain asset seizure powers. In 2002 the Remedies

for Organized Crime and Other Unlawful Activities Act made Ontario the first Canadian

province to have such legislation. As the first seized assets trickled in, Ontario Attorney-

General Michael Bryant (Rud, 2005) said that he “expected the haul to grow

significantly” before adding that,

the first priority for money recovered through the Ontario civil legislation

was compensation for victims...but that also depends upon the victim’s

needs [as] victims often can’t be tracked down. And in drug cases, the

most common targets of the civil proceeds of crime legislation, there are

typically no identifiable victims. If there’s any money left over after, it

goes to covering the cost of the department that is pursuing the civil

forfeiture, and then the remaining money goes toward law enforcement (in

Ontario).

Ontario’s Attorney-General was correct in both his expectation that “the haul would

grow” and to downplay expectations about the amount of money victims were going to

receive. In the first 5 years of operation the Ontario government collected forfeitures

totalling $2.6 million in assets with an addition $8.7 million in frozen assets. When the

first allotment of the $2.6 million dollars was given out in 2007 only $300,000 was

distributed in victims compensation, $763,000 in grants was awarded to 10 participating

police services across Ontario and the rest was presumably kept by the government. The

Ontario government’s press release shows how some of the police grants were spent:

 Ontario Provincial Police Asset Forfeiture Unit: $48,000 to extend the service

contract for a forensic accountant required to investigate asset forfeiture cases

across Ontario. This is a province-wide initiative.

 Ottawa Police Service: $50,195 to fund specialized training, equipment, and tools

for drug section investigators.

68 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

 Oxford Community Police Service: $47,821 to update technology, training, and

equipment to effectively investigate drug-related incidents and marijuana grow

operations.

 West Grey Police Service: $47,073 toward a canine unit vehicle to help

investigate property-related offences and drug crimes.

 Waterloo Regional Police Service: $45,570 to update technology to enhance

investigative tactics such as search warrant execution, surveillance, and

interviewing.

 Chatham-Kent Police Service: $21,351 to upgrade technology, training, and

equipment to increase drug crimes intelligence.

A worrying trend in this list is that many of the departments who received grants invested

the fund into tools to help them seize more drug assets. This cycle of profit and

investment might be good business sense for a commercial enterprise but it creates a

dangerous precedent for guardian institutions because when the police stand to profit

from the drug trade it becomes harder to judge their motives.

For example, when Canada’s major police union (the CPA) states they “will actively

oppose efforts to decriminalize or legalize possession of illicit drugs” warning that “the

public, especially children, are developing a weakening sense of the dangers of marijuana

[and] call on public leaders to speak out against the dangers of marijuana” (CBC News,

2001)—are they protecting children or profit margins? Or what is the public to make of

the RCMP ‘currency exchange businesses’ that were set up in Montreal and Vancouver

to expose drug dealers. These fronts laundered and exchanged $141.5 million but the

operation was too understaffed to investigate many of the suspected dealers who used the

centre, but

the centre did, however, make a profit from the drug dealers by charging suspected

criminals more than other clients [by] charging people thought to be laundering

drug money through the centre a fee of one or two percent for the currency

exchanged in addition to the usual exchange rate. During the years the centre was in

operation, it allocated some of its profits—$1.15 million—to the RCMP drug

investigations. By the time the company stopped operating in 1997, it had amassed

a profit of $3 million dollars, which was given to the federal government.

(McIntosh, 1998)

This may have been a legitimate RCMP sting operation but the profit involved calls its

motives and operation into question. Karen Selick (2001), a lawyer practicing in

Belleville, Ontario writes:

MODULE ONE Police: Policing Fundamentals 69

This [seizure] law threatens to transform policing into a self-contained,

self-perpetuating little industry, hooked on the proceeds of vice just like

any addict, putting occasional pressure on organized crime but never

enough to derail the gravy train. If it were anyone other than the

government doing this, we would call it a protection racket.

The temptation to use asset-forfeiture laws in a corrupt fashion is especially acute when

the police department that affects the seizures stands to directly receive a portion of it,

such as in cases where seized cars are available for departmental 46

or personal use 47

and

any shrinkage of police operating budgets adds to this temptation. This combination of

pressures seems to have been too great for at least one Texan policing department. When

an attorney filed a lawsuit to see the department’s record of asset seizures he found nearly

200 seizures from 2006 to 2008 and in 147 of those seizures the records showed that,

police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles

from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any

crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists

directly—and discovered all but one of them were black.

“If used properly, it’s a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime

doesn’t pay,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate’s

Criminal Justice Committee. “But in this instance, where people are being

pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no

convictions, I think that’s theft.” (Witt, 2009)

46

departmental http://www.abbynews.com/news/116772304.html 47

personal use http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/27/2767.asp

70 Police: Policing Fundamentals MODULE ONE

IN FOCUS

Corruption

As in the prohibition of the 1920s, the corrupting power of the drug trade on policing

has been enormous. Half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption

cases between 1993 and 1997 were convicted for drug-related offences including: (1)

conducting unconstitutional searches and seizures; (2) stealing money and/or drugs from

drug dealers; (3) selling stolen drugs; (4) protecting drug operations; (5) providing false

testimony; and (6) submitting false crime reports. Officers involved in drug-related

corruption were also more likely to be actively involved in the commission of a variety

of crimes.

As seen in the Toronto Drug Squad corruption case,

the most commonly identified pattern of drug-related police corruption

involves small groups of officers who protected and assisted each other

in criminal activities, rather than the traditional patterns of non-drug-

related police corruption that involved just a few isolated individuals or

systemic corruption pervading an entire police department or precinct.

(Rangel, 1998)

It is not just the police who are being corrupted,

The magnitude of funds under criminal control poses special threats to

governments, particularly in developing countries, where the domestic

security markets and capital markets are far too small to absorb such

funds without quickly becoming dependent on them. It is difficult to have

a functioning democratic system when drug cartels have the means

to buy protection, political support or votes at every level of government

and society. In systems where a member of the legislature or judiciary,

earning only a modest income, can easily gain the equivalent of some 20

months’ salary from a trafficker by making one “favourable” decision,

the dangers of corruption are obvious. (United

Nations International Drug Control Program, 1998)

For further information on the growing opposition to the drug war from law

enforcement agents see The Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)

http://www.leap.cc/