The Value Of Police Body Cams

With increasing awareness of the wrongdoing that police sometimes perpetrate, video recordings of their interactions with the public are becoming of increasing importance, both in Canada and the United States. 

Here at home, one only has to recall the murder of Sammy Yatim by Officer James Forcillo. Had CCTV footage not recorded the officer's execution of Yatim, an official cover-up story would have undoubtedly carried the day, something along the lines of a knife-wielding drugging trying to stab the officer.

In the United States, were it not for a brave bystander's recording, Derek Chauvin would still be conducting his brutal practices, like the one that killed George Floyd.

Abuse of authority can happen in any jurisdiction, but the San Jose California Police Department seems to have perfected the art. Start the video at the nine-minute mark to learn all about it.

Protecting and serving the public entails real responsibility. In my view, bodycams should be standard issue for all police departments. 

Some Good News And Some Bad News

First the good news: Canadians as a whole are feeling pretty cheery about being part of a multicultural, diverse country.

Now the bad news: One-third of a survey's respondents say that the country is racist.

Celina Gallardo writes:

In partnership with the University of British Columbia, the Angus Reid Institute conduced an online survey of a representative randomized sample of 1,984 Canadian adults between May 11 to May 17 for a report titled “Diversity and Racism in Canada” looking into people’s perceptions of race to highlight what the population truly thinks of diversity.

Canadians tend to feel pride from living in such a diverse country:

Most respondents from across the country think that diversity is ultimately a good thing — 85 per cent of people agree that Canada is a better country because of how racially diverse its population is.

There is a big caveat to this, however, in that many others experience Canada in a less rosy light.

One-third of respondents think that “Canada is a racist country.” Of these respondents, 42 per cent are visible minorities and 54 per cent are women under the age of 35. Meanwhile, three-quarters of respondents over the age of 55 don’t think Canada is a racist country.

Some respondents, including 54 per cent of Albertans and 57 per cent of Saskatchewanians, say that exaggerating discrimination is a larger problem than not seeing it where it does exist. However, 44 per cent of Saskatchewanians agree that Canada is a racist country.

Then there is this sobering result:

Though the majority of respondents say they feel “warm” towards visible minorities (specifically those who are Black, East Asian, South Asian and/or Muslim), Muslim people received the highest amount of “cold” feelings. A quarter of respondents say they feel “cold” towards Muslims, with 42 per cent of men age 55 and older and 37 per cent of Quebecers feeling this way.

Still, 87 per cent of respondents see all races as equal, while 12 per cent think that some races are superior to others. 

All of which goes to show, there is still much work to be done.  

 

 

 

Correction: "If You Can't Afford To Live, Then Don't Live"

That is the considered opinion of Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn, as he responds to the Supreme Court ruling upholding The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

America the beautiful, eh?

CORRECTION: Well, this is embarrassing. For all my talk and writing about critical thinking, I did not verify the source of this before posting. As John B. in his comment below rightly guessed, this is satire. There is no excuse for me having made this error. Confirmation bias is a very real thing.

A Look In The Mirror

 

There is a scene in the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, (about the Scopes Monkey Trial) where Spencer Tracey and Frederic March, courtroom adversaries, discuss faith. March insists it is necessary for the masses to believe in something beautiful; it makes their lives more palatable. Tracy counters with a story about his childhood yearning for Golden Dancer, a rocking horse he had long coveted in a store window. With much scrimping and saving by his parents, he awoke one morning to find it at the base of his bed.

But the story does not have a happy ending. The first time he rode it, it fell apart, so poorly constructed was it, "put together with spit and sealing wax. All shine and no substance."  This story relates to the ignorance and bigotry that hides behind great displays of religiosity, as evident in a previous scene, and is a major subtext of the entire film as science, in the form of evolution, confronts biblical literalism.

That got me thinking about the power of myth, both for good and ill, which brought me around to the often destructive influence of national myths, ones that are foundational to how people see their countries and themselves. Some are obviously destructive, such as American exceptionalism and the belief in the United States as a land of unparalleled opportunity, where anyone can become anything.

Then there are those that suggest something good, like Canada being an accepting, tolerant land that welcomes all and treats everyone well. As recent events have shown, we can no longer accept such anodyne myths as approximations of truth. They conceal too much ugly reality.

Consider, for example, this:

Before the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in British Columbia last month, two-thirds of Canadians say, they knew a little or nothing about the history of this country’s residential school system.

It’s one of the findings in a survey commissioned by the Canadian Race Relation Foundation and the Assembly of First Nations.

They polled Canadians the week after the discovery at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., was announced.

For many Canadians, it seems to have been a moment of shattered ignorance.

As Tom Parkin reports, ignoring reality was at the forefront of Jagmeet Singh's recent angry speech in the House of Commons, prompted both by the unmarked Indigenous graves and the horror that took place in London, Ontario.

“Some people have said, ‘This is not our Canada,’ ” Singh told MPs.

“But the reality is, this is our Canada. We can’t deny it. We can’t reject that, because it does no one any help. The reality is: Our Canada is a place of racism, of violence, of genocide of Indigenous people.”

Singh may be sensing a widespread mood. In an opinion poll Leger released last week, 57 per cent of Canadians said the Kamloops graves made them “question the whole moral foundation that Canada has been based on.”

Parkin says this is not a message that Canada's political and business leaders will take kindly to or promote.

The deaths and burials at residential schools were known by Indigenous families, but news media didn’t tell those stories. Nor is the frustration with ongoing racism, and fear of violent racists, new in Canada. Many Canadians live with both every day.

These are the experiences of what political science calls the “subaltern” classes of society — groups who have no say and no command in politics or business. And they certainly don’t decide the meaning of their country. Not usually, anyway.

Subaltern society is divided into identities, each pushed to the margins of political discourse, isolated from each other, and without the common networks, culture, or political language to tell a common and unifying story. That now seems to be changing.

“This is our Canada” isn’t just a demand to look objectively at Canada’s past; it’s a call to disparate people to find a new moral basis for their country. 

And it is also a call for all of us to take a good, long look in the mirror.

Confronting Reality

The other day, I posted my thoughts on the inadequacy of the term Islamophobia, opining that it seems almost euphemistic; it fails to baldly unveil what it really means: prejudice, bias and hatred against Muslims.

Toronto Star reporter Noor Javed, writing from a deeply personal perspective, offers a much better descriptor: anti-Muslim hate, a reality she has experienced throughout her life and whose incidence

have weighed down on me over the years. They have affected the career choices I have made. They have impacted my mental health. They have deeply hurt me — and still do.

When I tried to list all the incidents of hate that I have experienced since I became a journalist — both in my job and on a day-to-day basis — I hit 30 before I stopped. I could have gone on.

When I got my first barrage of hate mail as an intern at the Star 15 years ago, and turned to a colleague for support, he looked at my hijab and said: if you want to survive, you will need to have Teflon-like skin. Let the hate bounce off you. Don’t let it stick.

But the truth is, even when you tell yourself it doesn’t impact you, it still does.

Every email in your inbox with someone telling you they hate you because of your hijab.

Every letter calling you a “dirty raghead.”

Every tweet telling you to go back to where you came from.

Every person who walks by and whispers “You’re disgusting.”

Every smear campaign calling you a terrorist.

Every time someone doubts your news judgment because you are a “lying Muslim.”

Every time someone asks if you were a token hire. 

While we may not be able to fully appreciate the toll such incidents take on people, it might be useful to remember times in our own lives when we have been treated with even a small amount of unkindness. At the time of the event, our heartrates might have become elevated, our cortisol levels increased, our feelings hurt. Perhaps it becomes an indelible memory. And as much as we might rationalize a cutting comment or exclusion as being a reflection on the perpetrator, not the victim, we hardly escape unscathed. 

It is much worse for Muslims (and I am sure other visible minorities):

You look for ways to cope. But the hate slowly chips away at you and at the idea that we have been so conditioned to believe: How can this be happening here in Canada, the most accepting country in the world?

Let me tell you: It’s been happening for years. The hate is not new. And neither is the violence.

But the haters have gotten more brazen. More hateful. More organized. More dangerous.

So when the Afzaal family was killed for just being Muslim this week, it broke me.

Years of online hate, of politicians benefiting from anti-Muslim policies, of pundits spewing anti-Muslim rhetoric, of trolls questioning if our pain was even real, has done exactly what it was meant to. It turned people against us. It has led them to hate us so much that they want us dead. 

One hopes that writing the article provided a measure of catharsis for Noor Javed. But catharsis is not remediation. That is a responsibility all of us must shoulder.

 

Thought For The Day

 

H/t Theo Moudakis

UPDATED: There Must Be A Better Word

The word phobia generally connotes an irrational fear of something. A definition of the term from a mental health perspective tells us it is

a type of anxiety disorder that is characterized by extreme and debilitating fear of an object, place, situation, or creature (usually insects) which is usually not dangerous. A person does not need to have direct contact with the thing they’re afraid of to experience symptoms. Even thinking about it can bring on anxiety or panic symptoms. 

Phobias run the gamut from agoraphobia (fear of open spaces or crowds) to xenophobia (fear of strangers or foreigners) to zoophobia (fear of animals). All of these definitions have one thing in common: fear or social anxiety, a form of mental illness.

And that is why the term islamophobia, even though it goes beyond fear of Muslims or Islam to include hatred of, and prejudice against, them, seems wholly inadequate, especially in light of the recent horrifying events that unfolded in London, Ontario. It is almost as if the word is a euphemism for something much darker.

It is time to confront the fact that Canadians are not exempt from the racism that has long afflicted the United States, racism reflected in the residential school system our country embraced for so long, racism that is sadly evident in the ongoing crimes against minorities, not the least of whom are Muslims.

In her searing column today, Susan Delacourt calls out federal leaders for refusing denounce the anti-Islamic nature of Quebec's Bill-21, which prohibits the wearing of religious garb for anyone who seeks to hold a public service job. This, while these same federal leaders offer expressions of sympathy and solidarity with the Muslim community. What credibility, for example, does Erin O'Toole have when his party during the 2015 election campaign promised the infamous snitch line for "barbaric cultural practices," a dog-whistle if there ever was one?

But the most damning indictment of Canadian racism comes in this story:

Jeff Bennett, who ran for the PCs in the 2014 election, recounted in a Facebook post how people in his riding were happy to see that he had replaced the former candidate, a man named Ali Chahbar. Loyal Conservatives in London told Bennett they were relieved that “his name was English and his skin was white.” Bennett remembered how Chahbar had been smeared on local talk radio with talk of sharia law and other nonsense.

Bennett wrote that he was tired of people saying London was better than what happened on Sunday. “Bullshit. I knocked on thousands of doors in the very neighbourhood this atrocity occurred. This terrorist may have been alone in that truck on that day, but he was not acting alone. He was raised in a racist city that pretends it isn’t.”

Bennett came in second in London West in 2014 and has likely abandoned any aspirations to be elected again, given his willingness to tell voters what they don’t want to hear about themselves.

Being willing and able to confront unpalatable truths about ourselves will not rid us of those truths, But, in the long road toward a better society, it has to be the first step.

UPDATE: The following, by David Doel of The Rational National, offers a wider landscape upon which to view Canada's racism: