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First published on this site. Reproduced with authorization in Canadian Access to Firearms, November 1995

The Police as Public Enemy?
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

During the twelve months preceding Statistics Canada's latest General Social Survey, only 28% of violent crimes -- sexual assaults, assaults or robberies -- were reported to the police (The Daily, March 23, 1995). This is only one of the many indications that the attitudes of Canadians and the relations between them and their police are changing.

As history shows eloquently, the state is always a potential enemy of people's liberty. Yet, the police is widely thought of as an essential auxiliary to public peace and the rule of law. That this paradox would generate tensions between citizens and their police forces is not surprising. The question is, where do the tensions point to?

Consider four polar models of attitudes towards the police and the state. In the totalitarian model, the common man considers, and rightly so, that the state and the police are enemies to be feared, and not cooperated with to the extent possible. In fact, it is because the state and the police represent such potential danger that the Western liberal tradition harbored a healthy distrust of political power.

In other countries, people mistrust the police more than the state as such. At the risk of simplifying grossly, let's call this the French model. In France, people generally trust the state to act for the common good and the Rights of Man. Yet, on a practical level, state intervention and regulation are so widespread that cooperating with policemen is suspicious.

More in line perhaps with the Western tradition, is the American (and the olde English) model, where people distrust government but will generally view policemen as friendly protectors of liberty and the rule of law. This apparent contradiction has something to do with the tradition of local police forces, conceived as a potential barrier to, as much as an ally of, central power.

The Canadian model, I submit, used to be a mixture of the French and American models. The people did not fear their government, considered as a benevolent and innocuous tyrant. And honest citizens thought of policemen as friendly agents with whom cooperation was forthcoming.

There was some basis for this. Canadian governments used to look pretty unthreatening, laws were relatively unobtrusive, or at least sensibly enforced. The probability of a peaceful person getting in trouble with the law was remote. The policeman was a peer among his peers, hired "to serve and protect." The citizen knew his traditional albeit unwritten rights, and that the policeman knew that he knew.

In a sense, the Canadian model was as much a perversion of political nature as the "French" model. Canadians were much too trustful of Leviathan. The challenge of a free society is to combine a healthy distrust for government with some degree of cooperative relations between citizens and their police. One set of conditions for achieving this difficult balance is that citizens do not feel inferior to police officers, and do not have too many reasons to fear their power in their daily life.

Canadian naïveté towards political power did not matter much as long as the state meddled little in private affairs, as long as the police did not assume a repressive role except in extreme circumstances. Now, as could have been expected, the citizens' blind faith was repaid with increasing government distrust for its subjects. Give a blank check to government, and you can expect many zeros written in. The state has come to think that citizens are not trustworthy enough to care for their own education, their own language, their own health, their own love affairs, their own retirement, their own children, their own community, their own life.

Here is the paradigmatic example of the government's distrust for the very citizens who elect its leaders. In application of the 1991 federal gun control legislation, any Quebecer must fill a four-page-plus form just to obtain the authorization to own firearms (even long guns). Read question no. 16: "During the last two years, have you experienced: a divorce, a separation or relationship breakdown; a failure in school, a loss of job or bankruptcy?"

In this context, the relations between policemen and the people are bound to change radically. From a neighborly helper, the policeman becomes a smuggler chaser, a pornographic inspector, a tax collector, a customs sniffing dog, a PC enforcer, a citizen controller -- in two words, a permanent threat. If you shoot a burglar or a rapist, he will come and arrest you. Short of such dramatic encounters, you know, and the policeman knows you know, that there is always something illegal he can find against you.

The policeman's revolver has evolved from a quiet symbol of duty to a protuding sign of supremacy. Remember when RCMP's sidearms were discretely hidden under holster flaps? Now, the minister of Justice rides along with armed bodyguards, while his elector cannot keep a revolver at his bedsides without being liable to many years in jail (if only for "careless storage" as they say in pidgin law). And this is not counting the new, much worse, Bill C-68 just adopted by the House of Commons, after which a large proportion of this country's citizens will fear more a visit from the police than a burglar's break-in. Obviously, there is something rotten in the state of Canada.

The way things have been going, this country will be even more unrecognizable in ten years' time, than it is now from ten or twenty years ago. Mounting distrust, irresponsibility, police power, confrontation, and violence are easy to forecast. I suspect that most people who argue for national unity are defending what this country was, or could have been, instead of what it has become -- wishful patriotism as it were. Is our only hope that some secessionists from the East or from the West will (even if for the wrong reasons) break Leviathan's back?