Big Fat Hairy Living

In the latest Xtra, columnist Andrew Brett writes about how the NDP screwed over their queer youth. He writes about manoeuvring by party brass to stop a motion to oppose the increase in the age of consent by two years, a proposal the NDP supports. He describes hordes straight old white men being brought into the room to help pass a motion killing debate:

Although supporters such as Libby Davies and Svend Robinson voted on our side, the motion [not to oppose raising the of cosent] passed by a slim majority and the resolution was effectively eliminated from debate. Many youth delegates and others who had seen what transpired began booing and crying out ’shame’ and about half of the delegates began pouring out of the room.

Comartin later admitted to, and tried to justify the party organizing against us, accusing “the gay, lesbian, transgendered group, and the youth, organized by their leadership” of “taking over” the panel. The vast gay conspiracy again!

After the way queers and youth were silenced at this convention, I have lost much of my faith in the NDP as a party that is willing to put principles and rational policy ahead of shortsighted electioneering.

This makes me want to re-evaluate my support of the NDP.

(Click to enlarge.)

On the way home last night I stopped in the tuck shop at the bottom of my apartment building. As I was paying for my Diet Coke, the man who runs the store told me that a young woman had committed suicide earlier that day by jumping off her balcony. She was on the 18th floor.

Later that night I started wondering about the last few seconds of her life. Did she keep her eyes open or did she close them? Did she try to think of people she loved so that her last thoughts would be happy? Did she bring her iPod with her so she would be listening to her favourite music as she fell? Did she think about all the things that had gone wrong in her life? Did she think about how her emotional pain would end in a few seconds? Did she change her mind and regret what she’d done? What was she feeling?

I don’t even know who she was, but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about her.

About a month after everyone else on the planet, I’ve finally read that article in the San Francisco Chronicle about bears. It’s one of those fluffy “look at this new trendy thing” pieces newspapers put in their Saturday editions so that boring people aren’t left completely unaware of last year’s big trends:

Largely a reaction against the stereotype of gay men looking like Abercrombie & Fitch models, bears display a matured-male look. Facial hair is the most common characteristic — along with body hair — and there is a range of body types, from chubby to obese to slim and points in between.

Runway fashion and popular culture play less important roles in their lives. The actor John Goodman is a bear icon, and even Santa Claus would fit the image.

A few paragraphs into the article was this curious sentence: “Fashion designer Marc Jacobs’ fall advertising campaign features two gay men who are unmistakably bears.”

Immediately doubting this, I went directly to the Marc Jacobs official web site and tried to find any evidence of bears. The picture to the side is the closest thing I could find to a bear on that site, so I tried a web search and was eventually was able to find a picture of one of the ads. It was pretty much what I expected. While these guys are good looking and for all I know spend all their free time at The Dugout, my first reaction upon seeing them walk down the street in those clothes would not be “Look! Unmistakable bears!” As if anticipating such objections, the ad attempts to emphasize their bearishness by depicting them lying on a bear skin rug. Because they’re bears, you see! Get it? Bears, bear skin rug? So clever!

Much more interesting than that limp ad is an article I discovered in my search that covers an exhibition by New York photographer Sigrid Jakob. Sigrid Jakob is a straight woman who takes beautiful photographs of bear-identified men, and not just so that she can sell clothes to heterosexual yuppies. The photograph in the article is of a man who is a truly an unmistakable bear, and the fact that she photographs bears for artistic rather than capitalistic reasons makes the picture a lot more refreshing than yet another boringly “provocative” fashion ad.

I guess one can tell that one’s subculture has arrived when fashion designers find the richest, whitest, slimmest, prettiest beautiful members of it and take “provocative” photographs of them to in order to sell overpriced trousers. But not, of course, trousers in size 44.

Remember that whole Mohammed cartoon controversy from earlier in the year, when groups of crazy, reality-challenged lunatics rioted and burned stuff because of a few cartoons of their prophet? Remember when other crazy, reality-challenged lunatics claimed that, unlike those horrible, violent Muslims, Christians were always peaceful and would never, never do anything as horrible as carrying offensive signs? Remember great lines like “Christians are killing [Islam] with kindness?” I do:

Christians insist that God is patient and tolerant, even of those who reject Him, while Muslims seem to believe that Allah is unforgiving and eager to extract payment for any slight. The one thing these Muslims can’t afford is to win this argument. Should the moment ever come when Christians decide that the Christian view is wrong and that the Muslims are right about how God wants His people to behave, with the technology at our disposal, these mobs would wiped out in moments.

I think that moment has come:

Christian mobs torched cars, blockaded roads and looted Muslim-owned shops in violence touched off by Friday’s executions of three Roman Catholics convicted of instigating attacks on Muslims. Some 200 inmates escaped after mobs assaulted a jail in the town of Atambua, sending guards fleeing to the nearby jungle. By midday only 20 had been recaptured, deputy national police chief Lt. Gen. Adang Dorodjatun said, calling on the others to turn themselves in. And on the island of Flores, the executed men’s birthplace, machete-wielding mobs ran through the streets Friday, sending women and children running in panic, police and witnesses said.

Police and media reports said at least five people were hurt, including a prosecutor who was hospitalized with stab wounds. Vice President Jusuf Kalla appealed for calm, saying the deaths of the three men had nothing to do with religion. “It’s a matter of law,” he told reporters in the capital Jakarta. “If the people resent the law, we are doomed.’’

Ah, the razor-sharp machete of kindness.

Watching Christianity and Islam argue with each other is like watching two blind people fight to the death over whether the sky is the little alien men from mars are green or pink: neither of them is smart enough to realize that they’re both completely and utterly full of shit.

Update: Edited to make the analogy more acceptable to Daniel M. Laenker.

Say, look at this:

Missing money and drugs, falsified search warrants, and lying before a judge are among the disturbing allegations in dozens of police services act charges laid against 11 former Toronto drug squad officers.

[...]

Included in the allegations released yesterday is a case from 1998 where a search warrant was executed on a safety deposit box at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. According to the notice of hearing, $31,150 was not accounted for when the money from the bank was returned to an accused. Schertzer and Correia have been charged with corrupt practice in that case.

Other charges involve allegations that officers falsified information to obtain search warrants and that seized drugs were not logged into police evidence lockers.

Meanwhile…

[Toronto lawyer Barry Swadron] says he is spoiling for a fight with Mike McCormack over his controversial proposal that the country’s biggest municipal police association sue anyone who makes a blatantly false complaint against an officer.

McCormack, one of two candidates vying for the union’s top job, said if he wins the October election he will look at a case in which a police officer, Const. Michael Kiproff, is being sued for allegedly making an unlawful arrest of a supervisor at a youth detention centre.

Barry Swadron is the lawyer who represented Thomas Kerr, a man who won an out-of-court settlement from several police officers he had accused of severely beating him. One of the officers was Craig Bromell, the former head of the Toronto Police Association famous for admitting on national television to wanting to eliminate unfriendly politicians: “I think if you found somebody who is an enemy of the police, we don’t want him around. So you try and get him kicked out of office. Pretty simple… All the other loudmouths, they’re going to keep their mouths shut… (We’re) going to target our enemies.”

Swadron and his son Marshall are representing Fitzroy Masters, the supervisor who is suing the police for $825,000 in the Feb. 6, 2003, incident at the detention centre. Masters had been arrested by Kiproff for allegedly obstructing police, and was taken away in handcuffs after he objected to the way the officer and his partner were dealing with a 14-year-old boy being held at the facility.

But a Crown attorney later withdrew the charges against Masters after telling the court that “there’s absolutely no reasonable prospect of conviction in this matter,” according to a court transcript.

The prosecutor went on to say that it was a “miscarriage of justice” that Masters was even before the court.

This is the police force we’re supposed to trust to protect us.

In response to my previous post, sp_cst_cubby writes:

…the comment that police unions are facist pigs is below you.

All unions are there to protect its employees from their employer and outside entities that may threaten their jobs/livelyhood etc….

In respect to Police Associations/Unions they are no different. The big problem most people have is the fact that this union is a police union. Policing is a unique job that is highly volatile and inherently fraught with issues such as false complaints. It is part of the job.

[...]

Many don’t realize how much abuse police actually endure. Would you not bite back after being bitten so many times. And don’t tell me we’re being paid to be bitten.

I respect you and I know that you’re an honest, decent man. I owe you an apology for writing the post the way I did. If I were to write a post like that again, I’d use much less harsh language. But I still believe the proposal is wrong.

The Toronto Police Service has been accused of widespread corruption for many years now, even even by well-respected veteran police officers, and its drug squad is even today still under investigation by the RCMP. Over the past decade, huge numbers of drug charges have been dropped because the credibility of drug squad officers was called into question; after complaints that some of them allegedely beat and robbed suspects, several officers were charged with assault, extortion, perjury, and obstructing justice. Some of the charges were subsequently dropped, but others are ongoing.

Obviously not all police are corrupt, and I’m not saying that either here or in my previous post. There are thousands of police in Toronto, and the vast majority are honest and have probably never had any serious complaints levelled against them.

It’s in everyone’s interest to discourage frivolous complaints, and it’s acceptable for the union to support members to make sure that they receive fair and unbiased treatment. Unions are there to support their members against unfair treatment, and I strongly support unions as way of protecting workers. If this proposal were coming from any other union, most people would have a hard time finding anything wrong with it. The problem with this proposal is who it comes from: the Toronto Police Association. The Toronto Police Association’s idea of what it means to protect its members is quite scary. It’s been accused of many, many unsavoury things:

• Intimidation: Craig Bromell, former head of the Toronto Police Association, was widely criticized for his use of scare tactics. He openly admitted to placing politicians under surveillance and gleefully admitted that he wanted to eliminate any criticism of police. Police Services Board members Judy Sgro, Alan Heisey, and Olivia Chow, among others, all had intimidation tactics used against them. Chairman Alan Heisey, for example, was smeared with accusations that accused him of sympathy towards child molesters. He was completely exonerated, but he was eliminated anyway: he chose not to seek another term.
• Intimidation and inappropriate political intereference: The Toronto Police, in violation of provincial law, endorsed a mayoral candidate in the 2003 municipal elections. They also came under fire for election posters that were widely criticized as being racist. This is not the first time they’ve interfered: In 1980, the police raised money to fight against John Sewell, who had criticized the police.
• Intimidation: In 2000, the Toronto Police Association defied orders from the head of the Toronto Police Services Board to shut down a fundraising operation called Operation True Blue which collected money that was later used to investigate politicians. People who donated money were given stickers to put on the cars and many critics raised the possibility that people with stickers could in theory be given preferential treatment such as lenience on traffic infractions. The operation was eventually shut down under pressure from politicians, columnists, and the public.
• Intimidation: In 2002, Councillor Kyle Rae was sued for $3.5 million by members of the Toronto Police Service after criticizing their disgusting conduct in a raid on a lesbian bathhouse night called Pussy Palace. He eventually paid a settlement, and it’s a pretty certain bet he’ll never publicly criticize the police again. (The charges on Pussy Palace organizers were stayed in the incident when the judge ruledthat the police had blatantly iolated the rights of Pussy Palace participants.)
• Out of court settlements: In 2003, Craig Bromell, the aforementioned former head of the Toronto Police Association, was one of nine officers who settled out of court with a man who accused them of beating him up. He settled out of court rather than taking the civil suit to conclusion in court. Apparently, cases in which civil suits against the police are settled behind closed doors are not uncommon in Toronto. In one case, the police paid thousands of dollars to an elderly woman they had strip searched after having arrested her at a political demonstration. According to the CBC, the Toronto Police spent over $30 million from 1998 to 2005 settling law suits against police.
• Intimidation: In 2003, The police launched a $2.7 billion (yes, billion) law suit against the Toronto Star for publishing an article which accused Toronto Police of racism, showing that they were twice as likely to arrest and charge blacks as they are whites under similar conditions. The suit was dropped, but the message was clear: write something critical of us and we’ll take you to court, wasting your money and potentially years of your life.
• Disobeying orders: In October of 2005, the police union planned a demonstrarion in front of City Hall to publicize their demands in ongoing contract negotiations with the Police Services Board. Despite the fact that the chief of police had ordered officers not to wear their uniforms to the demonstration, several dozen officers disobeyed.

This is only what I can remember off the top of my head and can find references for in a cursory web search. If I were to bother to do serious research, I’m sure could come up with many, many more examples of the tactics the Toronto Police Association has used to discourage any form of criticism. The incidents I list above are just the tip of the iceberg.

This proposal from the Toronto Police Association has to be viewed in light of the union’s reaction to accusations of corruption. If this union were truly interested in justice, it would fight to ensure open, transparent processes instead of using knee-jerk tactics against anyone who criticizes or complains against the police. As critics say in the original news article, the inevitable effect of this proposal will be to silence critics and people who make complaints.

The Toronto Police Association has a reputation as bad as the Teamsters. It’s out of control and probably the only way to fix the problem is to disband it.

More proof that police unions are led by fascist pigs:

Anyone who makes a false complaint against the Toronto police could lose their home or their car under a controversial new policy being proposed by one of the candidates in the race to head up the force’s powerful union.

If there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the complaint made against an officer was false, that person could be sued by the Toronto Police Association, says presidential hopeful Mike McCormack, stressing the threat of a civil suit would be only in “extreme cases.”

But critics claim such a move by the union would have a chilling effect on legitimate complaints against police officers.

“Scary and intimidating” is how Toronto councillor and police services board vice-chair Pam McConnell described McCormack’s proposal.

“I defend the right of all people to voice complaints,” she said in an interview last night. “We want a system where people can come forward if they have a complaint, not a system where people are frightened to speak up against the police.”

The proposal comes from the head of the police union, Mike McCormack, who was charged with numerous corruption offences more than two years ago. The charges were later dropped after an internal investigation.

Police unions should be disbanded.

I JUST SAW ROGER HAZARD ON CHURCH STREET IN PERSON but was too chicken to say hi.