My personal encounters with the police as well as my observations of policing behaviours during APEC, the G20 Summit as well as during the 2010 Olympics, Gustafson Lake as well as Burnaby Mountain and the on-going situation on Wet’suwet’en territories, lead me to pose serious questions about whether the public good is being properly “served” and “protected” by law enforcement – as currently constituted – in this province in particular but this also of course extends to the country as a whole.
History teaches us that unless the weakest and most vulnerable members are safe and secure in our society, then, at the end of the day, no citizen is.
I would like to emphasize that my personal interactions with the police have not been uniformly negative; far from it. Despite certain unpleasant early experiences, I therefore possess no particular animus towards law enforcement. I do not view individual police officers through a moral lens, as either “good” or “bad,” but, rather, regard them just as just ordinary persons, like you and I, simply doing their jobs according to their training and to the best of their ability.
