Victoria Mayor welcomes police state to Capital of BC.
Victoria Mayor says "Victoria needs to look at how to create more police presence" after
strange visit to New York with several police board members.
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Mayor Alan Lowe has returned from the Big Apple with ideas on how to redefine Victoria’s sister city relationships. New York City has renamed its sister city program “Global Partners” in an effort to broaden the relationships beyond the cultural ones typically associated with sister cities. Lowe said he gets 15 to20 requests from Chinese officials wanting to forge a relationship with Victoria. The New York model offers a template on how that might be done. There are opportunities for Victoria to work with Seattle, Port Angeles and Portland on the passport issue, said Lowe, adding that Americans need to hear the message “that it’s really not that bad to cross the border with a passport.” The weekend Diversity Summit 2007 in New York brought together delegates in community-based agencies and city departments from around the world including Beijing, Rome, Santo Domingo and Winnipeg. Highlights for Lowe included touring New York’s community court system and its 3-1-1 headquarters, a centralized call centre for all non-emergency information calls ranging from garbage pickup to road closure details. Lowe sai4 he’s made proposals for such a call centre for Victoria and wants to dust it off and see how it might be used on a region-wide basis.
Lowe had earlier left Victoria saying he would be attending a conference of the Canadian Association of Police Boards along with several Victoria police board members and representatives from the Calgary police commission. This week he acknowledged he was surprised that the conference was a sister city conference. “I thought it was going to be more about policing… but I got a lot more out of it." Lowe said New York has made itself safer with a high police presence. “Victoria needs to look at how to create more police presence.” Victoria has four official sister cities: Morioka, Japan: Suzhou, China; Napier, New Zealand; and Khabarovsk, Russia.
Paranoid police state cities like New York and London now have these masked "peace officers" on many major streets, in addition to the millions of CCTV cameras watching your every move. Is this really the image the mayor of Victoria thinks should be considered for our BC capital?
Armed US police could be on London streets
Number of People Stopped by Police Soars in New York AL BAKER and EMILY VASQUEZ The New York Police Department released new information yesterday showing that police officers stopped 508,540 individuals on New York City streets last year — an average of 1,393 stops per day — often searching them for illegal weapons. The number was up from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the department divulged 12 months’ worth of data. After inquiries by the City Council and civil rights advocates, the department delivered four bound volumes of statistics to the Council in midafternoon. The raw data showed that more than half of those stopped last year were black: an average of 67,000 per quarter. At the same time, the average number of people arrested per quarter as a result of such stops almost doubled to 5,317 last year, from 2,819 in 2002, and summonses nearly quintupled, to a quarterly average of 7,292 last year from 1,461 in 2002. Until yesterday, the most recent information released by the Police Department about how and why it stops people to search them, sometimes looking for illegal guns, was from 2003, according to city officials and city and court records. Some officials have said that lag put the department at odds with a pair of legal requirements that sprang from public outrage at the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler. The department, which rejects such assertions, has not released numbers from 2004 and 2005, or from the last three months of 2003. Those who review the data are now grappling with dual issues: determining why the Police Department waited so long to release any new figures, and why it is stopping more people and searching them. The issue of these police-public encounters — called “stop and frisks” — became an emotional flashpoint after the shooting of Mr. Diallo, whose death in a barrage of 41 police bullets led to weeks of protests and scores of arrests outside 1 Police Plaza, in Lower Manhattan. Many of the protesters contended that there was a pattern of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks. A state study later in 1999 confirmed racial disparities in such stops. The guidelines to monitor stop-and-frisks in detail were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and in a federal court case settled by the Bloomberg administration in 2004. Both called for the Police Department to release to the City Council, four times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by officers, and the reasons for such encounters. But until yesterday, it had been a year since the department reported its stop-and-frisk activity, and those numbers dated from a three-month period ending in September 2003. In the meantime, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that investigates charges of police misconduct, found that complaints involving stops and searches have more than doubled in recent years, increasing to 2,556 last year from 1,128 in 2003. Complaints involving police stops now account for 33 percent of all complaints, up from 20 percent in 2003. At a City Council hearing on Jan. 24, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly assured council members that his officers were not practicing racial profiling in street stops. “Officers are stopping those they reasonably suspect of committing a crime, based on descriptions and circumstances,” Mr. Kelly said, “and not on personal bias.” Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that the department’s analysis of the numbers showed that while 55.2 percent of the stop encounters last year involved blacks, 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims (or by witnesses, in the case of homicides). Hispanics, he said, made up 30.5 percent of those stopped and 24.5 percent of suspected offenders. For whites, he said, the numbers were 11.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. Mr. Browne said that aggressive street enforcement was partly responsible for the increase in stop-and-frisks. Also, he said, “careful accounting” of such encounters by the department in recent years made the increase seem greater. “Part of it is taking guns off the street and responding to complaints where we use stop-and-frisk,” he said. [Now are you getting the picture as to the timing and reasons for the Victoria Police's fake gun hysteria? First they need to create the climate of fear, then they bring in the police state, one step up each time... inch by inch... keep watching... its coming.] It was unclear last night how much of the increase in stops was due to suspected gun possession or how many led to gun arrests. Mr. Browne could not confirm a direct line between gun arrests and increases in stops, and said officers’ efforts to take guns off the streets were just one facet of the crime suppression the stop-and-frisk forms reflected. The 2006 figures, delivered yesterday by two officers in plain clothes, were contained in four books of about 250 pages each. Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., chairman of the Council’s public safety committee, said his staff was unable to interpret the numbers immediately. The department’s lag in releasing the numbers came to light after the fatal shooting in November of another unarmed black man, Sean Bell, and has been seized on by civil rights advocates, academics and current and former government officials. Mr. Bell’s death was not related to a stop-and-frisk operation, but it has become a valve for frustrations over relations between the police and minority residents. But members of the City Council said they had been requesting the material even before the Bell shooting. Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University who studied the issue in 1999 for Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, said he was not surprised that the number of stop-and-frisks went up “during a period of no accountability.” But, he added, “it is an astonishing fact that stop rates went up by 500 percent when crime rates were flat.” Police officials and a city lawyer said there were several reasons the department had fallen behind in releasing the numbers. Compiling the reports, they said, has been hampered by antiquated technology, especially since the numbers have risen. The department has been working to modernize its reporting system, officials said, and has not been withholding the data deliberately. Some observers questioned whether producing data on street stops remained on the department’s front burner during the age of terrorism. [Notice how this is terrorism issue all of a sudden? Crime rates are flat, but anything goes in the "age of terrorism"..... Watch for phrases like "in a post 911 world" or similar, because they nearly always accompany a "justification" for increased police or government aggression. The terrorism is real alright, and its coming from your government.] “I just don’t think it’s a priority,” Dr. Fagan said of the data collection. The total number of stops includes cases in which the officers acted to prevent what could have been terrorist activity, the police said. But those stops are relatively rare, they said, and there is no separate category for keeping track of them. Searches of subway riders’ bags are not considered stop-and-frisk encounters because people willing to forgo entry to the subway can decline them. Joel Berger, who monitored matters of police conduct as an executive in the city’s Law Department from 1988 to 1996, said: “It is particularly frightening that the Police Department is not following the statute that requires reporting on stop, question and frisks. It is the thing that happens most often and most troubles people, and the failure to report the numbers is, effectively, very alarming.” Mr. Spitzer first dug into the issue of street stops after the Diallo shooting and found that Hispanics and blacks were being disproportionately targeted. After adjusting for varying crime rates among racial groups, his analysis found that blacks were stopped 23 percent more often than whites. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more often than whites. In the wake of those findings, the city signed a law allowing the Council to collect the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data on a quarterly basis. Separately, the federal class-action lawsuit, Daniels v. City of New York, alleged that the police habitually used racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. When the city’s corporation counsel settled the case in January 2004, the agreement required the police to disclose data on such encounters through 2007. The idea was that increased transparency about police stops would not only foster analysis of one of the department’s most crucial tactics for reducing crime, but also would help restore the public’s trust. Mr. Spitzer’s study reviewed police records known as UF-250s. Officers must fill them out after making forcible stops, including those in which a person is frisked or searched. His report noted that officers did not always fill them out. The form shows the race of the person stopped as well as the reason. Under a system begun in the spring of 1999, police officials said, forms completed at individual precincts were taken to 1 Police Plaza, where their 50 points of data were gathered. Envisioning a daunting backlog, Mr. Kelly in 2005 directed that the process be decentralized so that the raw data could be recorded quickly, at the precinct level. Mr. Kelly told officials at the Jan. 24 hearing that the data for the remainder of 2003, and for all of 2004 and 2005, would take longer to provide. That is “because it must be compiled manually, rather than in a technologically advanced way,” according to a letter sent Thursday from the Law Department to a plaintiff in the federal case. “We’ve been patiently waiting for years now,” Councilman Vallone, told Mr. Kelly at the hearing. “We would again request that you give us that information.” For a time, the police gave the data to the City Council with some regularity. But the frequency of the reports slowed, and in February 2006, the department released data for the third quarter of 2003. Then, the flow of data stopped. Until yesterday. But city leaders came under criticism as well for failing to more forcefully demand the data. “The City Council has failed to ensure that the Police Department is producing the reports, as required by the statute,” said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “As a result, it has not been doing any monitoring of stop-and-frisk activity, which was the very point of the statute.” _____ According to an article in the New York Post , "the NYPD's new patrol chief has ordered that special overtime money earmarked for cops in violence-prone precincts be given to "aggressive" officers rather than "do-nothings... His order affects a pool of funds known as Impact Overtime." Across the country, police brutality and presence has quickly become a nuisance. [full story] In an article published today by Raw Story , a 22 year old woman was hospitalized after a confrontation with a police officer in Providence, Rhode Island. According to the Providence Journal, the protest was organized by the Industrial Workers of the World labor group. The woman was tackled by officers, resulting in the dislocation of her knee. "She has had one surgery to repair the damaged knee and may face another, as well as physical therapy" according to the article. U.N. Wants NYC Cops for Peacekeeping - April 11/07 Victoria to boost downtown police patrols - May 25/07 Extra officers to tackle 'public disorder,' make residents feel safer downtown Cops Gun Down Brooklyn Teen Holding Hairbrush - Nov 13/2007
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Police killing starts just days after Mayor calls for New York style police presence.
Bystanders put in peril by hail of bullets.
'We could tell it was gunshots, a whole pile of them in a row'
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Monday, February 05, 2007 Judith Lavoie and Kim Westad Victoria Times Colonist A visibly shaken Victoria police Chief Paul Battershill struggled to keep his voice under control yesterday afternoon as he explained that, for the first time in recent history, Victoria police officers had shot and killed a man. Battershill, wearing full dress uniform and looking drawn, outlined the events on Saturday night that led to three experienced police officers firing a dozen shots in a residential neighbourhood, killing a 37-year-old man in a stolen SUV. The names of the three police officers -- two sergeants and a constable -- are being withheld for now. All the chief would say is that two of them are members of the Emergency Response Team. The name of the dead man is not being released until his family has been informed. The entire incident, which included a car chase along nine city blocks with the suspect driving a stolen white GMC Jimmy pursued by two police vehicles, was over in less than two minutes. It started just after 8 p.m. By 10:17 p.m., the man was pronounced dead at Victoria General Hospital. At the time of the shooting, police didn't know the identity of the male suspect. They later discovered the Victoria man had a lengthy criminal record, "including crimes of violence and convictions for dangerous operation of a motor vehicle during attempts to evade police," Battershill said. "He was before the courts here in Victoria on an assault charge," he added. "We didn't know who he was until this morning. Everything happened very quickly." At about 8 p.m. on Saturday, police spotted the white GMC Jimmy that was stolen from the 2600-block of Douglas Street on Jan. 30. It was parked on Topaz Avenue, west of Quadra Street. Officers watched as a man got in the SUV and started driving away. They attempted to block the vehicle, Battershill said, "but the suspect vehicle intentionally struck two police vehicles and escaped." At speeds exceeding 70 kilometres an hour, the stolen vehicle headed east on Topaz Avenue, turning right on Graham Street and crossing over Hillside Avenue. It turned left on Kings Road, and left again on Blackwood Street. "He was experienced in fleeing from police," Battershill said. Police positioned two vehicles in the road at the intersection of Hillside and Blackwood to block the man's escape and then got out of their cars and stood on the boulevard and sidewalk on the east side of Blackwood. "As the vehicle approached the officers, it suddenly swerved off the roadway and began travelling at a high rate of speed down the boulevard and sidewalk, straight toward the officers," Battershill said. One officer dived out of the way, giving himself scrapes and bruises, and all three police officers opened fire on the vehicle. The SUV passed them and then spun around violently and sped back towards them, so police again opened fire, Battershill said. The vehicle stopped on the sidewalk, by the intersection, after hitting two police vehicles and a pole. The man, who appeared to have been hit once in the head and once in the torso, was given emergency medical help by police, including one of the officers who had fired the shots, and was then taken to hospital where he died.
[These police admittedly were just a few feet from the blocked vehicle, and rather than firing to disable the vehicle (see photo insert), by shooting tires or radiator, or simply pulling out the driver, they went for the kill, and only by luck managed to miss innocent bystanders when they fired as many as 12 times. The rather puzzling path of the stolen vehicle indicates that the driver may already have been struck by a bullet. Click Here for closer examination.]
Battershill said the police response to the situation was not out of the ordinary. "It appears, on a preliminary basis, that the officers fired their weapons to protect themselves and to end what was obviously an exceedingly dangerous situation both for themselves and for the public." At the scene yesterday, shattered glass lay on the wet sidewalk across the street. A stray police bullet went across Hillside Avenue, a busy thoroughfare, and hit a bus shelter. "Thank God there was no one standing at the bus stop," Battershill said. Another bullet hit the engine of a car travelling east on Hillside. Yellow crime scene tape blocked off Hillside from Quadra to just past Blackwood, with police officers and cars converged at the corner of Hillside and Blackwood. A blue tarp covered the GMC Jimmy, which was up on the southwest corner of the intersection with its passenger door open. The truck was pinned between two unmarked police cars, one that clearly showed a smashed front passenger side. The area is primarily high-density residential, with a mix of apartment buildings, duplexes and triplexes and some single-family homes. Blackwood is relatively narrow, with vehicles parked bumper to bumper along each side. The shooting happened in front of two large apartment buildings. Court Taylor was in his apartment at the corner of Hillside and Prior Street on Saturday night when he heard sirens and saw police cars with lights flashing. "All of a sudden, I heard cars screeching and then boom, boom, two shots. And then another four shots right after that," said the 27-year-old man. His sister had just come back to the apartment from the corner store across the street. "We didn't know what the heck happened. We could tell it was gunshots and a whole pile of them right in a row, like someone knew what they were doing." When they heard the shots, they all hit the floor of the apartment. Taylor said his girlfriend, who was closer to the open window than he was, heard someone shouting, "Get down!" or "Stay down!" Other residents in the area report hearing up to 15 shots. Battershill said the shooting will be investigated by an officer from another force, likely from the Lower Mainland. [This is so any leaks or mistakes can be covered up by another department. One hand washes the other in these cases as a matter of policy and practice.] The three officers who shot the man have been put on administrative leave, and have received counselling. "They appeared very, very upset" he said. Although Saturday's shooting is believed to be the first fatal one for Victoria police in recent memory, officers have had several non-lethal shootings over the past few years. There have also been some fatal shootings involving other forces in the region. They include: - September 2005: Victoria Const. Mike Miller shot a 25-year-old unarmed man in the abdomen during a struggle outside a McDonald's restaurant on Esquimalt Road. The man had been punching the restaurant's windows and striking vehicles in the parking lot. Crown Counsel said charges were not warranted. The man has recovered. - February 2004: Joseph Pagnotta was shot and killed by West Shore RCMP after he went at officers with a knife when they were called to his Langford home. Pagnotta's family said he was clinically depressed, had stopped taking his medication and was intent on suicide. - July 2004: Saanich Const. Kris Dukeshire shot and killed Majencio Camaso, a mentally ill man who was in the grips of psychosis and armed with a crowbar and pipe at a school field. Dukeshire was exonerated in the following investigation. - March 2002: Victoria Const. Ken Fetherston injured a passenger in a car that reversed quickly toward him after it was stopped following a brief chase. Fetherston shot at the car as it came toward him, hitting the 27-year-old passenger. The man has recovered. - January 2000: Victoria Const. Steve Kowan and Const. Colin Brown shot at a stolen pickup as it drove toward them in the parking lot of St. John the Divine Church. Several shots were fired, but the driver wasn't injured and drove toward the officers before fleeing. - June 1999: Several Victoria police officers fired shots while capturing Stephen Reid and Allan McCallum, who robbed the Cook Street Royal Bank in June 1999. No one was injured in the high-speed gun battle that started in Beacon Hill Park and ripped through the quiet streets of James Bay. - October 1997: West Shore RCMP Const. David James Lucas shot a 17-year-old in the torso after seeing a knife in the youth's hand as Lucas tried to arrest him. The youth recovered and Lucas was cleared in the investigation. - - - POLICE SHOOTINGS The rules: A section of the Canadian Criminal Code allows police officers to use force that is intended or likely to cause death or serious bodily harm to prevent a person from fleeing lawful arrest. Such force is only to be used when the flight can't be prevented in a less violent manner. They can also use deadly force when they have reasonable grounds to believe it's necessary to protect the police officer, a person assisting the officer or any other person from "imminent or future death or grievous bodily harm." The officers: The three police officers who shot the man were tested for gunshot residue and their clothing was seized when they returned to the police station. "They are treated in the same way as anyone else involved in a shooting," said Victoria police Chief Paul Battershill. [Point of fact: There is no special law that grants "police officers" any more (or less) authority to use deadly force than any other individual. Canada's Constitution and Canada Act, 1982, forbids the unequal application of the law in no uncertain terms. It is not known why the Times Colonist chose to phrase the criminal code in terms of it only applying to the police. Those sections that permit all individuals the use of deadly force include 34, 35, and 37.
In Canada, the key provision in the
criminal code is that no one may use "more
force than is necessary" and then only when "he
believes on reasonable grounds that he can not otherwise
preserve himself from death or grievous bodily harm."
In section 35, the code goes on to require that one must
show that, "he declined
further conflict and quitted or retreated from it (the
assault) as far as it was feasible to do so before the
necessity of preserving himself ... arose."
]
The investigation: Police shootings are usually investigated by another force. In this case, the Victoria police will likely ask a senior officer from the Lower Mainland to head the investigation, which should last a month. The outcome: The report by the investigating police officer will be forwarded to Crown Counsel. It is rare that the Crown decides to lay criminal charges. The Office of the B.C. Complaint Commissioner, an independent office that oversees complaints against municipal police to ensure they are handled fairly and impartially, will also be given the file. [While it is indeed "rare that the Crown decides to lay criminal charges" when the killing is done by police. Even the brandishing of a weapon by individuals is enough for Crown to lay charges, as well as steal your weapons that you used to lawfully defend yourself. This is a deliberate assault against your most basic of all rights. Click here and see for yourself what happens..... Is Crown allowed to ignore the Supreme Law, and infringe your fundamental right to lawful self defence? Read what the SUPREME law says is our remedy if they do.........] Majority of Canadians would probably use a firearm to defend themselves.
No criminal charges for copFamily told of results of probe into Ian Bush's murder.
"I'm frustrated and angry and sad -- our whole family is,"
Andrea told The Province from Houston.
Ian Bush, 22, was shot in the back of the head by Const. Paul Koester inside an interview room at the Houston RCMP detachment last Oct. 29.
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Victoria Police using explosive devices in traffic arrests...
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