Witness to a brutal war

This morning I watched a video of Alberta Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam being arrested in a casino parking lot. In the course of the arrest Chief Adam was beaten and choked by at least one RCMP officer. He is now facing charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer. The whole event was apparently due to an RCMP officer observing that Chief Adam's wife was driving a vehicle with an expired registration. The video was recorded by an RCMP dashcam.

In the video several uninvolved people are shown filming the event with their phones, at least one of them is seen discussing it with Chief Adam's wife. The attack on Chief Adam was sudden, by an officer suddenly appearing from 'stage left' and tackling the Chief, bringing him down to the ground out of view of the dashcam. Immediately a host of other RCMP officers come into view and several of them pile on. When next Chief Adam's face comes into view it is seriously bloodied. He is not a large man.

The lawyer for Chief Adam wanted to release the dashcam video to the public but the RCMP said no, it was evidence and could not be released publicly. The lawyer decided to do it anyway as he thought it displayed undue police violence in arresting an indigenous person. Senior RCMP officers have reviewed the video and determined that it "did not meet the threshold for an external investigation."

The alarming part of all this to me is that the senior RCMP officers did not see this as worthy of investigation and tried hard to suppress the video. That senior RCMP officers deem this kind of incident normal and acceptable behaviour in dealing with infractions of the law by indigenous people of this country is just chilling. Apparently the woman in charge of the RCMP is having a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that the RCMP might be fundamentally racist, but after viewing this video Prime Minister Trudeau is telling her that it is.

The brutality being made evident has been complained about often enough, but the widespread protests filling streets all over the world because one man was murdered in Minneapolis have been phenomenal. The number of videos documenting the brutality and racism involved are just flooding both social media and quality news sites. I am not on social media unless you count this blog, I saw this particular video and others like it on the CBC news website, which is a pretty middle-of-the-road news source. TV cop shows portray cops as benign forces for good, protecting the larger community. We accept that to do that they must carry guns and wear bulletproof vests, as if there is a war going on in the streets and they are the good guys. Too often the bad guys in these shows are brown or black-skinned, setting a norm of crime as a coloured problem. The percentage of people of colour filling our prisons is out of proportion, as if most crime is committed by black and brown people and it truly is a war out there. Thank goodness for the heavily armed white policemen protecting us white people! [I'm being sarcastic]

More and more the police are deemed the appropriate authorities to deal with mental health and social issues of poverty, homelessness and domestic violence. An indigenous woman shot and killed by a cop who was performing a "wellness check" on her at the request of her brother. A young black man with mental health issues shot and killed because he called the police for help (the officer who shot him has refused to submit his notes to police authorities and he has the right to do that). Sexual harrassment by cops of teenage women in the streets, harrassment of women and men in northern indigenous communities. Too many civilians shot and killed in the execution of policing duties. Near complete lack of accountability for their actions by the RCMP and other police forces. Anyone of colour is fair game, not deserving of the respect white people take for granted.