Juno News - March 07, 2020


Let the cops do their jobs


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

207.1851

Word count

1,436

Sentence count

17

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A 14 year old boy who was abducted in Toronto has been charged with kidnapping and assault in the case of Mark Norman Norman, who was allegedly involved in a confrontation with Toronto police officers on a street corner. Police Chief Bill Blair and the Toronto Police Services Board have come under fire for their handling of the situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 We seem to have an increasing problem here in Canada where we're not willing to
00:00:09.360 let police do their job and communities are starting to suffer. You know it was
00:00:14.040 funny during the blockade crisis Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped forward
00:00:17.440 and said the politicians do not direct the police directly on what to do and
00:00:22.120 so forth with law enforcement matters. You go okay yeah I take your point I'm
00:00:25.880 glad we don't live in a country like that where you can personally intervene
00:00:29.400 and say go get this guy although there is an argument to be made that the Prime
00:00:33.300 Minister did just that in the Mark Norman affair but I digress. So yes the
00:00:38.040 politicians should not be doing that but what about the politicians telling
00:00:41.860 police don't do your job should they be doing that as well because we have been
00:00:45.900 seeing a whole lot of that of late. Now it can be argued that Justin Trudeau by
00:00:50.280 being really reticent about calling for the enforcement of law during these
00:00:54.000 blockades and calling for things like dialogue in the face of all of this
00:00:58.380 lawlessness that he was de facto telling police don't do your job until he changed
00:01:03.180 his tune and then waded in and said okay now you can do your job. That did seem
00:01:07.260 to be him basically admitting that yes he had been telling them to hold off. Lots of
00:01:12.900 frustrations for a number of Toronto police officers, a number of police
00:01:16.700 officers and forces across the country as they watch all of this mixed messaging
00:01:21.060 come down the pipes. Toronto in particular has a lot of problems with this
00:01:24.540 because for years now there's been this narrative that police are
00:01:27.980 discriminatory towards this group of people and that group of people and this
00:01:31.440 thing they're doing is wrong and that thing that they're doing is wrong and
00:01:34.140 they don't have a lot of people standing up for them. Now in some cases we have
00:01:37.540 particular officers who are doing bad things and they should face the
00:01:41.740 repercussions for it. They should not be doing those things so by all means
00:01:44.820 criticize them for that and police should be held to account and police
00:01:48.780 services boards should be representative of the people and they should
00:01:52.100 feel that yes the police work for us the police answer to us but the police
00:01:56.240 also work for all those law-abiding citizens out there who want to see the
00:02:00.320 laws enforced and I think that they are basically the silent majority out there
00:02:05.300 and politicians need to draw back from all these instant knee-jerk 1.00
00:02:09.560 criticisms of police that lead to a phenomenon known as de-policing where
00:02:14.780 police pretty much no longer feel that they can or should or are empowered to go
00:02:18.800 out and do their basic jobs. A lot of police have come forward and they've
00:02:22.760 spoken to me and my colleagues over the years about their frustrations with all
00:02:26.720 of this. Case in point a flashpoint that happened in downtown Toronto there was a
00:02:30.200 video that went viral of an altercation between Toronto transit enforcement
00:02:35.760 officers so sort of delegated cops who police public transit and one guy who was
00:02:40.880 seated on a bench on a streetcar. It was like a 12 second clip 12-15 seconds and
00:02:45.560 all the video showed was the police and this guy in a bit of a rumble he was
00:02:49.580 kind of there on the seat and they were wrestling him and pounded him and he was
00:02:53.660 pounding them back and so forth. What was going on here? We don't know we can't tell
00:02:57.260 you because there's no context there was not a lot of before there's not a lot of
00:03:01.040 after there was nothing. Aha but that did not stop a number of Toronto
00:03:05.120 councillors of course from wading in and saying this is wrong they shouldn't be
00:03:09.720 doing this training needs to be like this and hiring needs to be like that I don't
00:03:14.000 know how they can come to those conclusions after watching a 15 second
00:03:17.540 video. Now the mayor Toronto mayor John Tory who has been soft on a lot of these
00:03:21.600 things of light to his credit he acknowledged that hey this is something
00:03:25.400 where we don't have the full context so he was a little reluctant to do the sort
00:03:30.280 of progressive pylon which unfortunately he is doing way too often now when it
00:03:35.380 comes to a number of issues. Now later on that man was actually charged the man on
00:03:40.000 the streets car so clearly the broader video evidence because they have video
00:03:44.140 cameras on those street cars not just what the guy was filming that went viral
00:03:47.860 that showed a different story and the man was charged but think of those officers
00:03:52.180 who really felt the heat in all of that think of the people up the ranks who they
00:03:56.380 reported to how they would feel the heat on all of that the police board and the
00:04:00.100 police chief and so forth all because a lot of politicians and a lot of
00:04:04.480 activists are goading people into criticizing the police pretty much any
00:04:09.460 time they do their job so we're now in a situation where there's lawlessness
00:04:13.360 prevailing around our cities really frustrating to see this 14 year old boy
00:04:18.220 who was abducted in Toronto the other day on Thursday now thankfully he had been
00:04:23.380 found but there's this there's this impression this feeling that a lot of
00:04:26.740 people have particularly in the Toronto area that it's now the thugs and the
00:04:30.940 criminals who run the city and not the police I remember a piece from 2016 by
00:04:36.280 Joe Warmington where he was telling a story about how in downtown Kensington
00:04:40.360 Market very trendy area of Toronto there were these teenage gangsters they were
00:04:44.980 armed they had firearms they were walking around robbing people in broad
00:04:48.580 daylight with their weapons the police went to confront them these guys didn't
00:04:52.000 run they laughed at the cops they taunted them and they said guess you guys
00:04:55.000 didn't get the memo you actually don't control us anymore there's nothing you can do
00:04:59.020 you can't stop us the brazenness of this you know these kids were basically
00:05:03.700 picking up on what they'd heard in the media from politicians of chastising and
00:05:08.260 shaming the police and telling them there's a whole bunch of things they
00:05:10.660 can't do anymore now the cops said they could sorry that's not how it works and
00:05:14.200 they stopped them they arrested them and they took away their guns thank heavens
00:05:17.780 but we have a problem if that attitude is the one that's permeating right now a
00:05:21.880 lot of lawlessness out there right now Alberta released a report on the safe
00:05:26.180 injection sites that they're dealing with in their cities and part of the report
00:05:30.180 said unbelievably that in the Calgary sites part of the problem that they
00:05:33.920 have there because there's obviously a lot of lawlessness that proliferates
00:05:36.800 around these drug sites is that some of the workers at the facilities some of the
00:05:41.300 employees paid for by your tax dollars are also dealing drugs and the other
00:05:46.400 employees are okay with it they encourage them to do that now I'm sure you can
00:05:50.480 find me some sort of social justice master student to come on and tell me why
00:05:54.860 that's okay and that's actually true justice so forth but most of us look at
00:05:59.060 that and understand why that is absolutely totally ridiculous even if
00:06:03.420 you were full-on with the harm reduction agenda the employee should not be the one
00:06:07.640 dealing but if this made its way into a report I think that's what that tells us
00:06:12.100 is that a whole lot of people know this is going on the site workers the police
00:06:17.140 people throughout this whole harm reduction industry are well aware that they
00:06:20.580 have stuff like that going on and people are not saying we need to shut that down and
00:06:24.620 in fact police know and this is what that Alberta report said as well that they
00:06:29.060 are not welcome in these communities they are pushed away from the broader
00:06:32.900 communities where there are these harm reduction sites where are these drug
00:06:36.680 sites very alarming to see in so many different situations we're sending
00:06:42.000 signals to the police to not do their job it's not fair to them these mixed 1.00
00:06:46.340 signals and most of all it's not fair to victims of crime and it's not fair to
00:06:50.300 the regular good people of all walks of life walking the streets of our country