Editor:
Re: Courting disaster with a city police force, July 12
The oddest argument yet in favour of retaining the RCMP as a local law enforcement agency – by a PAN reporter, yet.
Alex Browne mixes pros and cons with unsupported predictions of future failure, rooting his misgivings in the doings of a Vancouver police chief in the early 1950s – doings, which the then-attorney general found non-prosecutable.
The loose reportorial talk includes prophecies of a new police force consisting of “also-rans and mall cops…officers ambitious…enough to be lured by the chance to feather their own nests.” A police force “rushed into existence at the whim of a few.
“Mayor Doug McCallum is courting disaster.”
Well, maybe he is. He was also elected on the promise of establishing a community-oriented enforcement agency that included preventive police work. Police, presumably, who show the uniform in daylight also.
Browne’s scare-mongering hangs totally unsubstantiated.
If anything, he inadvertently points to current police failures: “…a city plagued by gangs and drive-by shootings…recent report on money laundering … corruption, on a municipal level, has been…virtually unexplored territory for investigators.”
And the last spike hammered home: “What a boon for organized crime.”
This, while Browne has convincingly described how great a boon crime already is.
Finn Schultz-Lorentzen, White Rock
