St. Patrick's celebrations

[ijmorlan]

There is a fundamental difference between penalizing people for not carrying ID and penalizing people for not providing identification for the purpose of issuing them a ticket. The first is wrong in a free and democratic society; the second is mandatory for tickets to actually mean anything, especially to the worst scofflaws (I mean, realistically I’m not going to misidentify myself; but some guy who has figured out that if he does so he can violate the noise or dog poop bylaw as much as he wants sure will).

But the problem is, if you don't require someone to carry ID, unless they are accused of breaking the law, then you by definition require everyone to carry ID.  It's like the "resisting arrest" charge...if that's the ONLY charge, then what were you resisting?  If you don't carry ID, and some police officer decides to ticket you, even if you're innocent, you're now guilty.

Well the problem right now is that the more “minor” offences effectively don’t exist, at least not for the worst offenders.

I repeat my question about the guy blasting music into your house.

They might have to go home (presumably with an officer) and get their ID. Everybody has ID. I’d be satisfied with it being OK for a friend who does have ID to vouch for the person’s identity. I’d also be OK with an alternative being to take a high-quality photograph of the person being ticketed. Over time, attempted repeat offenders would build up a dossier of photographs that could be matched up and used to prosecute them for all their offences.

I do agree that this needs to be combined with better accountability for officers of all stripes. Officers who regularly issue bogus citations should lose their jobs (and, obviously, issuing a bogus citation just to ID someone would count). Actually a lot of existing officers should lose their jobs. I would go so far as to say that when the courts throw out evidence because of misbehaviour by the police, it should trigger an investigation which may, if appropriate, fire and possibly blacklist the offending officers. Partly, this should be management changes within law enforcement, and partly external investigation and supervision of law enforcement. I regularly hear of law enforcement behaviour that makes me think that the officer involved has no business being in law enforcement. Although the most recent time I heard of it, I think it may have been the officer who arrested a nurse for not performing an illegal blood draw, the news soon came out that the officer had indeed been fired. So under some circumstances there is accountability, just not often enough.

So I do have an appreciation for the issues. I think a lot of people who are concerned about law enforcement misbehaviour haven’t thought through what they are really saying, if what they say is fully implemented. This came up in Toronto, where I understand some were characterizing a proposed increase in transit enforcement officers as racist. This of course is absurd; while there probably is work to be done in improving the training and behaviour of the transit officers, the only way that hiring more officers can be inherently bad for, say, Black people, is if Black people actually do commit more fare violations. So characterizing an increase in officers, in itself, as racist, is what is actually racist, because one is saying that it’s simply unavoidable that more enforcement will involve more Black people in the justice system. By contrast, demanding that some of the budget increase go to better training, with a focus on eliminating racism, is perfectly reasonable.

Didn’t really mean to change the subject to Toronto transit enforcement. Going back to what you wrote, I also agree that resisting arrest, by itself, is problematic. It should be an absolute requirement to put down that charge that there be a lawful arrest asserted, including why the arrest was attempted. There should be no such thing as being arrested for resisting arrest but rather it should be something that can be added to a legitimate arrest if appropriate.