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Sunday, April 18, 2004
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SERVING AND PROTECTING
I've had a life long relationship with the Metropolitan Toronto police force. When I was a kid, one of their head muckity mucks was a close friend of my family. As a result of this connection, I got to see a lot of cops getting shit faced growing up. When I was about sixteen, a bunch of them tried to recruit me for the force (which was pretty funny, given that I looked like I was in the Manson family at the time.) I expressed my reluctance and explained my problem with authority and my low tolerance for shitheads.
As I got older, I found that the dumbest motherfuckers in my social circle became cops. It was a pretty good way of getting a starting salary of $32,000 and had the fringe benefit of getting to beat the shit out of people, consequence-free. The people I knew who became cops were absolutely the last people who should've been given guns and badges, but they got them.
Toronto is an interesting city in the way that it's laid out. Due to some interesting social engineering in the 1960's, it doesn't have a slum area. Up until the mid-part of the century, the city was comparatively small, not geographically big and fewer than a million people. Our social planners studied the growth of American major cities and decided that an area of concentrated poverty is to be avoided. So, they decided that low-income housing (read: tenements) would be even distributed throughout the city. Toronto may be the only city in the world where you can walk from a $450,000 house to an apartment complex you wouldn't want to visit after dark. This had some interesting social consquences. For example, Toronto is unique in that your chances of getting murdered are equal regardless of where in the city you are at a given moment.
The city also has skyrocketing gun violence. We're probably at a few dozen shootings so far this year. This probably doesn't seem so bad until you consider that getting a handgun legally is virtually impossible in Canada. Opps. Most Torontonians read the current statistics and properly ask themselves, "Where the fuck are the police?"
Now we know.
That the Toronto cops are taking kickbacks and "protection money" is not surprising. That its occurring in 52 Division should be expected. 52 Division is the heart of Downtown Toronto. The area is a combination of Times Square and Wall Street. I'm not exaggerating much when I say that if you wipe these few square miles from the face of the Earth, Canada would basically cease to exist. As a matter of fact,after 9/11, the RCMP compiled a list of the 10 most likely terrorist targets in Canada and three of four of them were in 52 Division.
The most surprising part of the corruption in 52 Division is how low rent it is. The dirty, little secret of the Toronto Police Force is how badly you have to fuck up to get charged with anything at all if you're wearing the blue. And when cops do get charged, they're insanely under-charged. Here's an example, a few years ago this kid called some cop and stupidly threatened to break his legs. This upset the cops, who visited the kid at his family home. In the resulting melee, the cops shot the kid in the leg and his father in the chest, killing him. Said cops were charged with second-degree manslaughter. You would have been charged with first degree murder had you have done this without a badge. During the trail, it was revealed that both officers were wearing tape recorders on their epaulet's. During the fracas, both recorders were shut off (or later erased) at precisely the same time. Such an occurrence is commonly known as "obstruction of justice" and "evidence tampering", neither of which were charged. Not that it mattered much. The jury acquitted bith officers of all charges. As a matter of fact, the last time a cop went away for anything in the Greater Toronto Area was a retired RCMP officer who nutted out and threw his wife over their 14th story balcony. That was in 1984.
It wasn't even particularly shocking to find out that Metro's Finest are extoring sex from prostitutes. I've been hearing whispered stories about that for years. It's the proclivity of extorting sex from transsexual, HIV infected whores that gave me a giggle. As one can guess, most cops were big time athletes before the wore the blue, and as such engaged in all the attended shithead homophobia.
In a convoluted way, this proves another long held theory of mine. That most athletes are big time homos.
Here's more proof.
And if you're confused about how I went from corrupt cops to homosexual jocks, you're not alone.
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