Meet Aminta Granera, Nicaragua’s 60 year-old police chief

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters

Cops like Marge Gunderson, the petite but very pregnant police chief who resolves gruesome crimes in the Coen brothers’ landmark movie Fargo, really exist. Meet Aminta Granera, Nicaragua’s police chief. At 60, she’s not expecting, but as a fragile-looking grandmother who once trained to be a nun, the five-foot-tall chief cuts just as striking a figure in a region rocked by drug violence and gang fighting. Unlike its neighbors in Central America, though, Nicaragua has a strong record on fighting organized crime, for which some credit Granera.

President Daniel Ortega, who won re-election in a landslide earlier this month, recently reappointed her to the post. Ironically, Granera’s greatest accomplishment may be that she is, according to some accounts, even more beloved than the president. Survey after survey, in fact, puts her as the country’s most popular public figure. It has caused friction with Ortega in the past, and U.S. diplomats suggested, in a leaked cable, that he may want to keep her in the police force to ensure she doesn’t enter politics. As Granera recently told a journalist from McClatchy Newspapers: “The greatest danger for the bullfighter isn’t the bull. It’s the applause.”

Byron Sonne: sacrificial lamb, scapegoat, gadfly

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 2:23 PM - 0 Comments

The Yiddish language is wonderfully precise when it comes to put-downs. Consider this famous explanation of the difference between a shlemiel and a shlemazl:

“A shlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup; a shlemazl is the person the soup lands on.”

Byron Sonne is a shlemiel and a shlemazl. He is clumsy and unlucky. But he is not a terrorist.

Driven by curiosity, hubris, and a genuine desire for social justice, Sonne poked and prodded the $1.2 billion “security apparatus” of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. He wanted to know if it was in fact just “security theater”–an expensive display of pomp and barbed wire that would never thwart an actual terrorist. Simultaneously, he wanted to know if it was too effective, if the heightened atmosphere around the summit meant that police were forgetting people’s rights. And he wanted us to know too, so he documented everything he did. Continue…

Police board kills promotions for G20-tainted cops

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 5 Comments

Toronto police officers who removed their name tags during last year’s G20 protests have been denied promotions by the city’s police board. A total of 90 officers were found to have stripped off their IDs during the event, which was plagued by widespread allegations of police brutality. The officers in question each received a one-day suspension without pay. Nine of those officers were recently put forward for promotion by Police Chief Bill Blair. But in a break from regular practice, the civilian police board refused to rubber stamp the upgrades. The police association has filed a grievance.

Toronto Star

Too many cops?

By Ken MacQueen and Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 104 Comments

Ian Lindsay / Vancouver Sun

This spring, Tamara Cartwright dropped off an envelope at her local post office outside Lethbridge, Alta. A friend had sent her a jar of hemp-based ointment, so she replied with a thank you card, wrote her name and return address on the envelope and, in a decision certain to haunt her for years to come, enclosed four grams of her homegrown marijuana, enough for perhaps four cigarettes. On an April morning some days later she returned to the post office to pick up another package. Moments later, police pulled her over, handcuffed her, put her in a cruiser and hauled her off to the police station.

It made quite a spectacle, says the 41-year-old mother of four, who suffers from colitis and is one of more than 10,000 medical marijuana patients registered with Health Canada. “It was embarrassing,” she says. “I was still in my pyjamas.” She emerged four hours later with a trafficking charge for giving away those four grams.

Her charge is part of a recent marked increase in arrests for cannabis offences. Cannabis arrests jumped 13 per cent in 2010 to 75,126. Of those, almost 57,000 were for simple possession, a 14 per cent jump from the year before. (The statistics reflect cases where the arrest was the most serious charge a person faced, not the thousands more where a pot charge was tacked onto a string of more serious crimes.) The cannabis arrest rate is an anomaly at a time when the overall crime rate in 2010 fell to its lowest level since the mid-1970s.

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Edmonton’s murder belt

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 3 Comments

Perry Mah/The Edmonton Sun/QMI Agency

The 2011 homicide counter started clicking early in Edmonton, and it has not stopped. Just three hours past midnight on New Year’s, police were called to an Ethiopian restaurant on Edmonton’s 107th Avenue—the “Avenue of Nations,” where East African immigrants are following the earlier footsteps of the Vietnamese boat people. On reaching the scene, investigators found 23-year-old Somali man Mohamud Mohamed Jama dead from a gunshot to the head.

A wounded witness refused to co-operate, and other patrons clammed up too. Fellow Somalis declared the victim a “typical Canadian young man” who “wasn’t involved with gangs or drugs.” But Jama died nine days shy of his sentencing for a 2007 aggravated assault; he had pleaded guilty of stabbing another Somali man eight times.

Jama’s unsolved murder struck a wearisome chord for Edmontonians, from the north-central crime scene to the frustrations of the cops trying to pry loose information from clannish Somali-Canadians reluctant to trust police. Yet the bloody big picture of Edmonton in 2011 defies neat categories or models. For reasons that remain obscure, a working-class city has exploded this year into unrelenting, record-breaking levels of violence.

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Woman sues Ottawa police for excessive force

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:04 AM - 13 Comments

Ottawa woman Roxanne Carr is suing the Ottawa police department for their alleged mistreatment of her when she was arrested and charged with assaulting police, obstructing justice, and damaging property in 2008. Carr claims her arm was broken in the process of detainment. Media outlets, including The Canadian Press, prompted an Ontario judge to release a video of Carr’s arrest, in which she can be seen being dragged through a jail hallway handcuffed. Ottawa police say they probed the incident and determined that no misconduct took place.

The Chronicle Herald

A blind spot for one’s own skills

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: Nearly half (49 per cent) of the province’s drivers think their fellow road warriors are ruder behind the wheel today than they were five years ago. The most common complaint—something 82 per cent of those surveyed have experienced in the last three months—was a fellow driver’s late signal, or no signal at all. Seventy-three per cent have been tailgated. And yet, when asked to rate their own performance on the road, 82 per cent of those surveyed gave themselves an A or B.

Alberta: With 74 per cent support, Albertans are the most likely in Canada to say they have a good quality of life. That’s probably due, say researchers, to the province’s strong economic standing. Quebec, on the other hand, has the lowest degree of satisfaction. Only 61 per cent of Quebecers say they have a good quality of life.

Ontario: It’s been over a year since the G8 and G20 meetings in Ontario, and the support for police actions that weekend has dropped significantly among residents of Toronto, where over 1,100 people were arrested. Just after the summits, 73 per cent of Torontonians said the police actions were justified. Now, only 41 per cent feel that’s the case.

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Lawful Access: spyware for cops

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 32 Comments

When I caution people about the coming Lawful Access spying laws, there’s often some confusion. Many assume that spying on the Internet is like putting a wiretap on a phone. So the police will be able to listen to my Skype calls and read my emails?

Sure. But it’s much worse than that.

Lawful Access does make traditional web surveillance easier, but it will also give the police access to your “basic information” without them having to get a warrant. “Basic information” covers your real name, your online identities, your email addresses, your I.P. address, your home address and your home phone number. If the police have one of these ingredients, they can use it to get the rest.

If you’re still not concerned, wait a bit…

Under Lawful Access, ISPs will have to build surveillance technology that stores this info and makes it available to the police. Right now, if cops go to your ISP and ask for your info (this happens all the time anyhow, often without a warrant) some human at your ISP will have to dig through your digital footprints to find it. Under Lawful Access, a police web portal will be built to automate the process.

This is hugely problematic.

First of all, what happens if (when) this portal gets hacked?  It won’t need to be a sophisticated hack, either.  If thousands of cops are assigned logins, how much do you want to bet that one of them will use “abc123″ as a password?

But let’s assume this somehow never happens. Warrantless data-tracking is still very scary, for reasons the police themselves likely haven’t considered. As anyone who compulsively checks their email knows, once you automate information requests, remove every obstacle, remove human communication from the process and throw it all online with a big shiny “search” button, usage skyrockets.

When Sprint built a similar portal for cops to track cell phone users’ GPS coordinates, usage shot up to 8 million pings in just over a year. In their idle time, police can just fish around, see where folks are at, see which avatar belongs to which human, and play the portal like a video game, hoping to stumble upon a lawbreaker.

The next step, of course, is for the police to get automated as well. With unfettered access to a massive dataset of “basic information”, why manually run hunt and peck searches when you could just write an algorithm that’ll mash it all up and spit out the names of those statistically likely to be up to no good?

Does that sound like paranoid sci-fi? Maybe, but it’s all possible with existing technology, and is really just an extension of current trends in data analysis into law enforcement. If data is accessible, machine-readable and has predictive value, someone will build an app for that. Everyone else is using “bots”, so why shouldn’t the police?

When RoboCop comes, he will look like a line of code.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown.

Bright idea: While supplies last

By Colin Campbell - Friday, April 29, 2011 at 8:01 AM - 0 Comments

Alamy/GetStock

News last year that Ford will soon discontinue its Crown Victoria sedan sent police forces across North America reeling. The big, rear-wheel-drive Crown Vic has long been the go-to police cruiser. It’s relatively cheap (at under $30,000), built like a tank, and is easy to fix. So before the car disappears for good, the police in Austin, Texas, are asking the city government for US$4.5 million to buy a final supply of 176 Crown Victorias—enough to last them at least five years.

This hoarding of cop cars should end up saving the city a lot of money, say the police. Carmakers are rushing to market replacement cruisers, mostly based on today’s smaller sedans. But police in Austin argue they don’t yet know how much those cars will cost (likely a lot more than the old Fords), and switching would mean replacing their entire stock of replacement parts for the decades-old car. Most importantly, the police point out the newer cars just aren’t “tried and true” like their beloved Crown Vics.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 5:17 PM - 39 Comments

Jack Layton promises funding for crime prevention and police officers.

If elected, the NDP would boost federal support for the National Crime Prevention Centre to $100 million per year. The party would also increase and make permanent the youth gang prevention fund, which supports programs aimed at keeping kids away from crime. Funding for the program would go from $7.5 million to $16.5 million. The NDP would also invest $75 million a year in federal support for a shelter system and women fleeing violence … the NDP would double and make permanent the police officer recruitment fund. The party said there would be annual increases over the following three years with a goal of adding 2,500 new police officers.

Oops! You're not a child pornographer after all.

By Jesse Brown - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 12 Comments

Homeland Security done goofed.

Beware of moral absolutes. For example: there’s not much room for debate in the war on child porn; we all agree that the stuff is atrocious and must be snuffed out. So we hand over extraordinary powers to those who would fight it. But righteousness and competence are two different things.

Case in point:

Last week the U.S. Department of Homeland Security proudly announced that they had “seized” thousands of child porn websites. Visitors to the sites now found stern government message screens reading “SEIZED” and warning that “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution” (link).

It was later revealed that the DHS had goofed—84,000 of these sites were seized by accident, and had nothing whatsoever to do with child porn. Given the special place in hell we reserve for child pornographers, one wonders what the innocent owners of those websites thought about being publicly associated with kiddie porn on their own homepages.

It’s not the first blunder (or questionable outcome) in the global crusade against child porn. Here are a few others:

• Parents charged with child porn for taking bathtub pics of their own kids. Walmart turned them in when they went to have the shots developed, and their kids were taken from them by Child Protective Services. The parents have since sued (link).

• Minors charged with child porn for texting nude pictures of themselves. It’s happened a bunch of times. (link) (link) (link).

• Australia’s national Internet filter was sold to citizens as a safeguard against child porn. But the “blacklist” of censored sites got leaked, and was shown to include many errors, including a dog kennel and a dentist. Also on the list were political enemies of the government, and Wikileaks. Not to mention the problem that a leaked index of child porn sites is a handy resource for none other than child pornographers. (link)

While many innocents can have their lives and reputations ruined by over-zealous law enforcement, actual for-profit child pornographers have had plenty of success evading authorities and Internet filters. The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reports that savvy criminals use a combination of proxy servers, encryption, and foreign computer servers to place themselves out of the reach of the law. Facing a tangle of technological and bureaucratic hurdles (extradition, etc.) police often skip the big bad guys and focus on low-hanging fruit (link).

Canada home to a record number of police officers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 2:28 PM - 10 Comments

The ranks of Canada’s police forces have grown by 69,000 people since 1981, according to Statistics Canada. Since then, the number of crimes solved is up too. In the first quarter of 2010, Canada added 2,000 police officers. Charles Momy of the Canadian Police Association told Postmedia News that officers have also been taking on new work outside their traditional roles–and that is not necissarily a good thing. “Unfortunately, police [have] become a social support mechanism when everything else is failing,” Momy said

Vancouver Sun

Chihuahua on duty

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 2 Comments

Kyodo/Reuters

The latest addition to a Japanese police force has proven that size isn’t all that important. A chihuahua—the world’s smallest breed of dog—named Momo (meaning “peach” in Japanese) recently passed the entrance exam to become part of a police search-and-rescue team in the Nara prefecture. The 6.6-lb. long-haired dog impressed judges by finding a “trapped” victim of a simulated natural disaster in less than five minutes, after sniffing his scent on a hat.

The seven-year-old chihuahua is one of 32 new police dogs to join the force. In January, Momo will begin her one-year contract in a search-and-rescue role focused on locating people buried under the rubble after disasters, including earthquakes. The dog’s tiny stature is thought to be an asset to the team because she is able to fit in places too small for traditional rescue dogs, such as retrievers and German shepherds.

Keiko Matsuyoshi, Momo’s owner, was overjoyed about her pet’s accomplishments, and said she’d cook Momo’s favourite dish as a reward for earning the new job: tomato-stewed chicken breasts.

Police chiefs want more power to suspend bad-apple officers

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 10:49 AM - 0 Comments

Ottawa’s police chief wants more power to suspend officers without pay in the wake of revelations that three male officers on his force strip searched a 27-year-old woman, kneed her violently in the back, and left her topless in a cell for three hours. And they did this despite the fact that, according to a judge who watched video of the incident, the woman displayed “no hint of violence or aggression.” Ontario Court Justice Richard Lajoie condemned the “unlawful” treatment of Stacy Bonds, a 27-year-old theatrical make-up artist with no criminal record. Now, the incident is under review by Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, a civilian agency that typically investigates cases of serious injury or death involving police. But Ottawa Police Chief Vern White now says the province’s Police Services Act should be changed so he and other chiefs have more power to impose discipline. “Every police chief I know,” White said, “has asked for a review of the act to allow us more latitude.”

Ottawa Citizen

A bit old for bumper cars, aren't you?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

New Brunswick: A drunk high school student was chased down and arrested after allegedly stealing a CPR kit from a police car that was parked at the RCMP headquarters in Moncton. The 19-year-old, already under an order not to drink, was charged with stealing as well as breaching an undertaking to the court.

Ontario: A driver flipped his truck, which was carrying 18,000 kg of tomatoes, on a ramp linking two major Toronto-area highways. It took hours to remove the produce from the pavement and the truck, ruining rush hour for commuters. The driver was charged with careless driving.

Manitoba: A Winnipeg man was caught at a Royal Canadian Legion allegedly pretending to be the commander of the local RCMP detachment in East St. Paul. A search of his home reportedly turned up a police uniform. The RCMP says he has never been associated with the force. He’s facing charges for impersonating a peace officer.

Alberta: On a routine patrol of a Calgary mall in the early morning of Nov. 2, police came across what they described as a makeshift “demolition derby” using stolen vehicles. Three men were allegedly racing around the mall parking lot, smashing into each others’ vehicles. Police say that one suspect almost ran down one of the officers, who was chasing the two other youths who’d abandoned their vehicles. All three were arrested.

British Columbia: A woman is facing what authorities call the first immigration-related bigamy charge. She allegedly married two men in the Greater Vancouver Area even though she was already married to a third man. Then she reportedly tried to sponsor those two foreign nationals for permanent residency in Canada. She has been charged with two counts of bigamy and two more counts of knowingly misrepresenting or withholding material facts under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

The Taser debate, Down Under

By Patricia Treble - Monday, October 18, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

After the images of Spratt were released, the premier called the incident ‘excessive’; Corruption and Crime Commission/ Richard Hatherly/Newspix

The video is chilling. Police in Western Australia surround a man writhing and screaming on the floor of a police station after being repeatedly tasered for refusing to comply with a strip search. “Do you want to go again?” one asks. Moments later the Aboriginal man, Kevin Spratt, is tasered again. And again. In total, two officers tasered him 13 times, while nine cops watched. The 2008 incident is only coming to attention after video of it was released last week by the state’s Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) as part of a report into the use of Tasers by police. The reaction was horror. “That particular incident was wrong,” said Western Australia’s acting police commissioner, Chris Dawson. “Clearly, in my view, the officers overreacted.” Premier Colin Barnett echoed the sentiment: “It was excessive use of a Taser that could not be justified.”

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Clash of the cruisers

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Chrysler Group LLC/ Mike Segar/Reuters/ Ford Motor Co.

For the first time in more than a decade, Dennis Simcoe won’t be able to simply pick up the phone and call Ford Motor Co. when it’s time to replace one of Edmonton’s 230 Crown Victoria police cruisers. That’s because Ford, which currently boasts 70 per cent of the North American police car market, is finally retiring the aging, tank-like police car next year, creating unease among police departments and an opportunity for competitors to step in. “It’s a very well-performing police vehicle,” says Simcoe, who oversees fleet operations for the city of Edmonton and already sounds a touch nostalgic for the Crown Victoria. “You can pound on them and they still keep ticking.”

For Ford, though, the “Crown Vic” lost its commercial appeal a long time ago. Built in St. Thomas, Ont., the car has been relegated to police and taxi fleets since 2007 after Ford decided the consumer market for big, rear-wheel-drive sedans had all but disappeared, save for a handful of Florida retirees. Even taxi companies are moving away to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. And police departments, although important and high-profile customers, only buy about 60,000 of the roughly $30,000 vehicles a year in total—not enough to justify a dedicated assembly line.

Ford is now attempting to convince police to move to a car based on its front- and all-wheel-drive Taurus platform, as well as a sport utility vehicle, promising performance benefits that stem from modern vehicle stability systems and the improved fuel economy of a smaller but still powerful V6 engine. “We can add that advanced technology and maybe change the way people think about police cars,” says Marisa Bradley, a Ford spokesperson.

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What of that weekend in Toronto?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 3, 2010 at 4:25 PM - 0 Comments

The one question Michael Ignatieff most noticeably punted at the St. Catharines town hall I attended last month had to do with police actions and civil liberties during the G20 conference in Toronto and here—setting aside our previously stated concerns about the use of analogy in political rhetoric—Doug Bell wonders where the Liberals are on this issue.

The largest mass arrest of Canadians in history and the Grits primary concern is that the cops were overwhelmed. It would be as if Martin Luther King in his letters from the Birmingham jail wrote to Police Chief “Bull” Connor complaining about the stress he was putting on his department’s German shepherds.

At a wintry moment in the history of Canadian civil rights, the Liberal Party is AWOL.

Police actions that weekend are now the subject of a rather large class action suit, while Toronto police chief Bill Blair has conceded that the kettling of 250 people on Queen Street was perhaps not resolved expeditiously enough.

Dalton Trudeau

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

The Ontario Premier gets comparative.

In a closed-door meeting with MPPs on Wednesday, McGuinty deflected questions from members unhappy at the heavy-handedness of police in dealing with protesters—and the government’s complicity in failing to correct the mistaken impression officers had been given more powers.

“He told us, ‘Just remember, the same guy who gave us the Charter also gave us the War Measures Act,’” said one startled MPP, noting the premier also refuted calls from several members to strike a public inquiry into the G20 debacle.

In fairness to Pierre Trudeau, the War Measures Act was enacted in 1914, he merely invoked it in 1970.

For the sake of comparison though… Continue…

'I refuse to give up in this effort'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 11:57 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Donald writes of his experience in the midst of the G20 madness.

I am writing this account on the morning of July 1 – Canada Day. I do it not in an effort to smear or merely embarrass the police services, but to remind them as forcefully as I can that both they and I must seek the same goals – the preservation of a free and democratic society. It is surely the job of the police to keep us safe. But, we must remind ourselves that the founding principles of this nation were not simply granted by the beneficent state; they were expanded, renewed, and agitated for by the actions of ordinary people. The sooner we as Canadians remind ourselves of this great truth, the sooner will stop regarding peaceful protesters as prospective terrorists, and the sooner both civilians and police will see themselves as what they really are: partners in the ongoing project that is our nation.

Quietly, an independent review of police tactics has apparently been launched.

On second thought

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 2, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 13 Comments

On Monday, in an interview with the Globe, Toronto police chief Bill Blair seemed relatively unconcerned by the suggestion that any public trust had been lost over the weekend. Two days later, in conversation with Christie Blatchford, Mr. Blair is decidedly more philosophical.

“One of my greatest concerns about this – there’s a lot of noise right now, but in the longer term, we’ve worked really hard to demonstrate [our belief in] human rights and civil rights …We’ve worked really hard to build respectful relationships with people with whom we’ve not always had great relationships.

“I’m very concerned about losing that,” he said.

“The trust between us is absolutely critical to keep in the city and it’s also the right way to do business, and so losing any element of that trust, any setback in that, any suggestion that we’re less than committed to maintaining and upholding human rights and civil rights, of treating diverse communities and marginalized people disrespectful is really fundamental.

“So we have a lot of work to do.”

Adam Radwanski, meanwhile, has assembled a brief history of the much-disputed five-metre rule.

A grizzly escape; flush with charges

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

British Columbia: Police continue to search for a 30-year-old man who allegedly doused four staff members at a Real Canadian Superstore with bear spray in early June. Police say the man, who attempted to pay with a fake gift card, was being removed from the store by security when he pulled out the can.

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48 hours of hindsight

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 86 Comments

With more than 1,000 people arrested, the G20 is seemingly the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The Toronto police are happy to showcase the seized weapons and condiments, but now concede the “secret” “new” “law” never really existed. The mayor is displeased. The Star gets a look at the infamous detention facility. Two Post photographers talk about their time there. A Globe reporter writes about her experience at Queen & Spadina. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says police action was, at times, “disproportionate, arbitrary and excessive.” Amnesty International wants an independent review. Mark Holland demands answers. The NDP has questions too.

Roland Paris weighs the cost. Tim Powers justifies the trouble. Brian Topp condemns the riot. James Morton defends the police. The Economist considers. Jon Stewart mocks. Steve Paikin laments.

Saskatoon considers a knife ban

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 5 Comments

In Saskatoon, says police Chief Clive Weighill, “knives, swords and machetes are the weapons of choice.” In the first 10 months of 2009, Saskatoon police documented 299 knife-related incidents. Though that number is down from previous years, Weighill says the proliferation of such weapons in urban settings is increasing. So he wants to give police across the province the power to confiscate knives.

The Criminal Code prohibits carrying concealed weapons, or weapons dangerous to the public peace, but a knife worn in the open can only be seized if police have reason to believe it has been—or will be—used in a crime. Weighill is pushing for what he calls “proactive” legislation, which would provide “non-criminal intervention”—the weapons would be confiscated but no charges would be laid. But the proposal is troubling many. “Knives are everywhere. We use them at work. We use them in our cars,” says Glen Luther, a law professor at the University of Saskatoon. “How can you ban knives without coming to grips with the fact that they’re used lawfully by people from all walks of life?”

According to Luther, the kind of legislation being proposed by Weighill would be highly subjective in its application. It suggests, he says, that “police can tell the difference between someone who is up to no good, and who [isn’t].” And he fears that giving police “a massive amount of discretion to decide when they’re going to enforce the law” could lead to racial profiling—a claim Weighill dismisses as “absolutely ridiculous.” Says Weighill: “The increase we’ve seen involving street weapons crosses all cultures and ethnic groups.”

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