well this makes me insanely angry.

sometimes i wonder why the police even go through the motions. why BOTHER knocking on doors? why BOTHER patrolling? if you aren't going to follow through with a suspicion, why even bother pretending to do your job.

today in the toronto star they ran a story about an OPP officer who noticed a vehicle not belonging to jessica lloyd park in front of her house--the officer knocked on the door and when noone answered, she left the premises.

well, russel williams owned that car. he watched the police officer leave. then he broke into the home and tortured jessica lloyd before taking her to his own cottage where he would eventually murder her.

apparently the police officer is "taking it very badly and is very hard on herself" and regrets not doing anything.

well yeah, you get paid to "do something." why not run the license plate? or take note of it? that way when jessica lloyd was reported missing maybe you'd have a lead and she wouldn't have been murdered.

people make mistakes, police make mistakes-- but this is a big fucking mistake. this is a woman who lives alone and the police officer feels strongly enough about the situation to go knock on her door but then just leaves? so why bother knocking on the door at all? was there so much going on in belleville that night that you didn't have time to radio in the license plate?

vancouver police letting women go missing under their noses for years and years without doing anything, cops at the G20 threatening to rape female reporters, cops in ottawa arresting a woman without cause and strip searching her illegally, and now this. why are police too busy being lazy or abusing their power to do the job they get paid to do? how much more will it take for us to realize that there is something very wrong the institution of policing?

so as much as the toronto star article makes us want to feel bad for this cop, that she's "beating herself up over it", i think it's more important for this to serve as a lesson-- when we place our "safety" in the hands of the police and they fuck up and don't do their jobs, when bad things like this happen they should feel bad. they should feel horrible.

when i make a mistake at my serving job, there was hell to pay. and that was FOOD. when cops make mistakes like this, it needs to be a bigger deal.

yeah, pick that guy to head the investigation.

partly good news, partly bad: an attorney general has been assigned the case of reviewing the investigations into the missing women of vancouver--the women connected to robert pickton. the inquiry is also going to take a look at the decision of crown prosecutors to "stay a charge of attempted murder against robert pickton, a decision that some say enabled [him] to continue killing women for four more years."

that's the good news. the police investigations and actions should be reviewed, because they allowed women to be murdered right under their noses simply because the women were disposable.

now, the bad news. the attorney general who will do the reviews is wally oppal.

don't know who wally oppal is? well, if you follow charter law or any news you might recognize his name as the judge who went after polygamy in B.C--went after polygamy, and failed big time.

there are a lot of other reasons to doubt this appointment, which the globe and mail does a good job of covering.

my main problem with oppal isn't that he's too close to the liberal government. my main problem with his appointment is that this is a major case that has to do with women's rights in canada, with laws that affect women, with the bias and stereotypes that made this case a catastrophe because people's/police's apathy didn't feel these women were important enough to find(or, crucial tips that were ignored by the police because of their disdain for the people bringing the tips in).

to me, a man who went after polygamy single-mindedly isn't capable of really understanding the subtle and complex ways that laws affect women's lives.

oppal has voiced his personal opinion on polygamy over the years, stating that he disagrees with using freedom of religion to defend the practice.

and even though TWO different special prosecutors recommended that the polygamy charges that oppal endorsed not go ahead, he appointed a THIRD special prosecutor who finally agreed with him and went ahead with the charges.

the charges were eventually dropped by another judge, who said oppal did not have "the jurisdiction to appoint a second special prosecutor .... after the first recommended against charging the two men."

so here you have an attorney general who went through special prosecutor after special prosecutor until he got the results that he personally wanted. doesn't seem very much like blind justice to me.

this isn't the guy i want taking care of a case that has to do with systemic discrimination against marginalized peoples, people accountability, and GOVERNMENT accountability.

it's already a disappointing inquiry, considering "The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter had hoped that the terms of reference would go beyond the police investigation to include a look into the systemic discrimination that women experience in dealing with the criminal justice system and the role of mayors who were head of the Vancouver police board during the investigation.

However, the government opted to have broader issues related to the lives of the missing and murdered women reviewed at a national conference in B.C., rather than during an inquiry. “It’s after all a national issue and a national challenge.”

it's about time

seriously, the recent admissions on the parts of the vancouver police and rcmp are not really news to anyone who has been following the picton case in any way at all.

those missing women didn't have to be missing at all, maybe some of them would still be alive today if the police hadn't treated them, the people who were missing them, and the people who knew about (and reported) picton like garbage.

i agree that there needs to be a public inquiry, because what that inquiry says about how the police acted in this case (and how is was a gross and egregious abuse of their position as "police") will have a lot to say about Canadian society as a whole and how most people didn't give a shit about those women until this became a huge "Serial Killer" case.

also, maybe a public inquiry will light a fire under the police's ass to try to find out what happened to all of the other missing women they've been ignoring for years.