Security Farce

Society relies heavily on the professionalism of its security forces to ensure that the public weal is held in respect and that social malfeasance and criminal activities are kept to a minimum.  That those who engage in socially deviant behaviour and who benefit from the commission of crimes of all categories are apprehended, for the purpose of sheltering the innocent and the general population from further predations by the unscrupulous and the sociopaths.

Through long exposure to various measures of anti-social and criminal activities those who have been trained as security specialists, whom we rely upon to keep society as free from crime as possible, have learned to rely upon their instincts, their recognition of the unusual denoting the potential for societal aberrations leading to criminal activities.

Police have an attribute that can have a negative connotation, but which in their profession is a positive one, and that is the penchant for suspicion.  Very often when someone appears to fit a model that has proven over long experience and professional training to expose the presence of a typecast persona in a situation that has been repeated ad infinitum, intuition verifies suspicion.

If a suspicion exists, someone engaged in the profession of defending and upholding societal norms and policing abnormalities has the responsibility to investigate both the individual who appears suspicious and the reason for that suspicion.  So when Chad Aiken was pulled over in 2005, as a young black male driving a high-end vehicle at night, he appeared, based on the investigating officer's experience, suspicious.

The broad brush of suspecting everyone who shares an ethnic or racialized background because many crimes are committed by those with that ethnic or racial inheritance is an unfortunate tendency.  It is called ethnic/racial profiling and is regarded with a suspicion all its own by decent folk loathe to create divisions in society.  The need to cultivate equality provisions into the law, and to regard others as basically innocent of degraded behaviour is a decent impulse.

And those who are regarded with suspicion while they are innocent of any wrong-doing have a perfect right to feel aggrieved.  Chad Aiken was aggrieved.  He brought his grievance to the Ontario Human Rights Commission against the Ottawa Police Force because a police officer stopped him to question him when he was out driving his mother's Mercedes-Benz.  He took offence, claiming his skin colour led to his having been questioned.

The Ottawa Police Services Board agreed to collect data on racial and ethnic profiling as a result of this OHRC complaint, over a two-year period.  The charge being that blacks, particularly young black men are generally held in suspicion.  This is an unfortunate reality. This occurs because of the disproportionate number of young black men who have gained a reputation for being involved in drug trafficking, violence and gun crimes.

An attentive, experienced police officer listens to his inner voice that nudges his suspicions awake under certain circumstances, facing identifiable groups that have gained a reputation through the commission of anti-social activities.  Will that two-year study and the collection of statistics change that reality, that seasoned police officers respond to a combination of experience and expectation?

Will the conclusion be that the old adage "where there's smoke, there's fire" is always politically incorrect, but not always wrong, and what can be done to ameliorate an impression that real facts and real events have conspired to conclude in real impressions?  Or the conclusion that it is an unfortunate fact of life that the innocent suffer from the actions of a significant number among them.