Knowing the law

Our relationship with the police is a complicated one.We ask them to do a job many of us wouldn’t do and we complain they aren’t as friendly as we would like.

While the rest of us are asleep in our beds, police officers are being called to a dilapidated apartment down a seedy lane to break up a domestic dispute likely fuelled by drugs and alcohol. They don’t know what they will find behind the door but are pretty sure it is going to be trouble—they’ve been here before.

On another night they will have to try to make sense of mangled young bodies and skid marks at a crash site. Later they will stoically deal with a belligerent driver who protests loudly that he was just speeding/drinking/texting a little.

We want our laws enforced—but perhaps not as strictly written when it is our lapse of judgment that is being called to account.

There is, however, more than the normal background angst at play right now between the police and this community. The unease is palpable. Everyone seems to have a run-in-with-the-police story to tell. The statistics tell the story. Every category of traffic offence is up sharply over last year.

The cost of policing is also way up—from about $300 per household per year in 2007 to nearly $390 this year. Many struggle to see where this money is going and how it is making their community safer.

The fact is that most folks have little direct interaction with the law—except to watch the car with lights flashing and siren wailing, racing through the village at an incomprehensible speed. Or perhaps to nervously ask the officer to move his motor bike so an older resident can back out of the grocery store parking lot. Or of course, by the side of the road, paying the price for bad habits or a lack of attention.

The police, on the other hand, spend most of their time with a very small segment of the population— and these folks they tend to see a lot. They get to know them well. Staff Sergeant Barry Freeburn explains well (see story page 3) the factors that have changed in policing—causing police to focus more time and resources on this small segment of the population.

Yet this doesn’t fully explain the distance that has grown between this community and its police. Many older residents remember when policing in Prince Edward County consisted of Burt Biddle (who didn’t drive) or George Pitt in Picton and Earl Marvin (a sharpshooter) in Wellington.

Now the County is patrolled by 42 officers— many of whom don’t live here.They come here, enforce laws and go home. They are young, well-paid and eager to set the world straight. We don’t know them. They are strangers in our midst. And we instinctively, understandably, fear strangers carrying guns.

For their part the police simply have a job to do—the law is the law. They are not interpreters of the rules but rather the folks who ensure they are obeyed. There is no room for familiarity.

Among the strongest impressions of my first year in Prince Edward County was meeting Constable Greg Richardson, who was spending two long, hot days in August providing a safe crosswalk across Johnson Street in Picton for the hundreds of children participating in the season-ending soccer finals on fields at Prince Edward Collegiate and Sunrise School. Despite the punishing heat, Richardson always had a ready smile and a helpful outlook. Folks brought him water and other refreshments. It turns out he volunteered for this assignment each year. When he retired, no one raised their hand to replace him.

Something has changed in the relationship between the police and this community.And we didn’t have a say in this change. That makes some of us uneasy.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca