the daily snivel

Now, believe me, I cannot emphasize enough that the job of a police officer is a difficult and demanding one, and the actions of police officers who break the law should not be a taint on the entire force of a whole. However, no one will respect police or the justice system if they believe the police will not treat them fairly. Not long ago, I wrote about a constable on the Ottawa Police Service who plead guilty to assaulting a woman while arresting her. Now, unfortunately, a Toronto police officer has also been found guilty of an assault while making an arrest, again due to the fact that the beating was videotaped:

A Toronto police officer who was caught on videotape as he punched a Somali immigrant during an arrest in 2003 has been found guilty of assault. He is to be sentenced on Friday.

Const. Roy Preston was charged after Jama Said Jama complained that he was beaten by police at the scene of a fight in a northwest Toronto coffee shop parking lot. The 21-year-old landed immigrant said he had been trying to break up the fight.

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Jama fled after being punched in the face. He was arrested a short distance away and charged with assaulting police and causing a disturbance. He could have been jailed and deported had he been convicted.

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Police at first said he had been injured in another incident before he was arrested. The charges against him were dropped, and Preston was charged instead, after a videotape of the confrontation taken by tourists from Ottawa surfaced.

It showed an officer punching Jama, who did not appear to be resisting.

Here we have someone who, while assaulted by a police officer, was charged with assaulting a police officer. It was a police officer's word against his as to what happened. Again, without the videotaped evidence of the assault on Mr. Jama, I find it highly unlikely that his version of events would have been believed. We are lucky the events were videotaped, but what message does this send the larger community? Would justice have been done had not the assault been caught on tape? And what does this say about the respect we as citizens are supposed to maintain for the police?

Credibility of an accused and of witnesses are a key issues in deciding ultimate guilt or innocence, and our system is predicated on the word of a police officer being afforded a high level of credibility. The credibility of the police is tainted here, and that does harm to future cases in which the word of a police officer must be weighed against another witness or an accused. It lessens the public trust in the police when their cooperation is sought to help solve a crime.

In one sense, we can be thankful that the true story came out, and that justice was done, but this only raises the question of how many times an injustice is not videotaped. It is even more shocking that a person who is innocent of the crime charged (such as assaulting a police officer, which was alleged here and which judges tend to treat especially harshly) was put in jeopardy because a police officer lied in accusing him.