Canadian Town Outlaws Online Insults To Police and Officials

Pig Hogger writes: The Canadian town of Granby, Québec, just strengthened its municipal bylaw that prohibits insulting police officers and town officials by extending its "jurisdiction" to online postings. Fines range from $100 to $1,000. The town's mayor said, "In my opinion, if I threaten you via my keyboard, it's as though I am making that threat right in front of you. For me, it's the same thing." Critics worry about the implications for freedom of speech, and wonder why police and officials should get protection an average citizen does not.

Comments

Re:Here we go again

[Alain Williams]

Mod parent up

One right that should be absolute is to criticise a politician for their public actions. We elect them and if we don't like what they do we must be able to say so in clear terms. This includes saying that if think they are being stupid or duplicitous.

As regards personal insults: they should have the same protections and rights of redress for ad hominem attacks as the rest of us have - no more, no less.

Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

By nature, police officers should have a thicker skin than normal citizens when it comes to insults, and they should be trained to deal with them.

However, police officers do need extra protection against real threats.They're more likely to be a target, and they're be more vulnerable than others. And it shouldn't matter which medium is used to threaten a police officer.

Re:Makes sense

[Antique Geekmeister]

Police can't normally walk away from the scene, and they are compelled to attend in the first place. That does not mean I support this law, but police injury rates are _much_ higher than most work. According to http://www.governing.com/gov-d..., they're only surpassed by nursing care, and I can easily believe that.

Re:Makes sense

[Idarubicin]

police injury rates are _much_ higher than most work

Welp...sort of. The U.S. BLP recently published their 2013 census of fatal occupational injuries. The overall fatality rate for the workforce was 3.3 fatal injuries for every 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers per year. Management employees averaged 2.4; sales 1.6--no surprises there, really.

For employees in the "protective service occupations" - police, firefighters, correctional services, animal control, security guards, and so forth - the rate was 6.9 fatalities per 100,000 FTE. (I haven't been able to find data broken out by occupation within the category. If someone can find that, that would be great.) So that's what we expect--police, firefighters, and others do have a riskier job than the average, and riskier than the typical office worker. Somewhat surprisingly, the relative risk is only a factor of three or four different when comparing a police officer to, say, an IT manager.

But...there's the rest of the table. "Intallation, maintenance, and repair" occupations? 7.2 fatalities per 100,000. "Construction and extraction"? 12.2. "Transportation and material moving"? 14.9. "Farming, fishing, and forestry"? 23.9.

The real manly men, in real danger on the job, are apparently out there working with tools, building stuff, drilling for oil, driving big rigs, and cutting down trees.

And let's be honest--a lot of the injuries and fatalities sustained by police officers aren't directly attributable to violent suspects. A big chunk of them come from the fact that the typical frontline officer spends a lot of time moving around--in a patrol car, on a motorcycle, on foot, or on a bicycle. Special laws protecting police officers from insults don't actually reduce their likelihood of being in a vehicular accident, or getting clipped by a passing car during a traffic stop, or slipping on an icy sidewalk in the winter. Looking at the last ten years' police fatalities for the United States, the total number of officers killed in motor vehicle incidents (car and motorcycle crashes; hit by car) is 605. The total number of officers fatally shot, strangled, or stabbed is 553. (And I suspect that the proportion who get shot is even lower in Canada.)

Re:WTF

[wisnoskij]

Its not Muslim-like, it is French-like. I was really worried, as a Canadian, until I noticed this is in Québec. Their entire legal system is filled with laws that could never pass our constitution, for the rest of the country. We don't tend to have legal precedent bleed into the the rest of the country; Quebec is more like a separate country to Canada than America is.