Slashdot Mirror
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.
Threats and insults aren't the same thing. What a bunch of idiots, someone should nuke them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I hope they made it pretty darned clear what exactly constitutes an "insult". Or is it just "posts I don't like"?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Let me be the first to say, the officials in Granby, Québec, suck.
"For me, it's the same thing". For the rest of us, it's obviously very different. Now shut up and go run your little moon.
*Threats* are already crimes. Opinions are protected by freedom of speech.
Let me be the first to say that the mayor of Granby is an idiot.
This is muslim-like mentality - ban saying something we don't like because our feelings are more important than free speech. I wonder if this Canadian town will take this to Muslim extremes where pointing out any moral issues with the officials, or that they are ineffective in their jobs will be seen as a reason to arrest someone.
The problem is that you're usually offered another lot of idiots to choose from...
police injury rates are _much_ higher than most work. According to Governing Magazine they're only surpassed by nursing care, and I can easily believe that.
That is not what your citation says:
Occupations recording the highest injury and illness rates include nursing and residential care facilities, police and fire personnel.
Note the weasel word "including" - there is no inherent ranking there, not even to say that the listed occupations are even at the top. The fact that they don't mention construction, which accounts for 20% of all workplace fatalities, more than any other occupation, suggests that site is being sneaky to promote their own agenda.
I don't really care about the numbers, but if you do, I recommend putting in the effort to analyze the BLS data yourself. I couldn't find an easy summary with less than 2 minutes of googling so I gave up.
"Police can't normally walk away from the scene, and they are compelled to attend in the first place."
Uhhhhh - no. The police are not obligated to come to your aid. Never have been, never will be. When you call the police, they only come if it is convenient, and when they feel like it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06...
As for walking away from the scene - I'm not aware of anything that binds any individual officer to the scene. He may walk away from a confrontation at any time.
There are some pretty good discussions going on right now about such things.
http://www.policemag.com/chann...
In short, a cop can decide to defuse a situation by just backing off, at any time he chooses to do so. And, in fact, some of the wiser heads in the various police forces say that they should do just that. Not always, but often.
How many stories have we read of, where some mentally deficient person was shot to death, simply because he wasn't cooperating? And - the cop feels "threatened". One of the most recent stories I remember involved a nut case who was on his own porch, and happened to have a screw driver in his hand. There was no indication that he intended to use that screwdriver as a weapon - the cop just "felt threatened" because of that dumbass 21 foot rule. Yet another dead nutcase - and no one answers for the killing.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.)
~Idarubicin