For the last few days, the RCMP’s great big, catamaran police-boat, the Higgit, has been cruising our area. It is a fabulous vessel. Goes fast. Bristles with equipment. Ooooh….quite a show of power! That boat could not have been built for under $2M dollars and most likely, it was twice that.
It appeared to have a crew of three. Each of the officers is paid well in excess of $100,000.00 a year and, with support costs for them and the boat, the $300,000 is more like $600,000 or even more (docking, maintenance, insurance, a second crew, support staff, offices, benefits….and the list goes on and on and on). Operationally, it has to be well over $1M a year. Oooooh, quite a show of money!
“Wonder why they are out here? They have been out here ‘boating around’ now for a few days. Must be nice work. Probably comes with overtime pay. Maybe danger pay, too.”
“Well, your questions may be answered. They have just pulled someone over right in front of our place.”
The great big catamaran (maybe 60 feet) had ‘loud-hailed’ a small 16’ runabout coming down from up coast to a dock just south of us. We knew the boat. We did NOT know the two people in it because they were heavily clad in wet weather gear. It was pouring.
The police bellowed, “Please come alongside. We have a few questions. It will not take a minute.” The little boat swung alongside. My binoculars revealed a man and a woman. She was about 40 or so – I saw that when she removed her hood. The male’s face was not revealed. They were addressed by the officers for a few minutes and then it looked like she was providing the officers with ID.
Most of us do not carry ID. Or a watch. Or money. Maybe some younger people carry a cell phone but it finds a reception signal only rarely. Had they stopped me, I would have had to say, “My name is David Cox. You are going to have to trust me on that or run me in or shoot me. I carry no ID.”
Then one of the officers left the police-cat and boarded the small vessel. That is a bit like a third person joining two others in a small walk-in closet. No one could move. Still, the boarding officer took the time to poke around as best he could. To give them the ‘authority’ to do that, the officer likely checked around for some absence of safety equipment or some stupid small vessel operator’s license. They need a reason to bully people. They usually find one.
If the runabout’s operator’s were polite, cooperative and obsequious, they may have gotten off with a warning but there is no doubt the cops found some deficiencies in safety equipment and paperwork. Even I could see that the registration number was not on the side of the boat and most boats around here run with minimal safety gear.
It is not as if the locals are cavalier or reckless and need policing for their own safety. They are way more safety oriented than the dimwitted police. Plus, they have plied these waters for years and know everyone on the coast, every nook and cranny and most of us just zip along not 100 yards from a shoreline. And yes, life jackets are 95% common (I am one of the few without). The police, on the other hand, have come up here several times over the years in smaller, ‘bristling equipment’ boats with giant engines and all decked out in layers of vests and radios, guns and batons, boots and crap NOT knowing even which island they were facing (swear to God). They rarely know where they are.
They regularly damage their boat because they do NOT know how to read a chart. If any cop falls in the water, they are going down like a granite boulder because they can’t float with all that crap on nor can they swim. They can hardly move on their own boats and cannot move if they board one of our smaller ones.
The main RCMP training is done in Saskatchewan. RCMP management and head office is in Ottawa. The small boater’s licensing test was designed for the lakes back east. What the RCMP knows about seamanship is akin to what Trump knows about astrophysics (although I admit that the Higgit seemed to have a designated skipper rather than just a junior officer). We watched as millions of dollars in equipment and staff time were employed over several days and the only purpose we could ascertain was to ‘check out’ the 16’ runabout going home in the rain.
They kind of had to have something to write in their report log, I guess, but I hate it. I hate the tyranny, the bullying, the stupidity and the incredible waste of resources.
Our Off the Grid Home 
they have all the power and can operate with pure immunity. police in north america are mostly a violent and uncivilized bunch.
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Self-serving bull crap.
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Gentlemen….you have my sincerest endorsement. Thank you for your rebellious nature. Thank you for not rolling over and accepting what has become legalized bullying. I have a few police friends and they are, in person, pleasant and normal. Friends. But……..in uniform, they tend to see a ‘them and us’ kinda thing and then, even worse, they are trained to see it that way. They are trained to treat the ‘citizen’ as garbage. I remember (in the good ol’ days as a kid) the cops were the nice guys on the corner that you could get directions from or whatever. Almost goodwill ambassadors. But, when I hitched to Haight Ashbury when I was 16 and passed through small towns, I was amazed at what an ugly bunch of thugs they had become (No. I had short hair and wore jeans and sneakers, not fringed leather jackets and bell-bottoms back then). A couple years later when I was in New York city, they were even worse! Mean bastards. Cruel. Ever since then, I have met a reasonable cop-on-duty maybe one time in four. What the hell is wrong with their training system? Why are they like that? It is so unnecessary and so NOT ‘civil service’.
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I live on the ocean front as do you.From my place I have a panoramic view all the way to the SAR dock in downtown Victoria.
A few weeks ago a SAR zodiac with three guys came in front of my place and pulled half a dozen crab traps 7 days in a row around the lunch hour,each time they would return to the aforementioned dock.
All along for these pandemic days the big coast guard boats have been hanging around downtown.
generally speaking a lot of freeloading grifters.
But it has always been like this, having said that I think this is why so many folk to your disdain, seek to build a thick cushion when it comes to getting wealth.
because grifting never ends and if one doesn’t want to be in a soup line you need a lot, cuz this crowd and it is a crowd, Are first in line for other people’s reserves
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I have basically concluded that being a cop requires a certain type of personality or a few distinct traits at the very least. They HAVE to be judgmental. They are on the front line and they have to use judgment as to what warrants a crime and what does not. The problem as I see it is that their judgment gets skewed over time and they find it easier to ‘assume’ guilt and act accordingly and then let the perp go if there is nothing found. That means screaming at innocent people to get on the ground! NOW! And that is insane. They need training in how to use judgment. They have also been trained to ‘take charge’ of a situation. That is stupid, too. If they try to do that in the wrong situation, their actions actually aggravate the situation. And so it goes. I think the answer is better training and less militarism. Remember…..I worked in Skid Row for 4 years. I had hundreds of ‘bad people’ to deal with every day. Half of them crazier than hell. There were numerous physical encounters but no one was ever shot, handcuffed or even jailed. All that ‘gun and screaming crap’ is unnecessary 90% of the time. Maybe more. Being in cars and filling our reports is also counterproductive. Cops should walk or be on scooters or something. Visible presence is fine and calms the crowd if the cop has a face and pleasant demeanor. Some nut in body armour in a car is just creepy. It’s time to make cops HUMAN again.
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Seems indeed quite stupid and a huge loss of money to be checking out a small boat like that…unless you are all growing some strange plants in your backyards on the islands. I agree on your observations about the police, but in the defence of some of them….they HAVE to take a lot of crap on the streets (especially in the big cities) and at least in Belgium are constantly bullied themselves by some groups of people. It is better on the smaller villages, and there cops tend to be a little milder. But it is definitely going the wrong way, they should be here “to serve and protect”, like sometimes it was written on the side of police cars in the States if I remember well. But now sometimes, it seems like “annoy and harress”. One of my daughters is thinking to join the police force, at her age for all the RIGHT reasons, we’ll see, and I hope if she does, she will become one of the exceptions, but then she’ll have to fight also against the system…and this definitely will NOT be good for her career
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Well, in Canada, the strange plant is now legal. So, they should only worry if they have ‘strange chemicals’ and no one out here is into that crap. There is simply no valid reason (generally) for stopping boats. If there is a ‘shooter’ on the radar or something, great! GO for it! But ‘monitoring’ the population with random hassles is NOT serving anyone. Neither is running a $2M to $4M boat that is loaded with equipment. These doofuses even have fast inflatable accompanying boats because they are so bad at running their big boats, they are afraid of getting too close to the shore!
What we need are three or more ‘fast boats’ with a crew of two each and a minimum of equipment. They gotta move fast and be present quickly but two cops is plenty. 99% of their time is spent asking victims questions as to ‘what happened?’, anyway. Grannies can do that!
If they PREVENTED wrong-doing, I will shut up but they are always there after the fact and, in one case where we came to the aid in a bad car accident, they took forever, had no supplies to help and stopped just long enough to determine if the victims had been drinking. Then they left! Their perceived role was in aid of ICBC (our provincial car insurer) not the people! I would really LOVE to have input into their training.
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Ah the “justification” of their budgets, equipment and training…..”winning hearts and minds” as it were…. …. another epic fail.
Hows that RCMP pension plan working for ya?
The latest news from Nova Scotia and the massacre?
The RCMP were told that the killer had illegal guns and beat the crap out if his wife on a regular basis YEARS ago ….and did nothing.
The RCMP officer that was killed was a former Musical Ride RCMP member and was sent on patrol by herself.
So we have a man who was known to imitate the police. Who had a history of violence. Who was reported to have illegal guns smuggled in from the States years before the killings….. All these red flag items and no one? No one thought to go and talk to this loon?
The sound of a large granite ball dropping into an empty oil drum comes to mind…..
And the Liberals think an new gun law will do what exactly?
Stop criminals from illegally acquiring guns and not using them?
My god if the pc weenies really had an emergency to deal with….we’d either be up the proverbial creek without a paddle ( or a life jacket, or a flare, or a license…….) OR all of us would be sent Pink T-shirts and spray cans full of rainbow colors to save Canada……… from itself.
I guess the Liberal “revised” gun Law( pages upon pages of rules and regs mentioning 1500 different firearms which they magically produced in less than two weeks after the killings??? When have the Feds EVER moved that quickly a cynic might ask? )
A “new” Law ( just as bad as the old Law?)that sat on a shelf gathering dust until the optics( insert latest massacre here) finally appeared.
Politics at its worst.
Apparently when the RCMP finish “their” investigation…..the Nova Scotia govt will be having their own investigation.
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I wonder what emergency the officer stated to board 5heir wee boat and break the mandatory 2 meter separation for C-19 protection? They have potentially infected our locals being they came from Campbell River! Who is protecting us from such a urgent need for separation if we see this from the RCMP!
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Video shows officer trying to tase Ahmaud Arbery in 2017.
5 seconds in, he got tasered. (the taser malfunctioned)
when a guy can be dead out jogging, what kind of a state you live in?
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In the USA!!!!
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Blacks have been persecuted by whites for 200 years. And blacks have fought back in many ways and not always within the system rules. Having said that, not all whites persecute blacks and not all blacks are sweet and innocent. If one was to find the ‘likely-most’ racist whites in the South, they are not excluded at all from the the police forces and, if one was to see a lot of blacks gathering in the South, not all would be pleasant towards the whites. Especially the police. The ‘love boat’ has sailed on that opportunity. The races have grown this suspicion and antagonism in a chicken-and-egg kinda way over the decades. The Middle East has much the same kind of crap. Blacks had to hide just to play music! That begets a behaviour of silence, non-cooperation and anger. An angry black man being hassled by an ignorant white cop is simply two highly flammable pieces of fuel on a fire already burning.
We had the simmering of that with our Indigenous peoples. They eventually achieved some kind of Native Justice system/process/protocol…whatever…..and that seemed to simmer the tensions. Enough, anyway. It is not skin colour doing this – it is culture conflicts and economics. Hell, I would be persona non grata in one of those bible-thumping creationist, racist, ignorant, Bubbavilles and I am white, look like a Bubba and like steak, beer and pick-up trucks. You’d think I would fit right in. But, I have been there and I do not fit in. I was the only white kid in my all-black school/class (grade 2) in San Francisco in 1953 and fit in easily back then. I doubt that would happen these days. I ‘fit in’ because kid’s culture is playing and there are no economics at play – we were all poor.
Today, blacks have more of a chance and so that part is good. But, while that is happening, economic opportunity is getting increasingly out of reach for everyone and so that is bad – off-setting progressive good with an inequality bad. Worse, the police have been pretty-much moulded into a ‘system support force’ for corporations and governments. They treat all poor people much the same (like garbage) but there are more poor blacks.
I do NOT see a solution – not anytime soon or in my lifetime, actually. If there was to be a solution it has to include reasonable equality in all things. Even then, there is a generation or two of bias to overcome. If I was a black man in the USA, I have no idea what I’d do. Maybe move to a more progressive country like Canada or Sweden? But we know that is NOT great – only better.
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Well said Dave. I think I will stay put in the safe haven of Richmond Hill. 🙂
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Canada is progressive? Not according to your full press Blogs.
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HAHAHA, LMFAO. 🙂
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Well, more progressive than say, The USA or even the UK but ‘progressive’ does NOT mean successful. We botch so much up. Thus the ranting.
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its hard being a chinaman these days, getting beat up wearing a mask, and getting beat up not wearing a mask. decisions, decisions.
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Well, we are all susceptible to the ‘deplorables’ but getting beaten up, mask or not, is inevitable if you are protesting in Hong Kong. Can’t imagine what protesting in Beijing gets. So, being a ‘man’ these days is difficult wherever you are.
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