so he can go in and arrest this guy, he can’t! Why? Because the law says in order to issue a warrant, police must actually see the suspect go into the house. It is simply not good enough to have neighbours indicate the hiding place.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, since these days this kind of thing can get you charged with police brutality or something, but what the heck. You only live once. (Besides which, if they come after Paul with this, he can always claim it wasn’t his fault!) Fact is, my brother is not one to let anyone get the best of him, so for months after this little episode, every time one of his officers was having a quiet night, he’d instruct him or her to do a little nighttime check of the house in question. It became a great game. Whip up to the house with the cherry lights whirling, flash the spotlight on the windows, and listen to the toilets flush as thousands of dollars’ worth of assorted drugs were sent plunging into the sewers of Brantford! The guy finally took off for parts unknown. “So,” says Paul with some satisfaction, “I did my job!”
• • •
You may recall one of the most famous examples of how the thug huggers have tied the hands of police. The RCMP in British Columbia follow a trail of blood from a murdered man’s home to a nearby house trailer. The trailer door is covered with bloody handprints. There could be little doubt the murderer is inside. Police yell several times to come out with your hands up, but there is no response. Finally they break the door down and find a man, drunk and covered with blood. They arrest him on the spot and charge him with murder.
Incredibly, the man is let off and police are lectured by the judge for infringing on his rights.
It’s called the “hot pursuit” law. What it boils down to is that only in the course of a “hot pursuit,” when police actually see the suspect going into a house, can they enter without a warrant. Even hearing the suspect inside or, as in the case of my brother, other witnesses seeing the suspect go into the house is not good enough. The only time police can enter a dwelling without a warrant is if it is in the course of “hot pursuit” and police actually see the person enter.
It is only one of a multitude of laws passed in this country at the insistence of left-wing politicians, social activists, lawyers, and in some cases convicted criminals, which have very clearly swung the pendulum of justice far into the accused’s corner. More than one caller to my show on CFRA has expressed amazement that police are ever able to make an arrest, let alone get a conviction.
This swing of the justice pendulum in favour of the accused is not confined to Canada. If anything it was much worse in the United States up until recently, when soaring crime rates finally convinced authorities that the lefty thug huggers, once again were dead wrong and that the only things that really deter crime are strict policing and stiff punishment. It’s an amazing concept, isn’t it? Let would-be criminals know that they will likely get caught and severely punished, and many decide maybe they should take up another line of work.
There is perhaps no more graphic example of how wrong the thug huggers are than what happened in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s.
As in Canada, crime rates in the US begin to climb drastically in the 1960s as more and more of us began to buy the Left’s insistence that we needed a much softer system of justice. Despite the objections and warnings from most people who knew anything about human nature, we began to provide more and more rights and protections for the accused while at the same time providing fewer rights and protections for the victims. The most graphic example of this happens to be in the United States where in 1966 the Miranda Law was instituted. Thousands of criminals, including hundreds of murders, were set free when courts ruled that police hadn’t properly dotted all the i’s and crossed the t’s.
• • •
The US Supreme Court in the 1960s was the most left-wing and the most activist that country had ever experienced. Just how left-wing is perhaps best illustrated by statements made by Chief Justice David Bazelon in an article he wrote for Atlantic Monthly magazine in July 1960. In the article, entitled “The Imperative to Punish,” he stated that “the problem with the criminal justice system in the United States is not with the so-called criminal population, but with society whose need to punish is a primitive urge.” He went on to suggest that society’s need to punish was “highly irrational” and exhibited a “deep childish fear that if punishment was reduced in our prisons the multitude would run amuck.” He actually said all of those things and was widely quoted and believed here in Canada, as well.
At one point in the Atlantic Monthly article, Judge Bazelon went so far as to ask if it would really be the end of the world if all jails were converted into hospitals or rehabilitation centres. Obviously the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States could not bring himself to believe that anyone— no matter how horrendous the crime—really needed to be locked up!
He, of course, was only espousing the widely held leftist view that all criminals were really victims themselves, forced into their lifestyle by society’s failure to “get to the root cause” of the problem. A view, by the way, expressed by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien speaking in Washington shortly after 9/11.
If any of this sounds like the stuff you hear today from leftwing Liberals, New Democrats, and some segments of the media, say “hey!”
Interestingly enough, back in 1960, both in Canada and the United States, crime was actually decreasing. The murder rate in the US presents the most graphic example of that. On a per capita basis the murder rate in the US in 1960 was about half of what it was in 1930 and, believe it or not, considerably less than it had been in the early 1950s and was dropping.
So what happened when the supporters of “soft justice” the “criminals as victims” crowd got their way and we introduced what they describe as “progressive” methods in the justice system? They told us that a kinder, gentler system of treating the accused and the convicted would greatly reduce the crime rate and make us all much safer. The main reason they introduced the Miranda Law in the States they claimed, was that it would help to protect the lives of police officers. So what happened?
Well, what happened is all hell broke loose!
In Canada we have seen a dramatic increase in crime rates (The Ottawa Sun in a piece on April 24, 2006, says 35 percent since 1986) since the introduction of a soft justice system in the early 1960s. In the United States it was an explosion!
Some examples: The US murder rate on a per capita basis more than doubled between 1960 and 1974. The number of police officers killed after the passage of the Miranda Law (1966) tripled in the decade of the 1960s. In the United States, just as in Canada, the new softer laws were especially favourable for juveniles. In Canada, the juvenile crime rate has more than tripled since the passage of the Young Offenders Act. In the United States, the murder rate in the juvenile population more than tripled between 1965 and 1990. (All US crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, Crime Records; all Canadian statistics from Statistics Canada.)
One of the reasons I am providing the American experience is that while we followed their lead in swinging the pendulum far over to the left-hand corner in favour of the accused and convicted, we are only now under Stephen Harper even talking about following the US lead, admitting the error of our ways, toughening up our laws and reintroducing the concept of punishment.
Because today in the United States the crime rate, especially the violent crime rate, has plunged dramatically. It is especially evident in those cities that have been aggressively fighting crime with more and tougher policing and stiffer sentencing. New York today is hardly recognizable from what it was only 20 years ago.
By now you are probably familiar with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “broken
