Doing his civic duty
Alderman shouldn’t be criticized for calling police
As citizens of this city, Calgary aldermen have as much right to phone the police if they suspect they see something untoward happening, as does any other citizen.
That’s why the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association should drop its request for an investigation into an incident last month in which Ald. John Mar called the police about guerrilla potato gardeners in his neighbourhood. Mar says he contacted police because he thought members of the Occupy movement were squatting on a vacant Scarboro lot. He says “Occupy Calgary” was painted on a tire that the gardeners were using for their potatoes, and he recognized a person there whom he had seen participating in last fall’s Occupy protest at Olympic Plaza.
Civil liberties association secretary Kelly Ernst says the group is concerned “police were taking their direction from a politician” — because Mar was riding in the van with police.
However, the police were not taking direction from Mar — except in terms of geographic location. He said he phoned the police from his house, and when they arrived, came out in his stocking feet, and then hopped in their van and went with them to show them the site.
Once the police arrived at the lot, however, they determined the illicit gardening was a matter for bylaw officers, and handed it off appropriately.
What’s troubling about this is the underlying implication that Mar should have taken a pass on calling the police when he noted something suspicious.
It doesn’t matter if the incident turned out to be something innocuous or part of another city agency’s jurisdiction. Mar did the right thing. He saw suspicious activity, and called the authorities to investigate it.
Too many times, there have been news stories about the tragic consequences of someone’s decision not to call police, because of a desire not to get involved or the assumption that someone else would phone the police.
The most famous case involved new yorker kitty genovese, stabbed to death outside her apartment building in 1964, while a dozen neighbours who heard or saw parts of the attack, didn’t call for help. And closer to home, none of the tenants in a Calgary apartment block reported two crying babies to police over a 10-day period in 2001 when their mother, Rie Fujii, was off partying with her boyfriend — until her landlord smelled the decomposing corpses of the children who had starved to death.
Obviously, what Mar came upon in no way compares to these crimes, but the principle is the same. Getting involved by alerting police to suspicious activity shows good citizenship and is something to be encouraged, not derided.
Investigations by both the Calgary Police Service and the Calgary police commission are underway. They are a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. Let’s hope the incident doesn’t deter other aldermen from calling police if they see a need to. Better to be wrong about what was happening, than to turn a deliberate blind eye to a crime in progress.