Western Policing and Justice Model is Broken

Commentators have been missing the true importance of Vancouver's Stanley Cup riots last week. It has nothing to do with hockey and very little to do with Vancouver.

rioters celebrate victory over police

The lasting impact of the riots has to do with the way Canada, Britain and other Western countries police themselves. It's a model that was set up by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 when he created the Metropolitan Police Force in London.

That model was based on the theory that if you had the consent of the public, you could police it with a very small force. All of London, then with a population of about two and a half million, was to be policed by a mere 1,000 constables. Indeed, these new 'Bobbies' weren't even armed, since the public accepted their authority.

For most of the intervening 182 years the model has worked well. Populations in all our cities have expanded but so too have our police forces. As long as they had the general consent of the governed, as long as the social contract existed, the mere presence of police was enough to deter criminal wrong doing.

Things started to go wrong in a big way during the anti-war and ghetto riots of the 1960's (Watts, 1965; Detroit, 1967).

In Canada we had conscription riots in Montreal, the Regina riot of 1935, hockey riots in Montreal and Vancouver, the APEC summit riot in 1997, the 'Riot at the Hyatt' in 1998, the Quebec City Riot of 2001, the G-20 riot in Montreal in 2003, the G-20 riot in Toronto in 2010 and now the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver of 2011.

G-20 Rioters burn police car

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it should be frightening enough as it is. What it shows is that the original idea started in Britain and continued in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, only works if the vast majority of the public is law-abiding. If large numbers of people congregate together and then act together, the police can't stop them.

This is even more so now that Western teen and 20's have seen what happened this year in the Middle East. The 'Arab Spring' saw tens of thousands of Tunisians and Egyptians topple their leaders and many more attempting to do so in Yemen and Syria. To our impressionable youth the message was, get together, riot, stick it to the man.

The 'man' in this case, is society, represented by the police.

I warned about this happening back in 2008 when I was writing about how to measure crime. Two paragraphs from that post are erily prescient. I was talking about all the graffiti covering the suburbs of Paris.

Sure enough, a year or so later, Paris was the scene of weeks of rioting by Muslim youths. Every night they torched hundreds of cars to display their anti-social angst.

We may not have it as bad as France, but all the warning flags are flying here in Canada and they're all saying the same thing. At some point the PlayStation generation is going to go out in the real world and play with real people just as if they were images on a television screen.

The alternative to the Peel model is a return to the model that preceded it. Namely:

• The right to carry arms
• The militia
• A sheriff and and a posse comitatus.
• Citizen's arrest
• Juries 
• Corporal punishment
  
• Penitentiaries
  
• Capital Punishment
  
• Banishment
• Transportation

 Police, after all, are only doing what WE'RE supposed to do. It's our society; we need to take it back! And that means we need to change the law to get rid of all the warm and fuzzy Progressive goo that inhabits and inhibits justice today. We need to change the courts. We need to change the constitution.

They're not over, the Vancouver riots; in some ways, for most of us, they've just begun. Our politicians haven't a clue what to do about it.

But I think we have.