Alberta’s police watchdog recommended laying charges against three Lethbridge officers who used police databases to improperly access the personal information of two people, including NDP MLA Shannon Phillips, but the Crown’s office has declined to prosecute, CBC News has learned.
Details of two recently completed Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) investigations come from a letter sent by ASIRT director Mike Ewenson to Phillips’s lawyer, Michael Bates.
Despite calling the Crown’s refusal to pursue charges “quite regrettable,” Phillips says she is feeling vindicated after years of pursuing police accountability.
“I think it sends a message to the public that in order to get even a sliver of accountability, even a tiny little ray of light on transparency and accountability in a police service, you have to fight, you have to pay a personal cost, you have to wait years, and even then it will be partial,” said Phillips in a phone interview.
“The system overall is quite broken.”
ACAB, and fuck the prosecutor’s office for not charging those cops … because I guarantee you a civilian would have been charged.
IF anybody has the resources to do this…
in Canada, when the state won’t prosecute criminality,
THEN individuals can hire lawyers to be the prosecutors.
Some criminals have the ( unofficial, of course ) protection of the authorities.
Unless some independent(s) pay lawyers ( who usually work as defense lawyers ) to be the prosecutors, … well … then “justice” can rot, is Canada’s actual position.
I found out that if the authorities won’t prosecute criminality, & you haven’t the resources to hire lawyers to prosecute, then … the criminality is actually protected by establishment.
( this kind of establishment-centric “establishment itself is the LAW” religion is visible in all political-systems, btw, it isn’t created by our system being Canadian, or generally centerist or moneyarchist … Isaiah railed against this a couple millenia ago, in the Abrahamic-religions bible, & Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita had to pit his life against his own family.
Rot/decay is normal.
The impersonality & correct-systems & objectivity-oriented-continuous-corrections required to counter this fundamental animal-instinct are not in-place, anywhere.
Nobody’s got the spine to enforce that integrity displace political-muscle-dominion.
So, it’ll continue ruling our … fate.
It may end up being our species’ epitaph, late this century.
shrug )
