To Serve and Protect Who Exactly?
Our firstborn has just been through a couple of weeks that might have turned a less honourable soul to a life of crime and vengeance. And what has struck me most forcibly about her ordeal is the craven failure of those institutions we perhaps naively rely on to set things right in a time of crisis – in this case, the police and an insurance company – to fulfill their stated duties. Not only did both institutions conspicuously fail to help her in the slightest way, the insurance company even did their bit to make a crummy situation worse by topping up her already overflowing cup of misery with their very own little dollop of wretched obtuseness.
A mother of three on Salt Spring Island, Emily has been commuting to Nanaimo B.C. each day this term to earn her teaching degree. Just to get her mornings underway has been a task worthy of Sisyphus; getting the kids up and ready for school and arranging for afterschool care before undertaking the ninety minute trip by car and ferry to Nanaimo where she puts in a very full day of studying. Then after her last class she makes her way back home. From her exit to her return, it’s a 12-hour day; followed by a few hours to help the kids with their homework and get them ready for bed as well as push along her own assignments.
Two Thursdays ago her car – an old beater with basic insurance – was swiped from her teachers’ college parking lot. In discussion with police the folks in the head office claimed that such a theft had never happened before. The doors were all locked but being an older model car, its safety features weren’t all that sophisticated. Worse yet, her Mac laptop which she didn’t need in that afternoon’s studio classes, had been stashed underneath the front seat. Luckily a fair bit of her material was stored in the cloud and retrievable on her tablet but she still had a lot of recopying to do to bring herself back up to speed. This problem would’ve been a lot worse if the heist had happened later in the school year.
Perhaps you couldn’t tell by the way I dropped that reference to the ‘cloud’ with such insouciance, but there’s actually a fair bit about computers and cell phones and social media that I don’t get. But apparently Em has some magical app on her iphone which she was able to activate so that a couple days later she received a text from Apple telling her that her stolen computer had just been connected to the internet and telling her precisely where this was happening. She passed this information along to the police, who then went to the identified location but failed to do anything about it because while the car outside was the same model and age as Em’s stolen vehicle, they thought it was the wrong colour according to the incorrect notes they’d made at the interview just after the theft.
A full week after the theft, Em received another notification from Apple and when she passed this latest bulletin along, the maddeningly blasé officer on the desk informed her that her filched car and computer were no longer a ‘priority’ for the police. ‘What are we going to do?’ they asked her. ‘Take out a warrant to try and get your laptop?’ Sure, she thought; that sounded like an eminently sensible thing to do. A crime had been committed and police are the people who are supposed to be able to do whatever needs to be done to address such a wrongdoing. Or would they prefer it if she took the law into her own hands and made that call to the guilty party herself? That can be fatally dangerous as we saw in London earlier this year when a man tried to retrieve his stolen cellphone. Leave that sort of thing to us, the police instruct us, and then in a case like this, they do diddly squat. Em asked to be put through to the colour-blind constable who had interviewed her the week before and left a message on his voicemail which he never so much as replied to.
Em’s basic car insurance policy didn’t cover theft but seeing as how she no longer had the car she’d been insuring to the tune of $55 a month, she put through a call to get her insurance coverage cancelled and was told, ‘Yes, we can do that but it’ll cost you more than if you just continue to keep up your payments until the end of your contract.’ In their ‘play-it-by-the-book’ obliviousness to the predicament of a client who no longer had need of their services, they probably thought they were being really helpful in pointing out the less expensive option. Indeed, the clerk had the witless temerity to sign off their conversation by expressing her hope that Em would ‘have a nice day’.
With no thanks whatsoever to the cops and the insurance company, this story actually has a happy conclusion. A few days after the theft, one of Em’s friends at the college started up a gofundme campaign with the goal of raising $1,000 to get her a new beater. As I write, $1,465 has come in from 26 donors all across the country (about half of them anonymous) and Em’s been able to buy herself a much better set of wheels than her last one. So good for Em and what a reassuring testimony to the kindness of people. But I for one am still pig-biting mad about the craven inaction of the police. Like the post office and like so many branches of the civil service, the police are becoming another entrenched, publicly funded institution that unconscionably ratchets up its budget and fluffs up its benefits at every opportunity while simultaneously providing fewer of the services they were initially contracted to provide. More and more the emphasis in police work is on the cushier jobs of community outreach and public education. I’m sure such work is a far more pleasant way to pass the time of day than tracking down thieves and thugs and lowlifes. But it isn’t what we want police for.