[LINK] "Questioning the ritual"

[rfmcdonald]

John Lorinc's Spacing Toronto post actually didn't create much controversy in the comments. Most of the commenters seemed to agree with his argument that the massive funeral of Toronto police sergeant Ryan Russell, killed by a man who'd hijacked a snowplow of all things, was over the top and perhaps a bit of unexpected positive public relations for a police force that has been criticized greatly over the cursed G20 weekend. 13 thousand people were present at the funeral, held in a Toronto convention centre, the downtown was dominated by the parade for most of the day, and major media outlets gave it heavy coverage.

I do not understand why the police as an organization (and certainly not just in Toronto) insist on transforming a deeply human tragedy into a show of force and a media circus.

There’s a certain irony here. I feel the Sgt. Russell we came to know as an individual in the past few days has been subsumed by a brand of militaristic ritual that serves to reinforce the otherness of the police as a social institution.

And maybe that’s appropriate: when I sit down at my computer in the morning to begin working, I am reasonably certain I will be in tact when I get up in the afternoon. Cops, on the other hand, do risk their lives on our collective behalf, and so when one of those lives is lost to violence, we should honour them in a different way, or so the logic goes.

Yet the traditions of police funerals, for me, evoke images that have nothing to do with mourning and the genuine connections between people that such tragedies engender. These events, rather, are filled with profoundly complicated visual symbols — of invasion, of force, and of a conspicuously defensive sort of esprit de corps. Indeed, in the wake of last summer’s G20 riots, how should those Torontonians who were appalled by the actions of the police react to the sight of thousands of uniformed officers again clustered in the downtown core?