Kelly McParland: Ottawa police brutalize lone, 100-pound female – and aren’t fired?

November 17, 2010
Kelly McParland, National Post

There are so many mind-boggling crimes in the world it’s easy to get immune to surprise. But there is something so mind-bogglingly stupid and commonplace about this particular case that it makes you wonder what home for the congenitally brain-dead Ottawa uses to recruit police.

Two years ago a young woman named Stacy Bonds was walking along an Ottawa sidewalk on her way to a friend’s house. Bonds is 27, just five feet tall, weighs barely 100 pounds. She’s not a trouble-maker, has no criminal history, no record of causing problems for police. She had — horrors — enjoyed a few drinks, though a judge ruled later that she was not drunk. Two police officers stopped her, checked her out, discovered she was harmless and told her to be on her way. She took a few steps, then stopped and asked them why they’d stopped her in the first place.
That got her handcuffed, thrown in the back of a cruiser and spirited off to the police station, where police pulled her hair, kneed her in the back a couple of times, slammed her to the ground with a riot shield, cut off her clothes and bra while a few male officers watched, and strip-searched her.

That done, they threw her in a cell, half-naked, for three hours. They charged her with public drunkenness — though she wasn’t — and with aggressive behaviour, though a video showed that wasn’t true either.

Now, how big a moron do you have to be to pull a stunt like this? These cops are on video — which one assumes they are aware of, it being a police station and all — and they molest an innocent woman, then lay false charges, which can be easily disproved. Did they think Bonds would just go away and not mention the experience to anyone? Did they think no one would notice the video? Did they figure three male cops and one female cop was appropriate force to use against a lone, 100-pound female?

Or, being clearly of limited mental capacity, did they just figure the rest of the world was as stupid as they are?

The judge, rightly, denounced the whole episode, noting there was ”no reason, apart from vengeance and malice, to have left Ms. Bonds in the cell for a period of three hours and 15 minutes half-naked and having soiled her pants, before she received what is called a blue suit. That is an indignity toward a human being and should be denounced.”

The obvious question is: Are these four idiots still employed by the Ottawa police force, and if so, why? Ottawa Police Chief Vern White says the force has launched “an internal investigation.” We know what that usually means: a mild rebuke, maybe some lost pay, but nothing that might upset the union.

Chief, this is an easy one. Fire them all. They don’t deserve the right to demean their uniforms.