if you are a NEGRO, you are “known to the police” but if you are a rich white medical professional who wants to kill cops, you’re not

for being black, aboriginal or moslem

I’ve always hated the dogwhistle term “known to the police” - it is only ever applied to poor, black, aboriginal or moslem people, people without expensive lawyers and deep pockets, to subtly imply their lives are worth less than yours or mine.

The police usually explain it all away as meaning that the person has been charged or convicted of an offence but that’s a laugh.

Or more bluntly, it simply means that the people who fit that description are more accurately  “known to all the public, as well as to the cops.”

I know, for example, that in May 1989, one man was charged by Moncton police with stealing the dog of another and that in September 1989 the charge was dismissed : because both times it was publicly reported in the MONCTON TIMES-TRANSCRIPT and I read it in their archives online.

Legal proceedings are public and have been so since the Star Chamber was abolished.

But when HRM & RCM police were asked, five weeks ago, if Gabriel Wortman was “known to the police”, a question they knew they would be asked and so had brushed up on it, they lied.

Lied, lied, lied.

They knew him, in the institutional deep memory sense, as a potential killer of themselves or other cops.

Not something you are going to forget, is it ?

But the fact that neither force took the threat seriously and that constable Heidi Stevenson is dead, along with 23 others, is something they hoped we’d all forget....