6° of Law Enforcement

On a gear making forum I go to, I’d been chatting a bit with a cop. He’s a fellow sew ho, but he also makes knives and bodies for Sure-Fire flashlights, as well as sheaths out of Kydex.

In Ontario I know of me, him, a cop up in Sudbury and my pal Andrew Kent that are stitch bitches. Just figured it would be advantageous to get to know one another, to compare tips, teach techniques, share ideas, show off our creations, but also with the idea of group buys and crap exchange. A lot of time you have to buy material in pretty sizeable amounts, which really doesn’t make much sense for people like us who are only producing small quantities of products at most. So group buys might work out well in that instance. Also, we all have sizeable collections of material and hardware, that might not be of use to one of us, but may well be of interest to someone else. Let’s share what we have. If one of us only needs one or two of something, but you need to buy a minimum of 200, but someone else has loads and has no real use for it, share it. I have piles of stuff that I have no real use for, but might be advantageous to someone else. That sort of thing.

On the forum he only listed his location as Ontario. I asked him where he was and he mentioned that he works for the York Region Police but lives up in Barrie. 

So we’d been trying to arrange a meet up to have a beer and dork out by showing off what we’ve all made. We exchanged names and numbers and all that.

The very next day I turn on the news to see what the weather is going to be the next day and I catch a bit about a robbery and chase. Then there’s a 2 second snippet with a cop, and it says Sgt. Mark *******, York Region Police.

What the hell?

I asked him about it the next day.

“Yeah that was me, and there is a photo of me in the Star today too. I’m the folliclely challenged one in the center. I happened to be the most senior officer on the scene so they stuck me in front of the television camera.”

The condensed version of the story is that there was a noon time robbery of a jewelry store in Vaughan. A security guard and off duty police officer who happened to be at the mall were shot at by one of the suspects, with some of the bullets whizzing past kids in a school yard. The suspect then forced his way into a home, took two women  hostage, put them in their van and led police on a wild chase. The van was eventually brought to a halt, with both hostages unharmed.

An article in the local paper at the time had a photo of Mark arresting the scroat, his head on the cruiser, looking a little worse for wear, surrounded by five pissed off looking cops. I’m sure that since all the arresting officers were white and the “suspect” (come on) black, some liberal do-gooders complained about racial profiling and police brutality and blah, blah, blah. Let’s see: robbery, shooting at police and security, endangering innocent bystanders, including school kids, home invasion, hostage taking, carjacking, driving through traffic endangering everyone else around. The circumstances left no doubt whatsoever as to this skells involvement, and he gets roughed up by the cops when he is arrested? Don’t play the race card at that point. I will gladly buy all the cops who leaned on this scumbags neck a little longer than necessary or dragged his face along the pavement or really twisted his arms up behind his back when handcuffing him, a beer or two. This fucker is a cancer on the face of society and I’m not going to lament what happened to him. There is police wrongdoing, and then there is criminals getting a little extra judicial attention, ie: what they deserve. Bleeding heart types who try to bemoan that shitbag getting his just desserts and trying to turn it into a socio/political quagmire need to shut up.

All I can say is good job Mark!