The social contract is not deteriorating

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/08/2020 (1875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Police Service’s media relations people didn’t have Police Chief Danny Smyth’s best interests at heart when they OK’d his decision to publish an opinion piece in last Saturday’s Free Press.

If you missed it, Smyth took issue with the erosion of the “social contract” between police and the community. His complaint is social media is being used to reject the need for police and he took aim at “woke” members of the community including the “editorial board challenging the integrity of police leaders without having all the facts” and “selected academic ‘experts’ who take the opportunity to denounce the police.”

Smyth says this is making it hard for members of the police service to do their job.

I wouldn’t want to do what cops do in this city. I had a limited career in law enforcement working as an immigration officer at a port-of-entry, arresting and detaining individuals under the immigration act for three years. I was terrible at it. My first arrest resulted in me apologizing to the individual. I cried when I found out a woman I was deporting to Tonga was attempting to sell her seven-year-old into prostitution. I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of work.

And I like Smyth. I think he’s a sensible, smart police chief. He’s got a tough job, dealing with a difficult situation in a city that often has challenges: one of which is being the frequent title holder as the murder capital. We’ve held that title 16 times from 1981 to 2012 — the highest per-capita murder rate among Canada’s largest nine cities.

But his Saturday column came across as defensive and inflammatory. The fact is, there are members within the community — “woke” or not — who do not think the police are doing a good job.

There’s also a significant portion of the population who think journalists, politicians and academics are not doing a very good job. They, too, take to social media to make their feelings known. In some cases, they even show up outside people’s offices to complain.

But the biggest issue I have with Smyth’s column is his premise that the social contract is deteriorating. He claims that he entered into a social contract with the community of Winnipeg. That alone is a ridiculous premise.

Social contract theory, according to Thomas Hobbes, argues that without rules, our society would become a dog-eat-dog world. Instead, as a society, we have devised a code of conduct that allows for order. We are born into this, with laws and rules that govern our actions. (Yes, I know this is a simplistic overview, but this is a column and not a treatise.)

So, Smyth did not enter into a social contract. He was born into it, just like you and I. It’s not like he signed on a line when he became police chief. Instead, this contract has been in existence since long before he was born and will continue after he’s gone.

The contract or agreement allows society to set laws or rules by which we must abide. In the case of law enforcement, it is the government who creates the criminal code and requires the police to enforce it. Of course, there are problems with this. The social contract gives government far too much power and it doesn’t provide us with much choice to get out of it if we don’t agree.

More specifically, this social contract provides law enforcement with a power imbalance — the very thing that the “woke” citizens and “academics” right now are decrying on social media. People are taking to social media and to the streets to protest.

The social contract is not deteriorating. For those who are watching carefully, it’s being interrogated because it’s problematic.

Right now, we’re seeing the imbalance play out with Black Lives Matter protests in Spokane, Minneapolis or Atlanta. Those protests are here, too. And the protests for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls will never go away, with the memory of a tiny body wrapped in a duvet cover still firmly in many Winnipeggers’ minds.

Perhaps Smyth may want to remember that two of his police officers stopped a car in which 15-year-old Tina Fontaine was riding just before she died.

Or the fact that in a space of 10 days last April, three Indigenous people died at the hands of police in Winnipeg.

A good leader would stop being defensive and try to understand what that means.

Shannon Sampert is a retired political scientist who works as a media consultant. She will return to the classroom in September to teach at the University of Manitoba.

www.mediadiva.ca.

shannon@mediadiva.ca

Twitter: @CdnMediadiva