Reflection Paper #1

As children we are taught to respect and trust persons of authority. We are told by our parents to seek a person of authority in times of need for example, if we are lost to find a police officer and he or she will know what to do and keep us safe until we can return to our parents. We paint ourselves a picture of how positive and safe persons of authority are and believe they can do no wrong. After reading Kinsman and Gentile’s Queering national Security, the Cold War, and Canadian History, as well as watching the clips on the G20 summit we see how the pictures we have painted may not always be so positive. These two events also show how in five to six decades some things have not changed.
Kinsman and Gentile’s reading Queering national Security, the Cold War, and Canadian History exposes us to components of the “war on queers”. Within the reading we see how RCMP officers used their authority to threaten homosexuals in the 1950s and 1960s. They would follow and interrogate those suspected of being gay, bisexual, and lesbian. Throughout the interrogations RCMP officers would threaten to expose their homosexuality to employers and family members if they did not give them names of other homosexuals. At this time “in the national security discourse, homosexuals were constructed as suffering from an unreliable and unstable character, which made [them] a threat to national security (Kinsman and Gentile). As a result once their names were released to employers many were demoted to a less important position, released all together, forced to resign or take their retirement. Authorities were segregating homosexuals, leading others to believe that they were weak, unreliable, vulnerable to blackmail, and unethical making them a security problem to all. Due to the authorities misuse of power homosexuals’ human rights were being abused and neglected. Reading these stories of what happened to homosexuals does not paint a positive picture for authorities in my mind.
Five to six decades later we still see persons of authority misusing their power at the G20 Summit in Toronto. I could not believe how police officers were treating people in the videos watched in class. From just the few videos seen police officers were being extremely violent without reason, disregarding press badges and stealing belongings. In one clip we see protesters sitting in Queens Park (an area set up for peaceful protesting) and group of officers surrounding them pushing them out and spraying them with pepper spray until they got up and moved. Another incident we see in Queens Park is a man being run down by police officers on horses. From what I see these people had come to the area where it was suppose to be peaceful protesting and police appeared to take things into their own hands and force people to leave. In other clips we see press being punched, thrown to the ground, their press badges removed, and belongings taken from them. One journalist asked to speak to a supervisor after being punched by a police officer and all that was said by other officers was to punch him again. Shortly after his microphone was taken by police, eventually returned after several press members got involved. Another press member shares her story of how her press badge was taken from her and she was thrown in jail (the cages they had set up). I was disgusted by some of the stories shared about what happened inside the cages especially stories of what happened to women.
Both these stories show how persons of authority abuse/misuse their power and how the human rights of other are mistreated. These events make you rethink how positive some things may not actually be. Now I don’t believe all police officers are corrupt and abusive of their powers/title but many do overuse their title in negative ways. These events really make us wonder how safe our security system is if these people can abuse their power how we have seen done in both the reading and video clips.