A wonderful Saturday afternoon in the park wrecked by impertinent civil servants.

In all the hub-bub about burning police cars and smashed up Tim Hortons, we’ve missed something rather important: Our police officers are impolite.  Forget enforcing the rule of law, many of these “gentlemen” do not even subscribe to the rules of manners.

Just today, I was in Queen’s Park with the wife and there was rather a lot of these fellows.  Apparently, they wanted us to leave.  I have no idea why as they never gave me a reason.  Instead of approaching us like reasonable adults and offering us an umbrella (it was raining – serve and protect)  they charged towards us, banging shields and beating the snot out of whomever they could find.  I have not seen behavior of that order since my Nan was healthy.  To top things off, they kept riding about on their horses, never thinking to bring a pony for the children.

They hogged the horses, allowing no one else to ride or even stroke these magnificent beasts.

Had they bothered to find out, they might have discovered that my wife was new to this country and they were giving her a rather bad impression of it.  When I had my photo taken with them, only one responded to my request that they say cheese.  The others were a real bunch of sourpusses.

From what I’ve heard, they’ve spent much of the weekend acting like this.  They’ve built fences all over town, tore up all sorts of trees, closed down the subway system and then tried to blame all of this on “anarchists.”  I’d like to know when exactly we started allowing anarchists to run our public transport.  Or the police for that matter.

Trying to understand the sudden shift in police attitude towards me. Did I offend them? Are they racist? Just what is their problem?

And I hate to accuse the police of racism when they have so much reason to hate every race in this city, but I feel I must.  For yesterday, I walked around the security fences with a white girl (Danielle from Final Fashion) and the police acted like decent human beings.  They smiled, said hello and good day, answered me when I asked them how they were doing and were altogether pleasant.  But today, when I went to the park with my black wife, they completely ignored me and then came chasing after the pair of us with shields and truncheons.  If that’s not racist, I don’t know what is.

If a waiter acted that way, the man would be sacked.

The amusing thing about all this is how deeply the police object to their being any weapons at a protest.  I recall a protest their union held a while ago where a bunch of them showed up wearing guns at City Hall and none of them even faced job discipline.  Considering that, it seems indecent to object to sticks or whatever these people carry to fight men with guns.  And they also dislike masks but almost every officer of the law I saw today wore one.  They also carried more bondage equipment than one of the G20 delegate’s whores.

It's not always easy to keep smiling when people are acting badly but it is quite rude to point out their poor manners. You must assume they know no better.

Really, the police and black bloc should find a nice little thunderdome where they can fight all this out with the same weapons.  If they cannot agree on a proper duel, they could at least settle this dispute with a softball game.  That way, the rest of us could go about our business like the peaceful, more or less decent folks we are.  Uninterrupted by the elite, their cops or any window breaking.

And while I long ago gave up on people like this holding to the rule of law, is it too much to hope that they hold to the rule of manners?  Or can we really expect worse behavior from our police than we can a child at the dinner table?  If that’s the case, perhaps we should get them their own little table.  Until they grow up.