It's an insult to pigs to call cops by their name.

News that Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Jim Brown (aka the “Kilted Knight”) posted graphic photos of himself holding a knife to a woman’s throat on a website devoted to sadomachism has prompted significant public concern. Although this appears to be just another black eye for the nation’s police force, there is potentially a much bigger issue here.

Cpl. Jim Brown isn’t just a police officer who is a sexual deviant on his own time and who likes to connect with other like-minded individuals to share their twisted experiences. He is the RCMP member who produced informant Ross Caldwell in mid-July, 1999, almost three years before the RCMP accidentally discovered evidence that Robert Willy Pickton had been disposing of women’s bodies on the Port Coquitlam property he shared with his brother David. Caldwell was an acquaintance of the Picktons who reported that Willy Pickton had been seen skinning a woman in the barn, that he kept handcuffs under his bed and that he owned night-vision equipment, a semi-automatic rifle and wigs that he wore when he went trolling downtown.

From here.

Xtra and Dan Savage have weighed in on Twitter, claiming that CBC news coverage about RCMP Cpl. Brown is an invasion of his privacy and that his personal sexual preferences should not be a public concern.

Given his close connection to the Pickton investigation - and that someone in the fairly tightly-knit and protective BDSM community found his photo re-enactment of actual crime scenes where women were tortured, murdered, dismembered and fed to pigs, disturbing - Brown's professional deportment should be scrutinized.

During the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a number of police officers who worked on the investigation that eventually led to the trial of Willy Pickton were exempted from examination.

Willy Pickton didn’t kill up to 49 women by himself, not according to the jury who convicted him of six counts of second degree murder. The women whose remains were found at the pig farm were likely the victims of a group of sexual sadists and torturers, who likely included convicted murderer Willy Pickton himself.

How did Cpl. Jim Brown meet informant Ross Caldwell? Was Cpl. Jim Brown one of the sexual sadists frequenting Piggy’s Palace? Why didn’t the RCMP act on the important information he brought forward? Were the RCMP monitoring the gang activities, including the Angels’ visits to Piggy’s Palace? Why did the RCMP seemingly ignore a ten year string of serial murders? Did they have bigger fish to fry? How many murderers remain at large?

All of these questions should have been answered by the just-concluded Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. We tried our best to pry the lid off and get the evidence out, but our attempts to have Cpl. Brown, Ross Caldwell, Bev Hyacinthe and David Pickton testify (among others) were rejected, as were our attempts to get access to the records of the Organized Crime Agency of BC that would reveal the nature and extent of police surveillance and gang infiltration activities involving Piggy’s Palace.

The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry is patently incomplete. Now it has been revealed that the Coquitlam RCMP had a sexual sadist in their ranks who was sufficiently connected to the Picktons to produce a key informant, someone who tipped the police what Willy Pickton was up to three years before he was arrested. The Commission hearings must be re-opened. If it does not re-open the hearings, it will be perpetuating a police cover-up of the circumstances surrounding Canada’s worst serial killing case.

Instead, the Commission targeted a number of minor players, including this police clerk. It was a travesty of justice miscarried in order to protect Pickton's buddies-in-crime.

The RCMP has become emblematic of the worst examples of male sexual entitlement and privilege.

Added: Rabble has a long screed regarding Brown: "Private fantasy, Public Reality". It's not that great. The author is clearly not familiar with the premise of 'safe, sane and consensual' activities that informs ethical practitioners of BDSM. As well, she misrepresents Terri-Jean Bedford who is a professional dominatrix - not someone who currently experiences abuse, exception made for the violence of a "justice" system that criminalizes sex trade workers to "protect" them.

Competent research, precise knowledge of legal questions, including the criticism directed at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry and a better understanding of boundary issues would have been highly helpful to Meghan Murphy and it would have made her rant referral-worthy.

The role of pigs in Pickton saga.

These are only 15 of the missing women that were killed at the Pickton farm in Port Coquitlam.

Pigs - the porcine type of Sus genus - were happenstance accomplices in the murders. They were recruited to remove the evidence.

What is emerging from the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, established to examine how police investigated the disappearance of dozens of sex trade workers from the Vancouver Downtown Eastside "combat zone" is that two-legged *pigs* stuck their snouts in, with the result that a number of deliberately engineered events derailed the investigations.

Certain police documents — including notes from their investigations — have not been disclosed. Pages from reports have mysteriously vanished. Police witnesses have offered conflicting accounts of key events. “This case has all the familiar hallmarks of a police cover-up,” says Mr. Ward, choosing his words carefully. “And I’m afraid the inquiry may be enabling it.”

Why, despite their strong suspicions, their corroborating information from tipsters, and their knowledge of Pickton’s violent history with prostitutes, did police wait years to stop the serial killer? Who knew what, and when did they know it? Mr. Ward doubts the inquiry will answer those questions, because they involve high-ranking police officers and others with too much to lose. [For example] why, in 1998, [was] a decision made by B.C.’s criminal justice branch to stay charges of attempted murder and unlawful confinement against Pickton, after his near-fatal stabbing of a Vancouver prostitute at his farm?

Pieces of the story emerged at Pickton’s marathon murder trial in 2007. He was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder.

From here. At the time, there was a strong impression, supported by Willy Pickton himself, that he accepted the role of fall guy in order to divert attention from other people involved in the bloody carnage, and in events that took place at the pig farm.

This sharp woman testified at the inquiry in January:

The investigation of serial killer Robert Pickton suffered from the same kind of systemic failures as the investigation of Ontario serial killer Paul Bernardo, the Missing Women inquiry was told Monday.

Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans, who was asked by the inquiry to provide an expert analysis of the Vancouver police and RCMP investigations of Pickton, said there was a systemic communication breakdown between Vancouver police and the Mounties.

From here and here:

In her report, Evans was critical of an interview of Pickton done on Jan. 19, 2000, by RCMP Constables Ruth Yurkiw and John Cater. [...]

During the interview, Pickton was asked about an informant's claim that Pickton was seen one night butchering a woman in a barn on his Port Coquitlam farm.

Pickton, claiming he had never hurt anyone, told the officers they could search his farm and even take soil samples to search for DNA.

"I ain't got nothing to hide," Pickton said at the time.

But the officers never took Pickton up on his offer.

In her report, Evans wrote: "The worst case scenario was that Pickton would refuse them entry; the best case scenario, we will never know."

And this week:

Wracked by personal grief and disillusioned by a loss of confidence in the VPD and RCMP, Vancouver police Det. Const. Lori Shenher broke down on the stand at the Missing Womens Commission of Inquiry on Tuesday.

Shenher’s two days of testimony painted a very grim picture of policing in the Lower Mainland, suggesting badly flawed efforts by the VPD and RCMP possibly allowed drug addicted sex workers to die needlessly. [...]

Shenher eventually got a handful more investigators. But two “interfered” with the effort because they were “racist, sexist and homophobic,” Shenher said.

Shenher admitted in cross-examination that tips and reports of missing women were likely lost because a VPD civilian member was “racist.”

She said she missed many investigative avenues and engagement with sources was “woefully inadequate” because she didn’t have the needed time or resources.

Shenher reluctantly acknowledged that she came to believe senior management did not expect her to be successful. She said she heard an allegation that Vancouver deputy police chief John Unger referred to the missing women as “just f-cking hookers,” in a meeting.

Most of the missing women were of mixed ancestry - Aboriginal, European, African, Asian.

Here's a personal account from a woman who experienced this toxic environment first-hand.

I was in Vancouver in the early 1990s, looking for work in the medical field for which I was trained. I had never been in Vancouver before. I got temporary work in the East End of Vancouver. It was like they had declared war on women, all women. I couldn't walk down the street without being sexually harassed and I was in my forties. On one occasion this man followed me onto a bus, saying he was going to follow me home. I asked the bus driver for help - he was brilliant in getting rid of this creep, much more than the police would have been, though I didn't realize that at the time. Looking back, it must have been in the mass murder period and every man in the place knew he could get away with virtually anything. I mentioned my problems at the clinic where I was working, but they were in denial in a major way. I was happy to leave Vancouver after three weeks and would never go back. I have lived in three cities, all larger than Vancouver, and have never experienced such harassment before. In fact, the largest city, London, England, was the safest.

And then, there's RCMP officer Catherine Galliford's perspective.

I believe Robert Pickton was the logistics guy, and that other people may also be criminally involved in violent activities including the femicides, that took place at his farm. How likely is it such facts will be disclosed to the inquiry?

Two important additions:

This website and a blogsite about the missing women.

Vancouver cops who acted with revolting impunity are named by witnesses at the inquiry, here.

A Few Good Women ...

When my daughter was 8 years old, she expressed a desire to work for the RCMP. Back then - and it wasn't that long ago, folks - some Canadians still took pride in our national police force. It was a collective romantic delusion.

Had she persevered in this interest, I would have supported my daughter's choice but I would have feared for her psychological and physical well-being. Even then, I knew that sexism was rampant in the RCMP, a systemic disease.

Flash forward a decade or two. Early this month, RCMP Corporal Catherine Galliford went public with her experience of the sexual harassment unofficially tolerated and sanctioned within the organization.

She has accused a supervisor of exposing himself to her, and says she suffered other unwanted sexual advances.

"I went to every boss I had at the time and I kept on saying, ‘Please don't make me work with these people.' And they didn't do anything," Galliford told CTV News.

She claims that several senior officers were responsible for the harassment.

On one occasion during the Pickton investigation, she says that a supervisor told her: "I have a fantasy about Willy Pickton escaping from jail and tracking you down and ripping your clothes off and stringing you from a meat hook and gutting you like a pig.'"

"My supervisors were laughing," she said.

The Mounties released a statement Tuesday saying that it could not comment on Galliford's allegations but that harassment "is not tolerated." [...]

According to police psychologist Mike Webster, however, complaints like Galliford's aren't that uncommon in the world of policing.
"This remains a man's world. It's very difficult for females to get by in that man's world," he said.

Galliford is scheduled to testify at the official inquiry into the Pickton investigation.

Galliford, 44, is slated to testify at the inquiry in January, but says she won’t be testifying for the RCMP, but rather on behalf of the victims.

In an interview, and in a 115-page statement given to the RCMP, Galliford said top Mounties had “enough evidence for a search warrant” of serial killer Robert Pickton’s farm in 1999. From 1999 to 2002 14 women were brutally murdered by Pickton, a fact that haunts Galliford.

She says she will testify that both RCMP and VPD officers, even after the Missing Women Task Force was formed in 2001, engaged in sexual liaisons and harassment, watched porn and left work early “to go drinking and partying.”

This is the work environment my daughter would have had to endure, had she signed up to become a RCMP officer.

Grand merci to Antonia Z.

That Tillman Thing.

Some facts, as reported here:

Court heard Tillman was supposed to be at a board meeting Aug. 6, 2008, but he was encouraged to go home by staff who thought he was "acting in an unusual manner."

Tillman joined the teen and his children at home. The girl bent over as she fed one of the kids, said Crown prosecutor Bill Burge. "When she stood up, the accused put his hands on her hips with his fingers in her belt loops and he pulled the rear end of the complainant into himself," said Burge. "While in that position there was physical contact that was clearly of a sexual nature. This occurred without the consent of the complainant and she told the accused, 'No."'

In my experience with legal issues regarding sexual assault, the significant element that would distinguish this action from something that could be dismissed as an unsollicited expression of affection is the position of the victim and the fact her assailant had an erection. That's likely why the police investigated, and charges were laid.

We don't know what other evidence the prosecutor would have presented at trial, because Tillman copped the plea (and a very good one, from his vantage point). He claimed he didn't want the girl to be subjected to the hardship of testifying and for his family to be exposed to the stress of constant media coverage.

Would his lawyer have tried to destroy the credibility of the complainant/victim, a common defense tactics with regard to sexual assault charges, to win his case? Perhaps merely floating that notion convinced the prosecutor that justice would not have been well served to let Tillman's lawyer use verbal and psychological assault on her in court. Particularly as one of the volatile elements of this case is that the complainant is a member of Regina's Aboriginal community, I've been told.

This case may be difficult to sort out for those who are not familiar with the horrendous history of patriarchal privilege that men of European ancestry have wielded against Aboriginal and Métis women and girls.

Those who get information beyond that published in media accounts of the Pickton trial, the murder of Aboriginal women in Winnipeg, and women who have disappeared along the "Highway of Tears" know that the judicial system is often weighed in favour of those charged with such crimes.

Tillman was treated with kid gloves. The drugs he took may have had the effect of reducing his inhibitions but they did not make him behave in a manner contrary to his impulses - or his values.

People convicted of sex offences are often required to submit a DNA sample to a national database. However, because Tillman's privacy and security concerns outweigh the public interest in having such a sample, there will be no such order, Hinds said.

Doesn't that seem like a good example of the privilege that being male and holding a powerful job with a football team will get you?

These are the faces of "honour" killings.

Anti-feminist rightwing religious zealots like "Debra Moore" are using the language of feminist activism to vent their xenophobic spleen.

"Women are being brutally murdered throughout the world in the name of Islam, and the mainstream media is totally silent. Someone needs to stand up for these women who are being executed by those whom they should be able to trust the most: their family members, through a crime known as an “honor killing”. And it is not unique to the Middle East; it is taking place in the West, including the United States.Where are the feminists? MIA once again. If there ever was an instance when feminists should speak up, this is clearly the case. But, it is not politically correct to insult Islam. The result is more and more women will die because no one is willing to confront this abominable practice."

From here. Moore is a self-styled fundamentalist christian crusader. She could be describing garden-variety 'domestic' femicide (except for the strident islamophobia), a form of violence against women and children that is tolerated in many cultures and countries. Until feminists in the 1970's started diligently and systematically dedicating themselves to the establishment of shelters and to reforming criminal laws, "family" violence was largely viewed as a private matter in North America. Even when women and children died. Even now, Antonia Zerbisias writes here:

Toronto author Brian Vallee points out in his 2007 book The War on Women, nobody counts the dead, nobody connects the dots, nobody calls out the problem. "Compare the raw numbers," he writes of the period 2000-06. "In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate."

These are horrific numbers; where is the rightwing christian fundamentalist outrage?

Dennis Gruending thoughtfully yet rigorously dissects a type of news reporting that’s little more than floridly opinionated and pretentious tabloid coverage. Respected for his well-researched and eminently knowledgeable writing on spiritual and political matters, Gruending observes:

The unfortunate truth is that men have used the power of religion for millennia to force women into submission. Some fathers of the Christian church, including Pope St. Gregory, Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, said women should be ashamed of themselves for merely being women, that they were slow, unstable, naïve and useful only for “animal sex and motherhood.”

Some will argue that Christian churches don’t hold those views today. I would respond that while most Christians do not view women as inferior, a fundamentalist minority continues to do so.

Has it finally occurred to you who the murdered/missing women in the photographs are? Those are the confirmed and presumed victims of Robert 'Willy' Pickton's religious mission. Those are "honour" killings, as defined by the terms of his christian upbringing. The defense argued that Pickton suffered from diminished intellectual capacity yet in his letters to a pen-pal, he clearly lays out the inspiration, the reasons behind his campaign to eliminate evil, as he understands the Bible to tell him so.

Two letters The Sun obtained ... may provide the public with the first real insight into what motivated the mass murderer. ... “I know I was brought into this world to be hear today to change this world of there evil ways. They even want to dis-re-guard the ten command-ments from the time that Moses in his day brought in power which still is in existence today,” wrote Pickton ...The letter was written Feb. 26, 2006, at the beginning of Pickton's voir dire, to California resident Thomas Loudamy who has a hobby of corresponding with prisoners and collecting their return letters. The second letter, written Aug. 22, 2006, is also replete with biblical references and Pickton provided his own interpretation of Ephesians 5:5. “You can be sure that no immoral, impure or greedy person will in-herit the kingdom of God .... Don't be fooled by whose who try to excuse these sins, for the terrible anger of God comes upon all those who disobey him,” Pickton wrote.

The Sun looked up Ephesians 5:5 in The Jerusalem Bible and found a chilling interpretation, given the fact Pickton has been convicted of killing sex-trade workers: “For you can be quite certain that nobody who actually indulges in fornication or impurity or promiscuity — which is worshiping a false god — can inherit anything of the kingdom of God.” ... In the religious portions, Pickton refers to himself as a “condemned man of no wrong doing” just like his “father.” Pickton also referred to Acts 14:22, which he interpreted as: “In each city they helped Christians to be strong and true to the faith. They told them that we must suffer many hard things to get into the holy nation of God.”

Altering a quote from Mark Steyn, plucking at one of the islamophobic chords in his MASSIVE repertoire: "Must be convenient to have a [biblical] code that obliges all your pathologies."

The photo montage came from Montréal Simon's blog, here.