By Mike Archer. Another Darryl Plecas story … another asinine police survey. This week novice BC Liberal candidate and RCMP Chair of Criminology Darryl Plecas presented the results of a survey showing 97 percent of respondents feel safe in their homes.
To top it off – 95 percent of respondents are pleased with the Abbotsford Police Department (APD) – (The other five percent must be the homeless who keep having their homes and stuff taken away).
Does this mean we can now cut back on the roughly 49 percent of our municipal taxes which go to the Abbotsford Police Department (APD)?
Clearly no one wants to step forward and make that argument. So why is the APD spending your money to have the police-funded RCMP Chair of Criminology at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) tell you that you are extremely happy with their performance?
And why is a guy who wants to defeat independent MLA John van Dongen after an undemocratic internal party coup orchestrated by Mike de Jong and Rich Coleman, getting such big play in the chain-owned media for such a childishly transparent and meaningless survey?
If the City of Abbotsford is going to continue subsidizing the Calgary Flames shareholders and local owners like hotelier Lane Sweeting, and wealthy business people like Fred Strumpski and Barry Marsden, then surely we can cut back on the police budget in order to balance the books and keep these guys from losing money.
After all, if Plecas is right, 97 percent of respondents feel safe in their homes.
I know people in the power structure think I’m mean and more than a little over the top in my criticism of them (especially when I dare to make fun of Patty Ross) … but come on.
If this community is ever going to grow up and learn how to function like a real city, it is going to have to learn to look itself in the mirror and be honest with itself.
This kind of drivel isn’t helping us.
We could start by looking at the pretense of calling UFV a university while allowing pseudo-academics like Darryl Plecas to get away with advising municipalities to break the law, invade people’s homes without warrants, accept money from the RCMP while publishing surveys on how people feel about the people paying him to ask.
This is a serious issue that can affect the growth of our city. Universities which do not take care to ensure their academic standards are high enough to attract the right professors and students do nothing to contribute to the healthy growth of the community. Just calling a bunch of buildings a university may work in the promotion brochures the Economic Development Department hands out, but it won’t keep people here once they discover it was all marketing-speak with no substance.
UFV will never be taken seriously as an institution of higher learning, and our children’s degrees will not be worth much, as long this kind of self-serving pseudo-academic claptrap, paid for by the police with our money, is allowed to be passed off as some sort of academic work.
Until we decide, as a community, that we are going to insist on eliminating things like Plecas’ police-funded research from our public discourse, or at the very least understanding them for what they are, we will not be able to move beyond the dysfunctional state in which we find ourselves.
Until the chain-owned newspapers decide to question the information they publish based on whether it contributes or detracts from the public discourse, citizens will continue to have to look elsewhere to find out what is going on.
If you want to read about a survey the newspapers barely covered which has something important to tell the citizens of Abbotsford – and which they didn’t have to pay for – have a look at Sheryl Guthrie’s Mayor and Council Performance Review.
It’s well worth the read.
Eric van Steenis Says:
There is a large divide between feeling safe, and actually being safe. All we need to do is ask the Abbotsford girl raped in the downtown core 3 weeks ago. I am sure she felt safe right up until the moment she was grabbed.
“Safe” is what the criminals and our so-called justice system want us to “feel”, so that we continue to be easy pickings for crime, and fleecing of our tax dollars, respectively.
Sincerely,