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Questioning the ritual
Why are police funerals so off-putting?
Before I try to answer the question, let me say that, like thousands of other Torontonians, I felt deeply saddened by the senseless death of Sgt. Ryan Russell, who was, by all accounts, a fine officer, a devoted father and husband, and an exemplary member of his community. His wife and child now find themselves in a terrible situation, and the city, as a whole, has been diminished by this tragedy.
It’s also true that for all cops, such incidents are surely traumatic. I have an old and dear friend who has served with the Toronto force for 20 years, and I always think about how this sort of violence affects him, professionally and emotionally. Of course, Sgt. Russell’s colleagues, as well as ordinary citizens, want to pay their respects and acknowledge the extraordinarily steep price he and his family paid.
At the same time, I do not understand why the police as an organization (and certainly not just in Toronto) insist on transforming a deeply human tragedy into a show of force and a media circus.
There’s a certain irony here. I feel the Sgt. Russell we came to know as an individual in the past few days has been subsumed by a brand of militaristic ritual that serves to reinforce the otherness of the police as a social institution.
And maybe that’s appropriate: when I sit down at my computer in the morning to begin working, I am reasonably certain I will be in tact when I get up in the afternoon. Cops, on the other hand, do risk their lives on our collective behalf, and so when one of those lives is lost to violence, we should honour them in a different way, or so the logic goes.
Yet the traditions of police funerals, for me, evoke images that have nothing to do with mourning and the genuine connections between people that such tragedies engender. These events, rather, are filled with profoundly complicated visual symbols — of invasion, of force, and of a conspicuously defensive sort of esprit de corps. Indeed, in the wake of last summer’s G20 riots, how should those Torontonians who were appalled by the actions of the police react to the sight of thousands of uniformed officers again clustered in the downtown core?
What’s more, the sheer elaborateness of police funerals serves (perhaps unwittingly) to minimize the sacrifices made by hundreds of other individuals who lose their lives while doing sometimes-risky jobs, among them the garbage collector crushed by his truck last summer in Vaughan. Do those lives count for less?
The point is precisely that we shouldn’t be called upon to make such comparisons, but rather to mark all these losses in the appropriate way. An obvious example: the way we’ve come to mourn Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The ceremonies manage to be both heartfelt and organic (ordinary people watching the hearses drive solemnly along the 401 from CFB Trenton) and traditional yet restrained (military funerals). The Canadian Forces don’t take over downtown Ottawa every time a man or woman in uniform dies in combat. Yet we, as a society, still manage to signal our respect for their sacrifice and express our condolences.
From where I sit (risking nothing but negative comments on the string below), perhaps the less-is-more principle should prevail the next time we must come together as a city, filled with regret, to bury a cop.
http://spacingtoronto.ca/2011/01/20...ing-the-ritual/
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