Last Wednesday, Toronto City Councillor Rob Ford was arrested at his home and charged with uttering death threats and assault against his wife. Ford was led away from his house in handcuffs, taken to a police station, processed and released.
It was later revealed that Ford had called the police the day before. When officers came to the Ford residence they advised him to leave the home AND to take his two children with him, which he did. He was arrested the following day when he returned to pick up some clothes. Awaiting a court date, the councilor and alleged abuser still has custody of his two kids.
During the last 12 years, there has been a zero tolerance policy regarding domestic incidents that may or may not involve criminal acts. Unlike most other incidents that are reported to the police, officers have no discretion not to lay charges no matter how weak the evidence, if any, happens to be. The purported reason for this zero tolerance is so that women who make complaints of domestic abuse can no longer refuse to cooperate because of either a change of heart or pressure from their abuser. That in itself makes no sense. Police could still exercise their discretion when to lay charges without going back to the previous procedure where the alleged victim could decide when a prosecution was to end.
Low level domestic matters; the ones where charges are only laid because of the zero tolerance policy rarely make the news. They are simply not newsworthy enough in a business whose motto is “if it bleeds, it leads”. What makes this situation unique is not the charges or the alleged actions of the parties but who the accused is. Not only is Rob Ford a member of Toronto City Council but he’s a maverick councilor (maverick, noun. not a Marxist-Leninist tree hugging, union loving socialist). The good thing about this situation is that as the matter winds its way through the judicial system, the public will have a greater appreciation of how this “zero tolerance” policy actually works.
What is truly bizarre in this particular matter is that while the police initially told the alleged abuser (the man) to leave the home, they also advised him to take his children with him. Notwithstanding that Ford is an alleged criminal and his wife is the alleged victim of criminal acts, he had and still has custody of the couple’s children. The alleged perpetrator (the man) is almost always told to leave the matrimonial home while the alleged victim gets to remain in the home with the kids . In this case, not only do the children have to go through the separation of their parents, but they are uprooted from their home. While the allegations are that Rob Ford committed acts of violence, no one seems concerned that he is now the prime caregiver to his children. If having the children remain with the father was the correct decision and there is nothing to suggest that it wasn’t, the zero tolerance policy should be done away with on this ground alone.
The policy of zero tolerance in domestic situations is nothing more than a bow to the gods of political correctness so loved by the feminists and their supporters. There is no reason why the police, who are given and use discretion in most other matters that they become involved in, can’t use their discretion in domestic situations to prevent the absurdity of what happened in this case – the “abuser” ending up with the custody of two small children. What will not be surprising is that those who generally are opposed to zero tolerance policies, such zero tolerance for violence in schools, will fight to the death to preserve zero tolerance in domestic assault situations. We need to replace zero tolerance and political correctness with common sense that includes police and prosecutorial discretion.
It will be some time before we learn more facts about what transpired in the Ford home last week and in all probability we will never know exactly what happened. While obviously important to Rob Ford, what actually did or did not happen should not really matter to the rest of us. The fact that Ford was criminally charged while allowed to have custody of his two kids is enough for us to question why we have a zero tolerance policy. We need to know how many anonymous Rob Ford’s are out there and whether or not this policy actually does anything to protect real “victims” of domestic abuse and their children. Or is it all just political correctness run amok?
