i have to point something out about my brief, and hopefully final, experience in the criminal justice system.

i was arrested by male officers. but, the officers i dealt with in the cell were all female - perhaps by intent. i mean, i would have expected to go to a female prison, and they seemed to realize how i ought to be identifying, as well. so, female cops with female-identifying inmates is probably not an accident. after i left the cell, though, these reasons are less compelling.

i dealt with three duty counsels, and they were all female. i dealt with three justices of the peace, and they were all female, too. all of the court staff were female. the staff in the attorney general's office were female. the crown prosecutors were primarily female. and, even most of the lawyers were female, as well. it was frequently the case that the only men in the court room were accused people.

now, i don't know why that is, exactly - and i'm not pointing this out to present an argument against it. my individual experiences do not a systematic analysis make; it could have been a huge coincidence. i'm just pointing out my observations of the situation.

i'll budget it as costs, for now. i should get it recouped one way or another. i'll just have to wait a month to buy the shelves, which is fine - i'd rather be rebuilding right now, anyways.

and, when i sit down to do that in the next few days, i won't have an artificial boundary i have to work around any more, either. i can sleep during the day, again - and stay up over night when the rates are cheaper.

speaking of which, there's a weird spike last night around 11:00 that i can't make sense of. i was asleep. the only possibility is that the freezer flung open, and it was in fact loose when i woke up :\. it's not a lot, it's just inexplicable.

i should hopefully get the electronic document first, and print off parts for the fingerprint destruction request. what's a few days, right? everything - in theory. but, i think it's worth waiting it out to make the point.

so, it turns out that my bail hearing is roughly 35 pages. that's expensive.

but, it's what? 2-3 minutes per page? that's at least an hour.

i was only there for around 10 minutes - indicating that a very lengthy process took place without me.

i didn't want to pay $150 for this. really. but, now i feel like i kind of need to know.

hrmmn.

yeah.

*sigh*.

it's funny, though.

that's what they told me, when i came in, and requested an immediate file destruction.

you should obtain counsel.

right.

i think i did pretty well, thanks.

but, should i wait for the bail hearing transcript?

that's the closest thing i have to a judge ripping this down. & it's coming, anyways. hrmmmn.

if i mail it today, it won't go out until tomorrow, now, anyways.

yeah.

let's see if i can get an answer, at least.

so, i have to send a letter to the windsor police.

ok.

====

Fee Waiver and Expedition Request

I am requesting a file destruction on prints that should not have happened, and I’m going to explain why. While I’m not a member of the bar, I do have a legal background, and this should be interpreted as a letter from a lawyer. If the officer had listened to me in the first place, none of this would have happened.

A part of me wishes that I would have gone to trial so that I could attach a scathing denouncement of the situation by a judge. As it is, I have to point this out - the evidence in the case was never presented to a judge for analysis. How can I be in a situation where I have prints on file that are going to affect my border travel, when the issue was never put before a judge? That is preposterous. & yet, this is the reality I am faced with, due to the actions of a rogue officer.

On Sept 12th, 2018, an officer that I had had previous negative encounters with appeared at my door and asked me to stop applying to an advertisement for an apartment, under threat of being charged with harassment. Now, harassment in canada is very explicit - it specifically refers to threatening behaviour that causes a victim to fear for their safety, and does not apply to behaviour that is merely annoying. Fully aware that my behaviour would simply not qualify as harassment in a canadian legal context (and that attempts to define behaviour that is similar to mine as harassment have been declared unconstitutional by the united states supreme court), I asked the officer to define the term ‘harassment’ under the law. He told me that harassment was behaviour that is repeatedly annoying - and that is wrong. I told him that was incorrect, and invited him to write a report, fully aware that, under canadian law, an officer is required to obtain a warrant to make a charge on a hybrid offence, and that an arrest should not happen, even if charges are filed. I expected that the officer would fail to obtain a warrant, because a judge would understand what harassment is.

Unfortunately, the officer came back ten days later and arrested me without a warrant. I was then held without cause and fingerprinted while in custody, aware that struggling or refusing would be futile, and perhaps harmful. I think the most cursory observation of the evidence suggests that I was illegally detained, and because I was illegally detained I was also illegally printed. I will be dealing with this in the upcoming months.

After seven weeks of obfuscation by the crown, the charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence - no reasonable chance of conviction. Great. Yet, I could have told you that in the first place - and a judge would have certainly stated as much, had the officer sought a warrant, as he is required to under the law.

It is one thing to have the officer(s) make an honest mistake and for an acquitted person to request a destruction after vindication through trial. It is another thing altogether for a person’s constitutional rights to be completely trampled over, and end up printed in a case that no judge would have ever issued a warrant for, and that ends up withdrawn over a lack of evidence. Had the officer sought a warrant, as he was required to, it would have been denied and the prints would have never been taken.

As mentioned, I will be pursuing this assault on my constitutional rights to various ends.

In the mean time, I have had my access to detroit severely restricted by these prints, which should have clearly never been taken. I am a disabled person on a fixed income. Why should I pay for the officer’s error? And why should I be subject to any waiting period at all? Have I not already (unjustly) suffered enough due to the officer’s incompetence, or malice?

Please note that I will also be applying to renew my nexus card in the new year - that I have expedited border clearance as a consequence of my flawless record. Why should I lose that over withdrawn charges that should have never been filed?

I am consequently requesting an immediate destruction, as well as a fee waiver on it.

While I am willing to accept an apology, what I want is immediate action; I would like to be able to get to detroit for new year’s eve at the latest, please. My life has already been disrupted enough, as it is.

the chatham office sent an email to the windsor office last night indicating that they acknowledge that they can't proceed without the "emails". they couldn't get this from the complainant. so the charges are now dropped.

it's a mixed outcome, as i have none of the disclosure i wanted and will need to file a series of foias to get it. and, trust me - i'm just getting started with this.

my immediate concern is in getting the prints destroyed. there is an ongoing investigation related to the officer. i have a bail hearing transcript coming for the discrimination suit. and, i'll need to evaluate the kind of evidence i need for the civil suit.

do i want to do this one thing at a time? well, the outcome of all of these things leads to the civil case, which might be better left put off for a bit.

and i need to call my grandmother tonight, too.

to be clear, this is the order of precedence in reliability of information:

1) grandmother - not a stranger.
2) step-mother - not a stranger, but do not get along.
3) mother - stranger.
4) sister - stranger.

for the record.

i have not had more than a handful of conversations with my mother about anything at all in roughly 15 years, and if you take out a brief period of six months when i did stay with her, i hadn't spoken to her for the ten years previously, either. i'm nearly 38 years old, and i haven't had a meaningful conversation with my mother since i was about 12 or 13.

while i was close to my father until his death in 2013, and actually have a better relationship with my maternal grandmother than i do with my mother, i haven't had a meaningful conversation with my younger sister in that time frame, either - and have really not spoken to her at all since my father's death.

what i'm trying to get across is that, while these people are technically my family, they are in every meaningful sense actually factually strangers. they don't know anything about me at all, and cannot be relied upon to provide the slightest bit of insight about me.

in the absence of any evidence, my mother no doubt interprets me through the filter of my father, which she interpreted through the filter of her own father. it is not possible for this process to lead to anything besides a fantastical projection, which, in the presence of her myriad mental health problems, can only produce a schizophrenic fantasy. the fact is that she would be unable to identify my thoughts or viewpoints from that of a complete stranger - because i am, in truth, a complete stranger, to her. she is not a reliable source of information.

my step-mother and i did not get along well, but at least she is not a stranger. yet, i would not present her as a reliable source of information, either.

if you must, please ignore my mother and especially ignore my sister and consult my grandmother or even my step-mother, instead.

but, listen - i don't want to come down too hard around the question of potential prostitution. remember: i'm on the left. and, it's a classical marxist argument that all sexual relations in a capitalist society are necessarily prostitution. i've been over this before: once you reduce the actual issue to the question of prostitution, the next question to ask is whether or not that's worth prosecuting anybody over, and i'm not likely to agree that it is so long as consent is easily established, which it usually is.

the court isn't likely to accept the argument, granted. but, this classical marxist perspective actually pushes the idea rather forcefully that consent is incompatible with capitalism. but, then, what you need to do is look beyond the person soliciting; taking this perspective doesn't indict all men on solicitation charges, or all women on prostitution charges, so much as it indicts the system for making any relationship between the sexes (and much intrasex relations, as well) reducible to a financial transaction. it follows that if you want to establish ideas like love and consent - real consent - then you need to do away with capitalism altogether. for all the pablum that hallmark wants to push, the marxist view is that love and capitalism are in contradiction with each other.

so, the cynic on the left is actually likely to shrug it off - well, you wanted capitalism, didn't you? then, this is what you'll have. no policing can change the capitalist relation, power must be redistributed. and, if you flip the gender, you just change who is holding the whip - preferable to the capitalist female perhaps, but not a real answer, on the left.

the ck example at least could have been workplace harassment, but let's look at what would have been harassment, and what actually happened (as far as i've read).

suppose your boss calls you up and asks if he can jerk off when you're on the phone. you say no. then, you get fired or demoted the next day. ok - this is a scenario that would have been wrong, and the correct thing to do is sue.

and, suppose your boss calls you over and over again and asks to jerk off when you're on the phone, even though you've said no. well, that's certainly harassment, even if you get promoted the next day.

but, if you say no and nothing happens - or you maybe even get promoted - then i don't think there's anything wrong with that. that would neither be morally wrong, nor would it be against the law, in my estimation. a very strict workplace may interpret it as a problem, but it would probably be the boss that gets to sue for wrongful termination, in such a scenario. if i were the judge, i would consider that wrongful dismissal.

further, if the boss asks and you say yes then that's not anything more or less than a consensual encounter. so, this idea that you were forced into it by some kind of imagined system of hierarchy or something is not an argument for anything except schizophrenia. the hierarchy is an abstraction, useful for certain arguments on the left, but it is not a concrete thing that actually exists, and it cannot be referenced as an actual entity in a legal context. that is an argument from conspiracy; it's like blaming aliens, or the illuminati. perhaps the consent was attached to an assumption of favouritism, but insofar as that is true, it's a type of prostitution, and the wrongdoing would fall upon the person consenting under questionable premises. and, in situations where people are promoted in exchange for sexual favours - which i believe was the case in the weinstein fiasco - the correct charges are related to solicitation, because that's what is actually happening.

but, to have a consensual encounter and then decide afterwards that it didn't have the intended outcome is not a coherent accusation of harassment under any existing concept of the law. and, it follows that i don't actually think that louis ck is guilty of anything at all - except, perhaps, behaving in poor taste.

so, why are all of these men just stepping aside and letting themselves by destroyed by ridiculous charges? franken is the worst example - he didn't do anything wrong. so, he should have pushed back. hard. and, you'll notice that the media narrative around the ck issue (and, i don't know anything about louis ck, nor do i think i'd find him very funny, based on what little i know about him) has shifted from "consensual" to "non-consensual" masturbation, due to some kind of neo-hobbesian, post-modernist claptrap about being unable to consent in the existence of a hierarchy, which is essentially an argument for slavery.

"i was just following orders, sir.".

the reason they're just rolling over is that they're sexists. they may not have done anything wrong, but they don't want to fight against the girls - because they're men, and men don't do that.

i'm neither a man nor a sexist, so i don't have any problems hitting back at a girl, when attacked - although that has nothing to do with my situation. i'm being charged by a faceless corporation, which i communicated with solely through an employee named "ryan". and, i'm being accused of repeated communication for the purposes of filling out a rental application. nonetheless, understand this - gender equality means that a man has the obligation to retaliate when attacked by a female. if you're just going to rollover and take it, you're just a stupid sexist idiot and you deserve what you get.

but, that is the change that needs to be asserted - men need to get used to the fact that women are going to fight them now, and they're going to have to defend themselves, when they do. that's equality.