The Witch Hunt

Starting in 2013 with the justified shooting of Trayvon Martin by private citizen George Zimmerman, police forces in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe have been bedeviled by various anti-police movements, started by self-proclaimed “trained Marxists” Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza. Aided and abetted by increasingly unprofessional and left-leaning mainstream and social media, this has led to calls to “defund the police”, and the victimization of many individual police officers, most of whom were exonerated of any wrongdoing but still found “guilty” in the court of public opinion.

I would like to say this is unprecedented, but it’s not. In 2000, the reputation of the police department of Saskatoon, a city of 225,000 in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, was tarnished forever. Two police officers were sent to prison for a well-meaning humanitarian gesture – giving a heavily intoxicated man a ride home on a freezing cold night – because they failed to arrest him, and two others were condemned as racist murderers and fired, based on nothing more than the ten-year old recovered memory of a violent career criminal with a history of lying to the police, even though they were never charged, never tried, and never allowed the opportunity to defend themselves in court. 

Some might ask why police officers outside Canada should be concerned with something that happened 20 years ago in a city in Western Canada. My answer is that it doesn’t make much difference whose end of the boat the leak is in, we all have a vested interest in patching it. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” 

The techniques used to destroy the reputation of the Saskatoon Police Services, and to destroy the lives of Constables Larry Hartwig, Brad Senger, Ken Munson, and Dan Hatchen are the same techniques later used by Black Lives Matter to discredit Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, Tulsa police officer Betty Jo Shelby, and numerous others.

Former constable Larry Hartwig has been campaigning to clear his name, and the names of his department and fellow officers, for almost two decades. All attempts to obtain redress through the Canadian justice system have been stymied by political interference and biased media that have been shown to repress or suppress evidence that discredits the “racist police” narrative. 

Activists, the mainstream media, and social media sites still state, as if it were a proven fact, that the Saskatoon Police Service (SPS) conducted so-called “starlight tours”, in which the police supposedly picked up young indigenous men, drove them to remote unpopulated areas, and abandoned them in freezing temperatures, with death from hypothermia a common result. Wikipedia, disregarding the fact that such allegations have never been proven, or even presented in a court of law, continues to state this as proven fact. When Larry Hartwig’s supporters have edited the pages to correct misinformation, the changes are always reverted and the false narrative reinstated, usually within hours, by Wikipedia administrators.

Larry Hartwig and his supporters are proposing to sue Wikipedia for libel, on the grounds that their editors have knowingly published false and defamatory information about former constables Hartwig, Senger, Munson, and Hatchen, and about the Saskatoon Police Service.

To this end, we would like to find a lawyer that is willing to provide initial pro bono advice on the feasibility of this idea and how to proceed with it, and an estimate of the funds needed to conduct such a suit. We are also looking at a crowdfunding campaign, aimed at police and police sympathizers who agree that it is in all our interests, as a civilized society, to push back against those who defame and vilify the police. We welcome any input from all sympathetic readers.

For more information about the travesty of justice that occurred in mid-Western Canada in 2000, continue reading here.