What was his profile? “Sketchy.” “Quiet.” “Reclusive.” An “outcast,” who “rarely showed up for school.” “Students also say he didn’t have a large circle of friends.” He is “like something off the American television news.”

Like a tag cloud, these quotes from the corporate media float around a story that broke in early June. That’s when police arrested a Grade 12 Templeton Secondary School student in Vancouver, a major Canadian city on the west coast of British Columbia. A hasty press conference featured weapons seized from the student’s home – knives, a gun, ammunition – together with the announcement that he had a 117-name Facebook “hit list.”

***

The profile of this “potential Columbine-type” killer has become a matter of broad public debate. But almost on the same day, another news story about a BC “young offender” hit the front page. In May 2005, Willow Kinloch was arrested for public drunkenness in her home town of Victoria, another city close to Vancouver. She was eventually handcuffed and tethered to a padded cell and hogtied for four hours. She was 15.

Now 18, Kinloch has just been awarded $60,000. A public hearing will take place. Luckily, the police videotape of her assault was not erased. Why else would anyone have believed her?

I found myself in the unusual position of agreeing with the Victoria Times Colonist editorial that being “drunk in public [is] not the issue.” But let’s not forget that Willow is a young white woman. And so lurking in the background is a third form of profiling.

What about Stephanie Warren’s profile? Stephanie, as Rebel Youth blog reported in March, was arrested, assaulted with racial slurs and physical abuse, and thrown in jail overnight. She wasn’t drunk. She was just an aboriginal youth hanging around a donut shop in Winnipeg’s North End.

Or Filipino youth Charle Dalde, who was stabbed less than a year ago in an untargetted killing. Assuming Charle’s killing was gang related (a claim later proven false) Richmond RCMP handcuffed his parents and brother at gunpoint, searched their apartment and later denied the
family access to Charle in hospital, where he died.

“We see [this] as another case of racial profiling towards a family of colour” the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance said in a statement.

Similar incidents are perpetrated against youth of colour and Aboriginal youth across Canada on an almost daily basis. It’s not a question of provincial or city police vs. Royal Canadian Mounted
Police. It goes beyond the cops vs. “the civilians” (as if police were an army of occupation).

Even a casual survey of Canada from the increasing willingness of police to use armed force, to broad cultural symbols, to the security arrangements for the BC Olympics, and even Canada’s foreign policy, shows a fetish of violence, a quasi-militarization of society.

Glorified violence directly contradicts what students learn in school, yet it also surrounds youth. Which moral reality is correct?

Which brings us back to the first profile, the Templeton student. The initial wave of media on the “hit list” painted him as a loner. As more accurate reports emerged, it became clear that he actually had a definite social circle.

In a new book on the Columbine shootings, journalist David Cullen argues that murderers weren’t a “Trench Coat Mafia.” They were bright students who hated Marilyn Manson’s music and were actually far more accepted than many of their schoolmates, hanging out with a tight
circle of close friends and partying regularly on the weekend with a wider crowd.

They were also psychopathically fascinated with violence.

Call it a vicious circle. Not to say that the police were wrong to step in at Templeton (how the police use of media theatrics helped isn’t clear, other than justifying their own existence). But are these social stereotypes valid, or just another in a host of devices or mirages that cultivate fear and erode social solidarity of the people against the forces that create oppression and injustice?

Beware bands of teenagers, Goth kids, aboriginal youth, or youth of colour – they must be a gang. They’re not one of us.

US Fox News is but the crassest expression of this kind of fear-mongering which fuels the fires of the right. On our side of that debate, progressive-minded youth must keep pointing to the political and social roots of violence. Nobody is born criminal, and youth must not be profiled into the “other.”

We are all human beings created by society with all its complex processes, contradictions and struggles.

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