A rchive Date
[ 30-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Texas guru made Bromell a tough guy
By MICHELE MANDEL
Toronto Sun
January 30, 2000 Down in deepest Texas, where they like their armadillos and their killers fried, lives the simultaneously charming and frightening guru of embattled Toronto Police union boss Craig Bromell.
In his languorous drawl, Ron DeLord confirms that the Toronto Police Association has indeed hired investigators to dig up dirt on its enemies.
He knows, because he taught them how.
"He's not doing it through the (police) department, is he?" DeLord says in Bromell's defence. "That's why he hired private investigators so that nobody used their police power or authority or police computers to look any of that information up. ... They wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety. So everybody is mad that they did it, but would you have been more mad if Craig had said 'I'm riding around in my car and I've been following these people to see if they have a girlfriend?' He didn't do that. He did what they should have done, which is, you use an attorney or you hire an agent or you hire someone to do it."
DeLord, director of the Police Labor Institute and president of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, just doesn't understand why we Canadians have problems with the police union spying on its enemies.
That's part of the curriculum he taught Bromell and other members of the TPA when they attended his PLI seminar on "Power, Politics, and Confrontation" a few years ago. DeLord's twice-annual course, attended by more than 300 police associations in the United States and Canada, promises to teach the art of "taking out a political enemy in a campaign" and warns that "due to the sensitive nature of program materials, PLI does not allow attendance of any city council members ... management labour relations specialists, police chiefs, sheriffs, or officials acting on behalf of these persons."
"I try to teach people how to play a game that we did not invent," insists DeLord, who admits he's been called abrasive, just like his Toronto pupil. "We do not teach anyone anything that exceeds the law."
But those tactics don't have to be illegal to be distasteful.
Bromell seems to have closely followed his mentor's strategy. Though he's been furiously backtracking this week, Bromell boasted on the CBC's fifth estate that he had private investigators working to "target our enemies" and that he had on file "some pretty nasty stuff."
He may be thousands of miles away in a small town called Georgetown, Tex., but DeLord is well aware of the controversy engulfing his student. He's spoken to Bromell and has been faxed a sampling of the Toronto media's unanimous condemnation of the TPA's new, political aggressiveness.
He guffaws at the Toronto councillors, like Anne Johnston, who have said they feel intimidated by the union. "What is she intimidated about, that she won't get their money, that she won't get their support? That they may tell people to vote against her? Well, she's a big girl, isn't she? She didn't have to go into political office. That's just silliness.
"What people are afraid of is that they have awakened a sleeping giant that is the police union," says DeLord, a 31-year veteran of police unionism. "A new 800-pound gorilla has entered the game and everybody is afraid."
Because that gorilla has both money and, perhaps until recently, enormous amounts of public good will and respect.
To DeLord, the controversy around the True Blue campaign, with concerns about a so-called protection racket, is a red herring. The real opposition, he believes, stems from fears of the political war chest that is being filled by the True Blue campaign. That and Bromell's perceived "haughty, arrogant" personality.
"It's more about a dislike of Craig because those methods being used -- you use them and you just call it investigative reporting. Political opponents use it and they call it opposition research, don't they? So when the police look at public information about someone in office to expose them because they don't like them, it's no different than what you did or the opponent did," DeLord argues.
"What you're trying to do is gag someone you don't like and a lot of people in the media they don't like Craig and because of his size and aggressiveness he causes everyone to get wound up. People are forgetting that what he's doing is (sic) things that are protected in a free society. I don't understand what everybody is all up in arms about."
He assumes, wrongly I believe, that fundamentally we are no different than the Americans. We still do not play dirty politics to the extent that it is played in the U.S. And we certainly do not want our police stooping to that level.
This is how it's done in Texas: DeLord's union snooped around a candidate running on a religious right-wing platform and discovered he was soliciting prostitutes. "We gave that to the media and held a press conference," he says proudly. "We have a right to tell people that ... We've exposed people out there who take their government cellular phones and are calling '976' numbers on it. We have a right."
The TPA is just doing what anyone else can do, he says. That it may appear unethical or immoral from a body we expect to uphold a higher standard seems not to matter at all. Not when there's power to be won.
In his book, Police Association Power, Politics and Confrontation, DeLord writes: "The fact is that police associations should exist for one, and only one purpose -- the accumulation and use of power."
Political endorsements secure access and power. Taking a page from DeLord's book, the traditionally neutral TPA threw its muscle for the first time behind the Mike Harris Tories during the last provincial election. Thus far, the Tories have been strangely silent on the entire issue of police union activism.
DeLord believes Bromell will defy any orders to end the TPA's fundraising drive because this is a revolution he is leading for the future. "If you're going to make change, if you're going to move a huge organization, and actually he's moving the whole country, on this issue, you'll break a few eggs to make an omelette. He's decided that they're going to get them out front on endorsing candidates and being active on political issues to a degree that has not been done in the past. No matter how he had done it, the media and the politicians would not have been happy.
"Though I guess he could have put a little more sugar on it."
Even if charges are laid against Bromell tomorrow under the Police Act, the genie is out of the bottle. "It will not go back to the way it was. It just won't. You can quiet him. You can pass some laws but you're just fighting against the tide.
"He will be proven right in the long run and the system will change in Canada. I can guarantee it."
Hopefully, the genial Texan is mistaken. True, we import much from the U.S. We are fond of their retail giants, their movie stars, even their Texas chili.
Surely their slimy power politics, though, should be arrested at the border.
Michele can be reached by e-mail at mmandel@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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