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The gender of the officers
standing around me on that parade square at the BC Police Academy on 25 July,
1977, reminded me that I was joining a brotherhood of law enforcement officers. At the time that I was sworn in the entire
Vancouver Police Department had only 3 female officers, all white. The
majority of the officers that I worked with in the beginning of my police
career were white and at least nominally Christian. The Vancouver PD had one
Japanese officer and one Black officer at that time. Over the years this imbalance
has gradually shifted. As of 1999 the Vancouver Police Department had 178
female officers, or 16.1% of the total force. 40.1% of the persons hired by
the Vancouver PD between 1997 and 1999 were women. Statistics Canada has announced
that as of June 2001, women accounted for 15% of all police officers in
Canada, an increase of 8% from the previous year. As of 1999 the Vancouver PD
had 106 officers of visible minorities (9.6%). By the time that I retired
from VPD they had a number of openly gay officers, as well as an officer who
had undergone a sex change. At Royal Roads Military
College I mostly found myself amongst people of my own generation. It wasn’t
until after I had left the precincts of the police academy that I was to come
to the realization that I had joined a multi generational police community.
The consequence of this, as I was soon to discover, was that educating my
peers about my beliefs resulted in varying levels of acceptance. Older
generations had quite different levels of education, experience and tolerance
than more recent additions to the ranks like me. Generally, I found that the
officers of this older generation were far less tolerant of alternative
religious beliefs. There were, of course, individual exceptions to this
generalization. Acceptance of me and my
Wiccan beliefs improved over time somewhat. As time went on my fellow patrol
officers got used to me. They came to see that I was not a threat. This,
combined with the retirement of an older generation of less tolerant, more
“conservative” officers, made my life progressively easier. Yet in the
beginning I had no idea whether these things would work out. I only knew that
it was probably going to be harder than I had imagined. Wiccans don’t proselytize. We
don’t believe that our religion is the one true one. I believe that there are lots of
possibilities out there and they all lead to the same place. Yet I found that
I had to spend a lot of my time educating people about my beliefs. Partly
this has been because, to this day, people are constantly stopping me to ask
me to explain my differences. I wrote my first book, The Law Enforcement Guide to Wicca, partly in self defense. I was
bombarded with so many questions that I was having trouble finding the time
to get other things done. Instead of getting into lengthy conversations, I
handed out copies of the Law Enforcement Guide to
Wicca. The first two editions of the Law Enforcement Guide to Wicca were a self published 44 page booklet. By the time that it had revised
as the third edition, the Law Enforcement Guide to
Wicca had expanded to 129 pages in order to address all of
the issues that people typically brought up. Religions like Christianity
are “revealed” religions. One way or another some prophet received what he
(rarely she) perceived to be the “word of God” and wrote it down. This word
got passed around and eventually some people started squabbling about who had
the correct interpretation of these words.
Using the Christian example again, we find that there are hundreds of
different translations of the Bible in circulation. For each of these
translations there is a church with professional clergy ready to interpret
their Bible for lay followers. This is what congregational religion is all
about. Divinity is approached through intermediaries. Worship is directed. In
some cases, the followers of such systems are not encouraged to think for
themselves. The clergy will tell the followers what to do. The concept of the revealed
word is a comfortable notion for many cops, since the idea of laws (lists of
rules) fits in rather nicely with commandments (more lists of rules). You
simply follow the rules that someone else has compiled for you. Cops chase around
after people who break the rules. Lawyers find ways to interpret the rules to
get those who break the rules out of jail. When you feel bad about bending
the rules, you go to church and apologize to the Big Guy before going out and
breaking or bending them again. Many people in Western society assume that
all religions are like that. Then they encounter me. One of the things that many
of my associates had to come to terms with was the idea that Wiccans don’t
have any scripture. Wiccans strive to find wisdom in themselves, not in the
pages of somebody else’s journal of divine experience. The foundation of our
spirituality isn’t a lengthy list of rules. It is a single concept called the
Wiccan Rede: “Do whatever you will so long as it does not harm
another.” The Wiccan Rede urges us to be all that we can be while, at the same
time, taking responsibility for our actions.
The Christian approach can be summed up by the words “thou shalt not.” The Wiccan approach is “I will not.” The Rede urges us to think for ourselves.
It compels us to own our actions. We
Wiccans do have a journal in which we record our rituals rites, cures and
magic, a ‘Book of Shadows.’ The term was first used by the founder of modern
Wicca, Gerald Gardner, who applied it to the journal of ritual and magic of
his coven. Since the contents of a Book of Shadows will vary from tradition
to tradition and from Wiccan to Wiccan, they aren’t considered to be
scripture. It was in the law courts that I experienced some of the first examples of
how I baffled people with my lack of scripture. In North American courts,
most people take an oath on the Bible prior to giving testimony. This doesn’t
necessarily mean that the person taking the oath is a practicing Christian. I
know plenty of police officers who have never gone to church that take an
oath on the Bible in court. For the first few years that I was a police
officer I did so myself, as I was unfamiliar with the alternatives. It is an
old social custom. |
The Fool: pg 2
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Dispatches:
Volume 2 No. 1 Imbolc/Feile
Bhride/Brigid//Barri/Iddis-Thing 2007 |