Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. My name is Laurie Long, and this is my daughter Jordan. We are from Penhold, Alberta.
Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:30 p.m., Jordan went to gas up her truck and get some juice for a sore throat. She had been feeling unwell all day but had determined she was not going to miss school the next day. She was 16 years old. She had been driving for about three months and enjoying some of the freedoms that go along with that milestone in life.
That night was the start of a horrendous ordeal for her and our family. She was observed at the gas station by a man who followed her back to our home and, while dressed as an RCMP member, forced her out of her vehicle and into his at gunpoint. He covered her eyes with blacked out ski goggles, cut her face with a knife while shouting, “You're under arrest. You're under arrest”, and ultimately bound her and put her in the trunk of his car and drove her about 30 kilometres away on a -32° Celsius night.
He approached her in our backyard not 25 feet from my bedroom window where I was. She was bound, blindfolded, and assaulted multiple times. She was missing for about 47 hours. It was terrifying, a parent's worst nightmare, certainly a young woman's worst nightmare.
On Saturday, February 28 at about 8:45 p.m. we received a call from a payphone to our home. Hoping against hope it was Jordan, my husband answered. It was Jordan. While he tried to figure out where she was, he told her to stay there and that the police were coming. What she replied stunned us. She said, “Dad, a policeman did this to me”. We found out the next day that the man was not a police officer, but he had dressed like one with the coat, the fur hat, and the flashes on the shoulders. He had borrowed his mother's white car and had a police light in it. He had pulled in behind Jordan in our backyard and told her that she had an insurance violation. Later a member of the major crimes unit in Edmonton stated that he felt the man's uniform was authentic enough that his own wife would have had trouble knowing whether the man was RCMP or not.
The major point here is that he never would have been able to get as close to her as he did without her using her cellphone for help or attempting to run into the house if he was not dressed as law enforcement. During the criminal trial for this man, he faced one count of personating a police officer. We were stunned to learn at that time that the maximum penalty for this offence was six months' jail time. That has now been changed to a hybrid five years maximum. Making the personating of a police officer an aggravating circumstance would allow judges to impose penalities befitting the crime.
In 1954 Abraham Maslow published his research and findings on the basis of motivation and referred to it as the hierarchy of human needs. This simple idea has become a fundamental framework for understanding how people are motivated and how they become successful and productive. The hierarchy is represented as a tiered triangle in which each tier must be achieved before the next tier can be reached. The triangle consists of a base of basic physiological needs like air, food, water, etc., followed by safety. The next levels are social, ego, independence, and self-fulfilment.
For all intents and purposes, safety forms the base of this triangle. If there is no safety, there is nothing else. Jordan has had this sense of safety torn away from her by someone who she thought was there to keep her safe, because that is how he represented himself. We depend on the police to keep us safe. We trust that they will. We tell our children that if they get into trouble they should find a policeman or they should call the RCMP.
An individual who dresses as a policeman in order to victimize someone or control them is abusing the public trust. I cannot tell my children not to trust the police. Police serve a valuable and needed purpose in society. The uniform and the office are sacred, and we as citizens of this society require it to be sacred. Because of how small this world has become in the wake of social media and 24-hour news, an episode like this does not affect just one person or our family; it affects thousands of people.
This is why we approached Mr. Dreeshen in May 2010 to bring to his attention the importance of this issue. He did not let us down. He drafted a piece of legislation that asked that the Criminal Code be modified to make personating a police officer an aggravating offence.
I would like to thank Mr. Dreeshen for working so hard on his bill, and thank this committee. It is a profound privilege for a citizen from Penhold, Alberta to come to Ottawa to be heard by the leaders of our country, so thank you.
Jordan continues to have issues regarding anyone wearing a uniform, be it the RCMP, the police, security, or a peace officer. It is likely that she will have these issues for the rest of her life. As another RCMP member said to us when we were talking to him about this issue, it's understandable that she would, because even as members, he said, they feel a little jolt when faced by the flashers in the rear-view mirror. For her, it's a whole other story.
RCMP members worked with us to flag Jordan's registration so that in the event she was stopped on a traffic violation they would be aware that she would be calling for confirmation of identification. Members were as distressed as we were that someone would commit such a heinous crime while representing themselves as law enforcement.
She was actually pulled over about three months after her abduction, which sent her into a panic attack; however, she said that because there were two policemen and she had three friends in the car, she was able to talk herself down. She never speeds now. She never disobeys the rules of the road. She never wants to give a policeman any reason to pull her over, because of her deep mistrust of the uniform.
This is not how we need the police presence to be viewed in this country. We ask those people to go out and possibly give their lives to protect the citizenry of this country. By that fact alone, the penalties for personating an officer of the law need to be strong. They need to approach the maximums more often than keep the minimums.
About five months ago, Jordan and her boyfriend Jimmy were driving home from bringing me a drink at work, and not an alcoholic drink, but an iced tea. It was late at night. I work night shifts. I'm an RN in the emergency room in our local town. On their way home, they came upon an accident involving a single vehicle, with a driver who appeared to be drunk. They did the right thing, and they called the police.
For whatever reason, five RCMP cruisers arrived in a short amount of time, lights flashing, and Jordan experienced a full-on flashback and began panicking and crying uncontrollably. The very people who we as a society are supposed to turn to in times of crisis sent her into an exacerbation of her post-traumatic stress disorder.
Thankfully, a kind policewoman asked Jimmy what was happening, and when he told her that Jordan was the girl from Penhold—they all know who she is—and had been abducted by someone dressed as a police officer, she went around, got all the flashers turned off, and let Jordan go home in Jimmy's car, later giving him a ride to our house.
My point is that this is ongoing, this fear of the RCMP and law enforcement persons in general, and it hasn't eased up. I very much doubt that it ever will.
Because our society is based on laws and those who protect and uphold the law, it is doubtful that Jordan can go through her life never seeing a member of that profession. That man and all others who commit crimes dressed as law enforcement abuse the public's trust. Our society cannot function if we do not trust law enforcement.
We need to make it clear that personating a member is not only an offence under the Criminal Code, but it's an offence against society as a whole, and that is why it should be an aggravating offence, so that justices may penalize accordingly and make the punishment fit the egregious nature of the crime.
Thank you.