Police Chief Faulkner in London Ontario is eating his words again

I find it interesting, nay astounding, to learn the myopic Police Chief Faulkner, who would falsify his own statistics, could be viewed as a sterling citizen. He appears to have been very involved in his community but if he would commit fraud because of ideology in one major area of his service to the citizens how many others are there? Ideologues, as we have seen within Victim Feminism, will lie, cheat, commit fraud and teach our children it is a truth in many aspects of gender relationships and noncommittal behaviour.

Maybe later more of his handiwork will arise when he is gone.MJM

 

 

Politics unlikely fit for Faulkner

By Herman Goodden, Special to QMI Agency

Last Updated: 5th February 2010, 5:01pm

With the retirement of 57-year- old London police Chief Murray Faulkner set to take effect this summer, glowing tributes to his character and record are pouring forth from many quarters.

A grad of Sir Wilfrid Laurier secondary school and Fanshawe College, Faulkner is well liked by his colleagues in the London Police Service where he was first appointed as a constable in 1975, rising to the post of deputy chief in 2000 and filling the top spot four years later.

Fellow officers always like it when one of their own heads up the service and this was doubly true when Faulkner was appointed as he followed in the wake of the dispiriting Al Gramolini debacle when an 'imported' chief was caught fiddling his expense reports and was forced to step down.

Faulkner has been a tireless ambassador to the larger community, serving on many charitable and philanthropic boards and councils and chairing the 2007 United Way campaign for London and Middlesex County. So extensive are his community commitments that it is estimated he presides at a mind-boggling 300 functions a year. This makes it more than understandable that his only stated plans for his retirement are to decompress and spend more time with his family and friends.

Faulkner is still young enough and his community standing is prominent enough that it is felt he would be a shoo-in for some sort of political office should he wish to stand as a candidate. He has not yet indicated any particular interest that way but overtures are being made to him, and he hasn't rejected the prospect out of hand.

While it might seem a natural enough progression for him to move into the political arena, such a repositioning would call on a markedly different skill set than that which he currently employs. In many ways, it would represent an inversion of the London police motto which he has sought to fulfil for the last 35 years. He would shift from a life of "Deeds not words" to one of "Words not deeds". Words are a politician's currency and tools and as a politician, Faulkner would have to exercise a level of nuance and care with his every utterance unlike anything he's ever had to concern himself with as a cop.

An example of the kind of thing I mean can be found in his address to the crowd attending the October 2006 launch of a special police task force aimed at "combatting woman abuse." At that event, Faulkner flatly identified domestic violence solely as a "gender problem," saying, "Men, and what it is to be a man in our society, (are) the problem."

This was strongly, even recklessly worded, and eight months later Faulkner's simplistic, one-sided reading of such a complicated, and fully human (i.e., pertaining to both men and women) problem, blew up in his face when London police service Insp. Kelly Johnson shot and killed retired London police superintendent David Lucio (then killed herself) the day after Lucio called off their three-year love affair to return to his wife and family.

As Ontario's Domestic Violence Death Review Committee defines domestic violence as a homicide by a partner or ex-partner, Johnson's despicable act clearly fits the bill. However unusual or flukish that situation may have been, the rage of Kelly Johnson showed that the roots of domestic violence are not solely grounded in the issue of "men, and what it is to be a man in our society."
Did Faulkner learn from this tragic act perpetrated by one of his officers, and take that opportunity to expand his understanding of domestic violence? He did not. The investigators' report on the murder-suicide which Faulkner called for, while brief, listed all kinds of extenuating circumstances that aggravated Johnson's hold on reality.

"Emotional disturbances," were cited, as well as, "historical stressors," the 2005 deaths of her mother as well as "her pet of 15 years." Such stuff would never have been considered if it had been a man who'd been pulling the trigger. More incredible still, in the release of 2007's police statistics on domestic violence (DV) perpetrated that year, only one homicide of a woman by a man was listed for the entire year. The Johnson/Lucio murder-suicide didn't make the cut.

Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. E-mail herman.goodden@sympatico.ca

Dr. Richard Warshak ~ Tough love from Texas

This visit by Dr. Warshak indicates progress is being made within the judiciary. In one report it was stated about 130 Judges attended his seminar. The comments by The Honorable Justice John Gomery of Canada in 1991 present a vivid reminder on the passage of time before cases of Parental Alienation of a child can be identified and dealt with in an expeditious manner    “Hatred is not an emotion that comes naturally to a child. It has to be taught. A parent who would teach a child to hate the other parent represents a grave and persistent danger to the mental and emotional health of that child.”

He was a wise member of the Bench to have not overlooked the emotional abuse of the children in this Quebec case. Hopefully the judiciary will start taking the matter with the seriousness it deserves and keep the same judge involved through court proceedings and also divest themselves of the argument only recalcitrant parents take matters to litigation.

When PA is involved it is often because the alienator themselves have personality disorders and use the children as pawns.MJM

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR

Psychologist Richard Warshak offers intensive and controversial programs to help children who have suffered parental alienation during divorce. “Love your kids more than you hate your ex-spouse,” he says.

February 09, 2010

Susan Pigg

Living Reporter

When Richard Warshak whisked into Toronto last week from his native Texas, he brought along some tough-love advice for both divorcing parents and family court judges.

"Love your kids more than you hate your ex-spouse," the renowned expert on parental alienation said.

Be firm and fast at pushing toxic custody cases through the clogged courts, he advised judges attending a day-long seminar at the Four Seasons Hotel.

The psychologist runs the controversial Family Bridges, a Texas-based "educational workshop" aimed at undoing the damage of parental alienation – orchestrated campaigns of hate and hurt in which one parent turns their children against the other in bitter divorce battles.

Critics have decried his work as "deprogramming" but for the past year, Warshak has been working with two Ontario psychologists and says a third is due to join him soon. He's teaching them how to run similar programs here to tackle what Toronto psychiatrist Sol Goldstein describes as the "scourge of parental alienation in Canada."

Warshak's aim is to make the intensive therapy more affordable – with airfare to Texas it can hit $20,000 (U.S.) – and ease the optics of Canadian kids being whisked away from nasty parents and flown off to the United States for what skeptics label as brainwashing.

"Every day I get letters from parents with very, very tragic stories in which they've lost all contact with their children – in some cases for years," Warshak says. "It's heartbreaking to see so much pain, but it's enormously gratifying when you've been able to restore a child's identity and help them recover a lost relationship."
The key, stresses Warshak, is for parents to know that badmouthing their ex-spouse, fixating on their flaws and blaming them for the divorce in front of the kids, can doom children to a life of anger, depression and a divorce of their own later in life.

Since these bitter marrige breakdowns often end up in court, judges need to get tough before things spiral so out of control that the only solution is expensive and intensive therapy, says Warshak.

"Judges can help these families by making very clear and unambiguous (custody and visitation) orders, by having very clear expectations about what will happen if the orders are violated and by moving on these cases very early rather than allowing the problems to reach the point where expensive and intensive (therapy) is necessary."

He's determined to make parental alienation as socially unacceptable as sexual or physical abuse of children.
His 2001 book on the topic, Divorce Poison, has been updated and was re-released last month. This spring he's coming out with a new, self-help DVD (Welcome Back Pluto, which he hopes to sell on his website www.warshak.com for $19.95 U.S.) for parents struggling to reconnect with kids who've been poisoned against them.

During an hour-long interview with the Star, Warshak talked about Family Bridges. While acknowledging that it's financially out of reach of most families, he says it's treated 103 children in the past 18 years.
Of the 23 kids he's personally helped reconnect with an alienated parent since 2005, 18 still maintain a relationship with both parents. Eight of those 23 children came from Canada.

"Some parents don't really realize what they are doing – they are so preoccupied with their own anger and disappointment over the failed marriage that they fail to understand how harmful their behaviour is to their children," says Warshak.

"Others deliberately turn their children against the other parent as a way to express their anger. (The alienation) can happen literally overnight and turn into what we call `tribal warfare.' I've talked to relatives who say that as soon as the divorce was announced, their nephews and nieces stopped talking to them."
Family Bridges isn't for everyone and it's critical for family law lawyers and judges to be sure the alienation isn't because of "realistic estrangement" – a parent who is abusive or neglectful or has a new partner, for instance, whom the child doesn't like.

It's aimed mainly at children who have been so alienated that a judge thinks there should be a change in custody to give the rejected parent time to reconnect.

"We teach children how easy it is to develop a distorted view of someone, a hatred that has no sense, and we teach them how to overcome that, to think for themselves, have a compassionate view of both parents and help them understand that all parents make mistakes and that in most cases children are better off having both parents involved in their life," Warshak says.

Family Bridges is meant to be a getaway, in every sense. The child and rejected parent are sent to a hotel or a resort (in rare cases the treatment takes place at home) for four days of intensive therapy – 64 hours of treatment that's the equivalent to about a year of regular therapy, although there's lots of time to just hang out and swim. Two mental health professionals work with the parent and child.

"We find that most children under the age of 8 don't really need this kind of program to make the transition.

"Even though they've been taught to hate or fear a parent, all it really takes in most cases is to be around that parent long enough to see that they are not what they've been led to believe."

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/newsfeatures/article/762379--tough-love-from-texas