There’s a war being fought out there, people.
On the battlefield of the World Wide Web, or the internet, or perhaps the ‘interweb’ for those who like combining words, there are all sorts of shots being fired left and right and back and forth between two groups of people; those who support the victim’s family, and those who agree with the verdict.
What am I talking about, you may be asking? Only the court case that has gripped Saskatchewan for the past few weeks; Gerald Stanley, a Biggar-area farmer, stood trial before a judge and jury in North Battleford for the death of 22-year old Colten Boushie in August of 2016. Stanley would either be found guilty of second degree murder, manslaughter, or be acquitted.
You don’t need me to go over the details of the incident, especially since every media outlet in the province – whether it’s in print form, online or on TV – has covered every nook and cranny of the case to the point where I’m almost begging to see something else hit the news and take over the headlines.
The jury’s verdict in the Stanley case, as it turns out, was revealed on Friday night. I happened to be at the SaskTel Centre in Saskatoon (it’ll always be Sask Place to me…) attending a WWE wrestling event when my friend showed me her Facebook timeline, which said the decision would be revealed at approximately 7:30 pm. The show went on, a few matches came and went, and she looked at her phone again.
Gerald Stanley was acquitted. He’ll face no jail time for his part in Boushie’s death.
Within minutes, or rather within mere moments, the internet proceeded to basically explode and caused a great divide.
Cries and rants of “MURDERER!” flooded social media, as did shouts of “RACIST!” towards those who agreed with the jury’s verdict.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Boushie happened to be Indigenous? Did I forget to say that before?
That’s because I made a conscious effort not to.
The biggest wrong-doing in the coverage of this entire case was the fact that one thing seemed to be the prevailing topic that everyone focused on: race.
What it bogged down to, according to some, was virtually the stereotypical ‘us versus them’ scenario; an evil white man allegedly gunned down a young First Nations man for no earthly reason. And that just simply isn’t the truth, if anyone bothered to follow the happenings of the trial on a daily basis.
This incident and the ensuing trial became about race when they shouldn’t have been, and the media more than played a part in amplifying the drama to crank up those web traffic numbers and nightly news viewers.
I may not have covered the events of the trial, but as a reporter myself, I’m more than a little ashamed of my media contemporaries. In a delicate situation such as this, it’s more important than ever to try and maintain a balanced view on both sides of the issue, but any kind of coverage on the Gerald Stanley side (sorry, “evil white man”) seemed to be few and far between.
This trial became about race when it SHOULD have been about crime, and more specifically, rural crime. The facts that came out in the trial revealed that Boushie and everyone else in the vehicle had just come from another farmyard that they targeted for stealing. They had also been drinking, which they admitted to in court, and they also had a loaded weapon in their vehicle.
Rural crime is virtually a whole other issue besides what we see in larger towns and urban areas. Criminals know that the response time for police or any other emergency personnel to be called to a remote farmyard can typically be a lot longer than within a larger community area, and they’re using this information to their advantage.
The facts in the trial also shed light on what Boushie and his friends were doing that day, and apparently, that was engaging in criminal behaviour.
What happened in this incident exactly? I don’t know for sure, but I choose to believe it was just a terribly tragic accident. I DON’T believe that Gerald Stanley intended to take a life that day. I mean, who can even make such a conscious choice to do that in the heat of such a moment? I DO believe he intended to protect his home and property from people that he believed were a threat to it, because farmers like him know that theft in rural Saskatchewan has been an escalating issue for the past few years.
I believe that people who agree with the jury’s decision are not automatically racists, and they may be in fact just realists.
I believe that, like the media, our elected government officials have no business commenting on a trial outcome that is decidedly top-heavy in their support of one side.
I believe that we’re not going to get anywhere with “defeating racism” by playing that card every time something like this happens.
I believe that we all need to do better as human beings, and not just as divided races.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
