This one is a real Gordian knot.
A little while back, RCMP officer Corporal Jim Brown exploded into the news. A bunch of bondage photos had emerged, in which he allegedly menaces an unidentified woman. He, or someone that looks like him, uses a knife to cut off her clothes. There’s more (and dammit, I’d show you if I could find them) – at one point, she’s in a cage, and at the end she’s playing dead.
Brown is into S&M, and on a website goes by the name Kilted-Knight. So, here is a police officer who in his private time likes to engage in bondage and domination.
For a short time he was involved in the massive Pickton investigation. Years later, these photos came out.
Now, I’m no fan of the RCMP (I think the VPD are orders of magnitude better and more ethical than the BC mounties), and the province will have to spend millions of dollars untangling their endless fuck-ups – the murders (poor Robert Dziekanski, and Ian Bush, who was shot in the back of the head while in custody), the dinosaur culture, the sexual harassment, the old-boys networks, and that mountie who knocked up a gangster’s girlfriend.
But there is a whole host of panjandrums who are calling for Brown’s head. Lawyers of Pickton victims, bloggers, academics, victim advocates.
‘So yes they are pictures of consenting adults but what they are depicting is criminal acts of sexual violence,” as one blogger puts it.
Yes, they are consenting adults. But in yet another wrinkle, a few friends of the disgraced officer have come forward. They say Eroticvancouver.com has stated that only few of the photos are of Brown, and the more dramatic ones are of another man. One might say that it’s a bit fanciful to suppose that those two separate men of a certain age in the BC bondage scene both have moustaches and shaved heads, but that’s a common look in the sub/dom community.
It’s pointless and blatently illogical to link the Pickton murders to the lifestyle of a Mountie. Yes, he should have been more careful (his photos had originally been found on a memory stick by someone else), but that’s a code of conduct issue, and not a moral issue linked with Canada’s most prolific serial killer. In being a bit of a perv, Brown has become a scapegoat for crimes he never committed, as if his very existence somehow is part and parcel of how the Mounties dropped the ball in the early days of Pickton. But that’s another story, and one that has nothing to do with Brown and how he likes to get his jollies. If we delved into the life of every man who ever investigated anything, we’d have no investigators left.
And besides – these photos are hot. While you might be disgusted (I ain’t, but I’m looking at the issue of possible consent here) by what Jim Brown and this unidentified Brown lookalike do, you can’t deny the smile on that woman’s face. She’s enjoying herself, and she’s clearly into it.
Jim Brown should take his disciplinary lumps. In his personal life, he likes to be the one giving out the punishment, so a Code of Conduct hearing will be extra painful for a lifelong dom like him. But everyone else should leave him the hell alone.
