The Toronto police and Crown attorney's office made the preposterous claim that a shop-owner cannot perform a citizen's arrest when a thief returns one hour after a grab-and-run. Too late - the thief has to be caught in the act, they said in the case of grocer David Chen. Imagine a thief who plays peekaboo every two minutes. Home free! he might shout each time he returns to the shop, his hands empty of the goods he'd stolen moments earlier.
The case of David Chen, acquitted on Friday with two store employees, began with a similar absurdity. Thankfully, Judge Ramez Khawly of the Ontario Court of Justice saw through it, saying it might as well have been the same robbery, still in progress.
What made the state's claim even more egregious is that, according to testimony presented in the case, the Toronto police may take hours to arrive on minor shoplifting calls. In fact, just one day before the incident in question, Mr. Chen had been kept waiting five hours when he called the police about a theft. The Crown did not even attempt to rebut this evidence, though it surely had access to the police logs.
In effect, Mr. Chen was left on his own. He and his colleagues tied up career thief Anthony Bennett (43 convictions) and tossed him in a delivery van. It should not be surprising if, in the heat of a chase, they used force that might not be deemed appropriate in retrospect, or from a distance. They didn't have time to draw up a plan. They didn't have the training of the police, or the handcuffs, for that matter. They may have made mistakes which, in all the circumstances, are understandable and fall short of being so dangerous to public order as to be a criminal offence.
The case illustrates the "broken windows" theory, as Judge Khawly pointed out. Tolerance of perceived minor crimes breeds disrespect for the law. "David Chen tried to fill the void where the justice system failed." It's an upside-down world in which police don't show up to arrest thieves but come quickly and take away the merchants who make the arrests themselves.