Some of these former children are not pleasant to deal with. Scruffy and dirty, shifty and manipulative, they invite distaste. Fearful and contemptuous of authority at the same time, they evoke hostility. The police often handle them roughly. Cops are not necessarily predisposed to harshness, but a loss of humane interaction inevitably results whenever an entire group of people is delegitimized while another group is granted virtually unrestrained physical authority over them. I’ve had a small taste of it, having been stopped by cops on my Hastings Street rounds—once for jaywalking and once
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