Cop Wins RCMP Settlement After Search By US Troopers

Last spring, Laing was driving on a highway near Hope. He turned a corner and a man in an orange traffic vest in the middle of the road motioned him to pull over. In a heavy Texas accent, the man asked for Laing's identification. Laing asked if the man was an American. The man answered that he was, and that he was performing a B.C. road check. "I said, are you a police officer? Who are you to be detaining me?"...snip snip...RCMP spokesperson Const. John Ward says the Texas troopers profiling program provides great help to the Mounties. "The Americans do a lot of this and have been doing it for quite some time. So there's a lot of opportunity on both sides of the border to become closer." Laing and his lawyer disagree. They say that when it comes to narcotics, American attitudes and Canadian laws are quite different. "We have different freedoms than they have," Laing says. "You don't want to mesh too much. You don't want your police meshing to the point where we start taking on other police jurisidiction's policies." full article: http://vancouver.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=bc_troopers20050128 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on February 3, 2005]