Starlight tours

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A starlight tour is the non-sanctioned police practice of picking up individuals in their cruisers, mostly homeless, drug addicts, or other such marginalized people, and taking them outside of town where they would be beaten and/or abandoned on the side of the road.

A suspected case in Canada resulted in an inquiry in 2003 into the hypothermia death of Neil Stonechild in 1990 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The inquiry found that he might have been subjected to a starlight tour by the police. However, the inquiry found that at the time of the death the police investigation was not adequate to conclude what the circumstances were surrounding Neil Stonechild's death. However, the 2 officers who picked up Stonechild that evening were eventually fired.

In pop culture

• A starlight tour is notably depicted in the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood.
• The Nick Nolte film Mulholland Falls, a story of a Los Angeles police detective and his partners, is named for the protagonists' particular style of starlight tours. To wit, the detectives will approach a member of organized crime who has recently arrived in town and make what appears at first to be merely a harassment arrest. However, instead of taking the man to a police station, they take him into the countryside to a large cliff, which they euphemistically call "Mulholland Falls", where he is unfortunately thrown to his death.

External links

• Report of the Stonechild Inquiry (requires Adobe Acrobat reader)

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