Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books, including The Shape of the Suburbs.
Researching and writing my recent book was depressing. Research associate Chris Williams and I produced Crisis in Canada’s Policing, which assesses the state of Canadian police since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
I found large police forces in this country are virtually all the same. All have engaged in systemic carding or street checks, stopping and questioning individuals who are nor engaged in any hint of criminal activity, stopping Black and Indigenous individuals five or more times more often than whites — something Black and Indigenous peoples have claimed has been the case for decades. This in spite of a 2004 study in Kingston documenting the racial discrimination carding involved.
But police forces rejected that evidence. Toronto police fought attempts to end carding for a decade until finally the provincial government intervened in 2016. Most other city police forces in Canada are now, reluctantly, putting an end to carding. One can only conclude that racial discrimination has been a big part of police culture.
Sexual discrimination is another part of police culture. Every large police force in Canada is embroiled in court cases where female officers allege sexual assault and harassment by male officers. Former Supreme Court of Canada judge Michel Bastarache, in his study of sexual harassment of female officers in the RCMP, concluded the RCMP is misogynist and homophobic from top to bottom, from coast to coast.
He suggested the RCMP should be disbanded, but then noted that recommendation had been made in 2007 and never acted on.
Police forces in Canada are rife with violence. More than two dozen people a year are killed by police in Canada, and almost daily there are reports of people being beaten by police during arrest or at demonstrations.
However many good officers there might be, officers do not interfere to stop fellow officers from acting this way. Police organizations throughout the country are racist, sexist and violent.
Reports commissioned by governments during the last three or four decades are eminently clear about the changes that need to be made, but those recommendations are rarely acted on. Police boards — including the Toronto Police Service Board — simply look away when someone asks for change. It took the Toronto police 19 years to implement a 2001 Supreme Court of Canada decision to substantially reduce the number of people it was strip searching, from 40 per cent of those arrested to just a few per cent. Nineteen years.
In 2016 the Ontario Ombudsman told the provincial government to require training to de-escalate police activities dealing with those in mental crisis. The province has simply ignored that suggestion.
As I document in the book, there are lots of good uncomplicated changes that could be made, many of which are successful in one place or another: pre-charge screening, suspension without pay, taking weapons away from the rank and file, to name a few. They will probably be opposed by police associations, which hold a lot of power, but they need to be done together to make real change.
And while I found the story I tell depressing, it is not without hope. Things can change if we set our mind to it and tell our political leaders they must change the way policing happens.
