Front Burner - Race, policing and a 'disturbing' pattern

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

"If a few white people were being killed at the rate that we are being killed...we wouldn't be having this conversation today," says Desmond Cole, in response to an Ontario Human Rights commission report on policing and race in Toronto. The report's findings include that a black person in Toronto is nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by police. Cole is a writer and activist who focuses on race and policing.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Good morning. Yesterday, the Ontario Human Rights Commissioner was on stage in front of the press. She was announcing the findings of an interim report on race and policing in Toronto. Our interim findings are disturbing and call for immediate action. This is what she found disturbing. Between 2013 and 2017, a Black person was nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police. And despite being only 8.8% of the city's population, Black people made up about 60% of deadly encounters with Toronto police and 70% of fatal police shootings.

The data proves that Black people are overrepresented in police use of force cases that result in serious injury and death. The data in this report comes from Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, the SIU. Today on FrontBurner, I'm talking to Desmond Cole. the SIU. Today on FrontBurner, I'm talking to Desmond Cole. He's a writer and activist, and we're going to be talking about a decades-long controversy over racial profiling, and also about how this story adds to the growing picture we now have of policing and race. If a few white people were being killed at the rate that we are being killed, and those white people happen to be connected and have some good lawyers and some good public exposure, then policing wouldn't be policing and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I want to hit today some high watermarks in the evolution of the story of race and policing in Ontario and Toronto. Obviously, the story has national implications too. We've seen over the years in Toronto, at least, the release of data that has told us in different ways how police have been interacting with Black people. And I want to get to that. But first, I think to really understand the story, we actually have to start in the late 1980s. And so, Desmond, can you tell me about Lester Donaldson? Lester Donaldson was a black man living in Toronto. He was identified as having schizophrenia, and he had had several encounters with the police before. He lived in a rooming house, and one day in 1988, five police officers, I believe it was,

went and entered Lester Donaldson's rooming house. The officers say that they came into this room, that they found Lester Donaldson on a bed, that he was threatening them with a knife, and that he refused their command to surrender the knife right away. He swung at us with the knife. We discharged the shot. He's still armed, still threatening us with the knife. We need the ambulance now.

The interaction, which lasted a long time, ended with the police shooting and killing Lester Donaldson inside of his own apartment, which they entered themselves. Black activists were organizing around that time, and the Black Action Defense Committee, they were organizing and raising these issues and demanding oversight and accountability. His shooting was so egregious that it stirred a kind of an anger. And then the police officer who shot him, not only was he cleared again, but he came out when he won the case with a cigar in his mouth,

in cowboy boots. Let the courts understand very clearly, we will not condone the injustices of the courts of Ontario. And what did they get? The big thing that came out of particularly the mobilization around Lester Donaldson, but also others, was the creation of something called the Special Investigations Unit, the SIU. The Black Action Defense Committee is calling for the formation of a province-wide, permanent, independent civilian review board.

And that organization is the organization that we're talking about today in terms of use of force investigations. Right. The Special Investigations Unit is an arm's length agency that investigates serious injury or death at the hands of police. Or allegations of sexual assault. Did the idea of racial profiling have any societal buy-in at that point? Perhaps that conversation didn't have the social level of awareness and immediate understanding and grasp as it does today. But that is in white communities and other non-Black, perhaps, communities. I want to say that clearly because Black people are the ones experiencing this.

So it's not news to us that our own experiences are real and are happening. I think that the work of Black Action Defense Committee and other groups that were organizing around that time really started to make this into a public issue. When Dudley Laws said that he believed police in the United States maybe didn't even have anything on the Toronto police, that was provocative. Those were the kinds of things that started to get people upset, started to get people talking about this in the public light. If the people do not have confidence in the police, it doesn't matter if you put another thousand police officers out there. They will not get involved within the process.

Okay, so the next big moment in this comes in 2002. That's when we start to see data. The Toronto Star publishes its Race and Crime series using police data that shows Black people make up 8% of the population in Toronto, but face 27% of violent crime charges. The Toronto Star analyzed the arrest records of the Toronto police force dating back to 1996. The investigation also revealed that, for example, when it came to simple drug possession, Black people were being taken into police stations and held overnight more often than white people.

So this is data having to do with people who have already been arrested. What was the community reaction at the time? So what I remember personally from that time was that I was a university student in Kingston, Ontario, going to Queens. And in my own experience around this time, I was being followed by the police in Kingston. I was being profiled. I was being stopped on campus. I was being stopped walking, driving, and being asked regularly for identification. So I remember hearing about this reporting and being like, well, yeah, that checks out. But I still felt at that time like this was a blip, like this was a conversation that

would come and go and that it never really had as much staying power. The investigation that was happening through the Toronto Star was critical. It exposes things, it puts pressure on public officials. Hard to argue against. Very hard to argue against because it's the police's own data. I also remember at this time, I grew up in Toronto, and it was a very different time vis-a-vis the police. At this time, it wasn't as common to see critical coverage of the police in the press. And I remember Julian Fantino, the police commissioner at the time, was very

aggressive on this towards the Toronto Star, the Toronto Police. They launched a lawsuit against the Toronto Star for $2.7 billion. A lawsuit for publishing their own statistics. Yeah. The police union became so angry at the Star that it decided to sue the newspaper for $2 billion. And we intend to prove in court before a jury that the methodology used in the statistical analysis is flawed and false. So we've talked about the creation of the SIU, which is a body that deals with serious injury or a death at the hands of police or sexual assault allegations. And we've also talked about data that we've seen in the early 2000s that deals with arrests of Black people disproportionately

to the rest of the population. We fast forward another seven or so years. At this time, I know Jim Rankin at the Toronto Star is fighting in court for more data from the Toronto police. And he gets it starting in 2010. And this data, it deals with interactions between the police and people. So not just arrests, but this data is like every time a person is coming into contact with the police, they could just be walking down the street.

A Toronto Star analysis of stop data shows Black people in Toronto are, are overall 3.2 times more likely than whites to be documented. The Star analysis shows that black people are more likely to be documented than white people in every one of the city's 72 patrol zones. And so tell me about this information. It's called carding. Yes. Now, the known-to investigation that, you know, started around that time with Jim Rankin and the Toronto Star and others, not everybody can relate

to an instance of somebody dying or being killed at the hands of the police. But black people across this country can relate to the idea of being harassed, stopped, questioned, asked for identification for no reason, delayed, detained, even arrested, even beaten. I received a contact card entry. Interestingly, they pulled me over on my birthday and claimed that since they pulled me over after 5 p.m., you know, the document in the form of the driver's license and the sticker tag had expired. Very interesting one where it says I'm born in Jamaica, even though I'm born in Toronto. It just says nature of contact, general investigation. This is our daily experience. And now there was statistics about that.

And so carting also happens to people who are not black a lot. Carding also happens to people who are not Black, a lot. And I think that this is key because you don't have to be Black to be experiencing police surveillance. And so this resonated with those groups also. I know that you became a prominent anti-carding advocate around then, partly because you wrote a piece for Toronto Life about your experiences with carding. Could you tell me about the experiences that led to that piece? Yeah, that piece for Toronto Life was called The Skin I'm In.

And it talked about my dozens of interactions in Kingston, as I mentioned, and across the GTA, wherever I've really lived, with police officers. Interactions that have scared me, interactions that have made me unsafe, interactions that could very well have led to me being arrested or beaten up or worse by the police. I just found as I left teenagehood that it was impossible for me to drive a car without being stopped by the police.

Police officers would ask where I was going. Police officers would single me out as the only black person in a group. And I was terrified. What impact do you think that story had? I think that the impact was significant. But I think it has to be placed in its proper context. This is 2015. This is only a few months after a group called Black Lives Matter Toronto

have stepped onto the scene in this city and completely changed the conversation about Blackness in Toronto have stepped onto the scene in this city and completely changed the conversation about blackness in Toronto and in Canada. Let's talk about the people who may have become emblematic of that issue here. Tell me about Andrew Loku. Well, on July 5th of 2015, Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old man, had a dispute with one of the neighbors in his apartment building. He was living in an apartment building that was subsidized by the Canadian Mental Health Association.

was living in an apartment building that was subsidized by the Canadian Mental Health Association. They actually had leased rooms there to provide subsidized housing for people living with mental health issues like Andrew. Andrew was going to school. Andrew was working with a community group for support. He was doing a lot of things to get further ahead in his life. He's an immigrant from South Sudan. And he had this argument with a neighbor one day, and the police were called.

We see police arrive. Constable Andrew Doyle is the one up front. Upstairs, Andrew Loku has a hammer. Doyle testified he told him to drop the hammer. Loku walks out of frame towards the officers. Shots fired. Shots fired. One down.

Shots fired. One down. I need EMS here now. The police raced up the stairs of this supportive mental health housing building. They saw Andrew and almost immediately opened fire on him and killed him. The police officer who killed him is named Andrew Doyle. And Andrew Doyle was cleared of any wrongdoing. The argument that the police used was that Andrew Locu had a hammer in his hand,

correct? And he was charging at the police and they were defending themselves. Yes, that is the argument that the police used. I would offer to the police that if the general public responded to perceived threats every day, as school teachers, as nurses, as child care workers, as pedestrians on the street, if we took out a gun and shot every time we felt threatened, I think half the population would be gone. I do remember Andrew Locu's death was part of what spurred some widespread protests in the city from members of Black Lives Matter,

including camping out in front of Toronto police headquarters for several weeks at one point. Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! It was 16 days and nights, if I remember it correctly. That protest ended, of course, famously, with Black Lives Matter confronting Premier Kathleen Wynne at the time on the grounds of Queen's Park. I believe that we still have systemic racism in our society. Anti-Black racism. Well, society. Anti-black racism.

Well, and anti-black racism. Anti-black and beyond. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we need to address it. And I think that was the first time Kathleen Wynne was forced to utter the term systemic racism, which she didn't want to say. So we were seeing a completely new moment around this organizing for Andrew. You were seeing a completely new moment around this organizing for Andrew. So, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember when these protests were happening in the spring of police, which are statistics that the SIU, the Special Investigations Unit, the unit created in the 1980s because of the death of Lester Donaldson, has in their possession. And that really brings us to yesterday. This interim report is the latest in a body of reports, findings and recommendations

over the past 30 years that point to persistent concerns about anti-Black racism in policing in Toronto. To these new statistics that we have, that while Black people make up 8.8% of Toronto's population, they make up about 30% of police use of force cases and 60% of deadly encounters with Toronto police and 70% of fatal police shootings. What impact do you think this new data or this new report could have? I think what it does now is it brings back into the public conversation an issue that we've now gotten more used to hearing about and talking about publicly.

However, I actually think that that's where it stops. I don't believe the truth will set us free when it comes to anti-Black racism and police violence. The truth will not set us free. We've been telling you the truth for hundreds of years. The thing that is missing, I mean, I looked at my Twitter feed yesterday while all of this news was rolling out. I noticed that almost none of the Toronto City Councillors were making any public commentary about this, Jamie, and they weren't even being asked. People like me, who don't have political power,

who are not elected, who are not accountable to the broader public, who are not voted in, we are the ones being constantly asked to explain what the police are doing. And the city council that is voted in sits and says nothing. Just to push back on that a little bit,

the Toronto police say they have taken action. Carting was restricted in 2017. That was because of the community, but I hear your point. They say their officers are being trained in use of force situations. So why isn't it stopping? If a few white people were being killed at the rate that we are being killed and stopped and beaten every day, and those white people happen to be connected

and have some good lawyers and some good public exposure, then policing wouldn't be policing and we wouldn't be having this conversation. And we cannot actually draw down on police violence until we draw down on policing. And that means divesting. So we always talk about mental health. We talk about all of these other things that

should be of concern to the public rather than just using force against somebody. Where's the money for these things going to come from though, when so much of the budget is devoted to policing? It's never going to happen. The Toronto Police released a statement today in light of this report, and they acknowledged that they have work to do around systemic racism. But I want to read you a paragraph from the press release. We hope that this interim report is seen in its broader context,

causing bigger questions to be asked and real solutions to be identified. Questions about poverty, social exclusion, inequality in our neighborhoods, and the root causes of crime and violence. Because once the police are involved, it is often after all other systems have failed. This is not to say that this explains

even a perceived or disproportionate use of force by police, but it does highlight the reality that once the police have been called, the incident is often one of crisis. Desmond, I'm really interested to hear your reaction to this. Jamie, the police are agreeing with the community. They are agreeing that they are being used as a first resort when really they should be the last resort.

When you put all your eggs into the policing basket, this is what happens. So the police are correct. They shouldn't be being called. But I don't see in that statement the police then saying, please draw down our budgets. Police are never state intervenes to stop its own police force from killing us, we are sadly going to continue having this conversation, Jamie. And as much as I like to see you, we need to move forward. Desmond, thank you for coming here and for having this conversation today.

Thank you so much. In addition to the police statement I just mentioned, the Toronto Police Union boss, Mike McCormick, spoke to the CBC today, and here's some of what he had to say. One of the concerns that we have with the report is that the lack of context. There is data in there, but again, the context around that, which is really critical and important for a discussion like this. What I want to do is work in a positive way, build relationships between the policing and the community, and I don't think that this report is necessarily going to achieve that. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.

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