Racial Discrimination in Canada (PART 4): Community Recommendations to Reform Toronto's Policing Model
March 16, 2022
The deaths of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, and the interactions of Black people with Toronto Public Service (TPS) led to a virtual public meeting on August 18, 2020, by the Toronto Public Services Board (The Board) for police reform in Toronto. In particular, they discussed systemic racism, alternative community safety and crisis response models, and building confidence in public safety. They did so with the intention to discuss working collaboratively with the community to design a model that best responds to systemic racism.
Prior to this meeting, Toronto City Council had a meeting to consider how to address policing in Toronto. Meanwhile, The Board hosted Town Hall meetings to hear directly from the public. In these meetings the Board consistently heard people call for a complete restructuring of how community safety is addressed and delivered in the city. With this call, the suggestion was to alter policing from the reactive approach to a proactive one that addresses the social determinants of crime, such as poverty, housing, food security, and social services. Majority of the speakers also called to fund this alternative approach by reducing police funding in Toronto.
With all of this in mind, many advocated for the need to reimagine how to achieve community safety in Toronto, possibly with a completely transformed role for police. To achieve this reimagined role, 81 recommendations were presented. These recommendations include some of the following areas: alternative community safety response models; police training; police budget and budgetary transparency; independent auditing and service accountability; chief selection criteria; information-sharing and transparency; conduct accountability; consultation with experts and communities; building public confidence; and, ensuring change. Across these categories I found some notable points to consider.
Alternative Community Response Models and Effective Police Training
One of the more striking recommendations was to create a community response model that doesn’t include the police. Understanding that emergency responses will always be necessary, this was recommended because police officers are often untrained or inadequately trained to address the specialized needs required in emergency responses. In other cases, it’s reported that they escalate the situation by their mere presence. As such, the perception became that removing police from these situations may improve outcomes, specifically in terms of mental health crises.
With respect to mental health crisis responses, in February 2021, the Toronto council approved a multi-year mental health crisis response service pilot project that allowed for a mobile crisis assistance intervention service in multiple parts of Toronto. These areas include northwest Toronto, Scarborough, and downtown Toronto, and a program for Toronto’s indigenous community. This month, in March 2022, this civilian-led mental health crisis response team is set to launch in two of the four planned pilot teams. The program will be made up of health-care providers and non-profit organizations that specialize in mental health, substance abuse, crisis intervention, and de-escalation. The community organizations chosen to lead the program include TAIBU Community Health Centre (northeast Toronto), the Gerstein Crisis Centre (downtown east), the Canadian Mental Health Association Toronto Branch (northwest Toronto) and a collaboration between the ENAGB Indigenous Youth Agency and the 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations (downtown west). The plan is for it to operate between 2022 and 2025, with the possibility of scaling up if it’s effective. The program has requested $8.5 million to help them run it for this year. To address these costs, it was suggested that the Board work with the police chief for potential reallocation of funds from TPS budget.
The creation of an alternative community safety response model to satisfy this goal was a crucial step to reimaging policing in the city. It tends to be the case that police officers are more aggressive with people with mental health issues because they lack the training to control the situation. As such, people dealing with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence or a police shooting than the perpetrator. In being more aggressive, police rely on standard policing tactics used on uncooperative—or what they perceive to be uncooperative—suspects. The problem here is that these standard tactics aren’t de-escalation techniques. By leaning on mental health workers to handle these complex situations, our approach will medicalize these issues as opposed to criminalizing them.
Along this line of thinking about alterative community safety models, the report indicates that current police training itself is not the answer to addressing systemic racism. Police training merely plays a part of any approach to confront and disrupt issues that feed systemic racism and the unconscious biases present in organizations. The Board recognized that police training can be improved and can focus on inclusivity, community input, and the incorporation of the lived experience of minority community members to disrupt systemic racism in policing.
Budgetary Transparency and Accountability Measures
In terms of the police budget and budgetary transparency, the police budget, which is more than $1 billion, has generated significant public interest over the last few years, leading many to call for budgetary cuts. The Board heard calls to defund TPS by as much as 50%. To the public, this idea of defunding may sound good. But I also believe that the idea of defunding the police functions as a theoretical idea that will have safety concerns and repercussions for our low-income communities who desire a greater police presence. Irrespectively so, the reality is that The Board is statutorily responsible for the provision of adequate and effective policing in Toronto. This means that they are prohibited from making arbitrary cuts to the police budget and reducing TPS’s complement of police officers where doing so would affect their ability to adequately and effectively deliver policing services in the city. As such, cuts to the police budget can’t be done. But they have recognized that Toronto is not adequately policed if certain communities are disproportionately affected or targeted by policing, and that the city isn’t effectively served if the policing budget leads to the underfunding of programs and services that eliminate the root causes of crime and proactively achieve community safety without law enforcement. In this light, crime prevention may be more effectively provided by investing in, and through partnerships with, social services and community initiatives that are underfunded.
Beyond reducing the budget, many have called for greater transparency in the police budget and budgeting process. With the budget being over $1 billion, many have called for TPS to identify opportunities to develop alternative crime prevention and reduction initiatives that could reduce the strain on TPS and shift some of the resources to another unit created for alternative safety. In theory, this would provide TPS the ability to prioritize medium to high-risk situations where their presence is warranted. To meet this desire for transparency, it was recommended that there should be line-byline breakdowns and annual reports related to the budget to allow for greater transparency and accountability for the distribution of the funds. By publicly announcing what the funds are for, people can hold the police accountable for irresponsible or irrational spending that doesn’t benefit community safety.
Increased accountability also speaks to some key points. The first thing is sharing data publicly about the use of force. More data on situations where lethal and non-lethal force are being deployed will allow us to effectively assess disparities and the prevalence of racial discrimination. The second thing is holding police officers responsible for their actions. However, according to the report the investigations and discipline of police officers is strictly regulated by provincial legislation. As such, despite the fact that The Board is the employer of police officers, it has no jurisdiction to direct accountability for misconduct, and being so, this is entirely out of The Board’s scope under current provincial law. The recommended approach in this regard was that The Board supports a political push for provincial law to be in-line with city standards. Additional items were recommended to alter the provincial law structure for punishing misconduct. These include the expansion of the instances in which, suspension without pay, and conducting a review of the current use of force model can assist in reducing disparities in policing and the use of force.
If this is to be done, these standards should be more in line with human rights policy, necessarily decreasing the discretionary powers of police officers. Currently, provincial policy provides police with a broad and vague set of policies to allow the most lateral use of discretion, allowing them to determine the approach or degree of force that is necessary. Often, these can allow for greater subjectivity and discretionary powers than needed, inadvertently giving room for discrimination or irrational and inapplicable uses of force. I agree that some level of protection is required for police officers to do their jobs without fear of punishment. But increased accountability is a step in the right direction towards disbanding bad policing practices and policies.
The recommendations in this report addresses issues related to systemic racism. Some actions have already been taken to improve public trust. A full copy of the report can be read here for more context. I encourage you all to consider this report closely and to remain involved as much as possible in the process; and I hope these articles elevated your situational awareness about Canadian society.
Interested in learning more about Black experiences? Check out this article related to the subject::