Ontario rewrites book on policing
More scrutiny, more oversight, more resources
Ontario will demand better from our police officers — after acknowledging that we’ve been asking them to do too much for too long with the wrong resources and direction.
Officers will still have to be emergency social workers, crisis counsellors and addictions experts. And they will be subject to more public scrutiny. But, if the province lives up to its promises, they will not be left to do as much of this alone as they have been.
On Thursday in Toronto, Community Safety Minister MarieFrance Lalonde and Attorney General Yasir Naqvi, two Ottawa ministers, announced mass changes to the way the provincial government oversees policing.
They take the form of a 417page beast of a bill that rewrites the Police Services Act, modifies the Coroners Act and includes new acts on policing oversight and a policing discipline tribunal, missing persons (to give police new powers when they don’t have specific evidence of a kidnapping) and forensic laboratories.
The Police Services Act, the constitution for Ontario’s police forces, got its last major overhaul in 1990, a generation ago.
“The issues faced by police services and their members today are far more complex than when the act was developed,” Lalonde said. Technology is different, but that’s only a small part of it.
Police deal with more mentally ill people, people with addictions, people from more diverse backgrounds.
“We recognize that these new realities require transformation,” the Ottawa- Orléans MPP said.
If you think the job of a police officer is to man the thin blue line separating evil from good, protecting the innocent by catching bad guys and knocking heads from time to time when you need to — because some people deserve it and others need to see it and be warned — you will likely not approve of the direction the province is taking.
But policing is far more than enforcing law and order. It always has been. As numerous reports on the failures of policing, the courts and jails in Ontario have said over the last few years.
The most pointed and sweeping was by Justice Michael Tulloch, who the government asked to examine how the police are overseen. There are police boards, a complaints commission, the Special Investigations Unit and more. The result is confusion, opacity, a sense that nobody is in charge.
From the beginning with Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police in London, the model for modern-era professional police services everywhere, the police have been the public and the public have been the police, Tulloch wrote. The principle recognizes that “the special authority bestowed on the police is at the behest of the public and is to be exercised in the public interest.”
If that authority isn’t exercised in the public interest, what you have isn’t a police service, it’s an occupying militia.
Too often — not always, but too often — it’s felt that way, especially to Ontarians and Ottawans who aren’t white. Carding, the practice literally of stopping people in the street and demanding to see their papers, is a Gestapo tactic. The fact it’s been deployed particularly in neighbourhoods full of people with darker skin, ostensibly because they’re highcrime areas, emphasizes the offensiveness.
The police stop darker-skinned people for traffic violations at ridiculous rates.
The police kill a disproportionate number of black men who turn out to have been mentally ill, at least partly because their training in dealing with people who don’t respond rationally to orders has been lacking.
The police also have a remarkable history of not chasing down women’s sexual-assault complaints.
Sometimes the police themselves are liars. In this town we’ve had cops faking traffic warnings to boost their numbers.
More than once, judges have listened to officers’ sworn testimony and disbelieved it and nothing seems to happen to them.
A few bad apples? Maybe. But the thing about a few bad apples is they spoil the whole bunch. We have a right to better. As Naqvi put it Thursday: “For the police, having the faith of the people they serve is essential for them to be able to do their jobs.”
Compounding the problem is that too often, police investigate each other.
The SIU — which investigates death, serious injury and sexual assault at the hands of officers — is nominally civilian but heavily staffed with former cops.
When a possible offence comes up that doesn’t involve violence and therefore isn’t the SIU’s business, other police forces are typically called in.
Historically, the results of investigations have been kept secret unless charges are laid. Recent ministers have changed that habit but the new law will formalize the release of information.
“These changes will make people, no matter the colour of their skin, what neighbourhood they call home, or their mentalhealth status, feel protected and safe in their communities,” Naqvi promised.
The province will ask more of local police boards, the nominal overseers of police services that are too often in thrall to whatever the chiefs they hire tell them.
Their members will have to take training in policing issues, such as systemic bias and diversity training. Police forces and their boards will all be subject to a new inspector-general with the power to investigate them and identify systemic problems.
Municipal governments will have to devise community-safety plans laying out objectives and how they intend to pursue them, the same way they have to have land-use and transportation plans.
Police officers have had to become social workers and crisis counsellors partly because of Ontario’s impoverished mentalhealth and addiction-treatment systems. We notoriously shrank our mental health hospitals in favour of “community-based” care, and then didn’t fund community-based care.
So formally integrating police forces into the range of social services cities provide is necessary. But it is not sufficient.
“Municipal costs are going up about $1 billion per year, just to deliver current services. This bill introduces new unfunded mandates on top of those costs,” said Lynn Dollin, the president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and deputy mayor of Innisfil, a town of 36,000 near Barrie. “Municipal governments are forced to either cut services or hike property taxes to worrisome levels.”
Little municipalities are in more difficult straits than bigger cities on this. They often can barely afford to hire the Ontario Provincial Police as it is, since they have to pay big-city equivalent wages on small-town tax bases. This reform effort is well along. Nothing that’s come so far has been easy. The next part, while the new legislation plods through its hearings and votes, is making sure the money is there to pay for the demands we’re making.
That’s the other half of the bargain and the provincial government must keep it.