OTTAWA’S POLICE BOARD NEEDS TO TAKE MORE OF AN INTEREST IN HIRING PROCESS
Whatever’s going on in the Ottawa Police Service’s liaison committee with the city’s queer communities, it’s taking up much deeper problems in the Ottawa police that the police board, not just informal volunteer advisers, ought to have their oars in.
The minutes of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) liaison committee, some of whose troubles I wrote about on Wednesday, record a police human-resources person visiting to consult on the force’s recruitment process last spring. For a bunch of reasons, queer people are more likely to have had mental-health challenges and histories of drug use, which can be impediments to joining up even if they’re in the past, and the police wanted to talk about it. Well and good. But the Ottawa police were still running potential recruits through background checks conducted by a cohort of 27 retired officers, who essentially investigate would-be new officers and advise on their suitability. (I noted this Wednesday but I’ll repeat it because it’s so stunning.) Their reports aren’t the final word but they’re important. Of those 27 ex-officers, 25 were men, one identified as GLB or T, all were white, and none was required to have taken any particular training in anything diversity-related before doing the work.
How could this be? What board of directors allows this in any hiring process?
(Maybe so few women are in the group because of a long history of institutionalized sexism, documented in separate examinations of the Ottawa police. Eighty-five per cent of 127 employees interviewed recently by outside experts, in pursuit of more gender equality, described the department’s culture in negative terms, according to a report last fall.)
Justice Michael Tulloch pointed out problems with weak oversight as a provincewide issue last spring, when he reported on improving how Ontario’s police are supervised. The core of his work was on agencies like the Special Investigations Unit, but police boards are the “first level of oversight for policing.”
The board isn’t to meddle in investigations or other “operational matters,” but it tells the police department what the people it serves expect.
Mayor Jim Watson has ceded his place on Ottawa’s board, where he sits by right of his office, to Coun. Eli El-Chantiry of West Carleton-March. As mayor, Watson still risks taking the blame if things go wrong with the police, but he’s created distance for himself. Instead, it’s a duty El-Chantiry has taken on.
El-Chantiry became a close personal friend of Vern White when White was chief, including travelling abroad for his wedding. That was always troubling: “friendly,” not “friends,” is a proper relationship for a politician overseeing someone who holds a key public trust. El-Chantiry’s not known to be as pallsy with White’s successor Charles Bordeleau, but the precedent is there.
So it’d be best for the board to bend over backwards to listen when people tell it something’s not right, as activist Jeremy Dias did last week over dysfunction in the Ottawa police’s liaison committee with the gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans communities. In a few words, the committee doesn’t seem to be taken very seriously.
“I do not have the background on the issues you raise, and further, the police services board is not involved in the operations of the committee,” El-Chantiry responded to Dias. He didn’t really know what Dias was talking about but he was sure it wasn’t his business.
When I contacted him separately, El-Chantiry declined to talk about the situation, repeating that “the board is not involved in the operations of the committee.”
It’s evidently determined to stay that way.
The board, as of the end of December, has two outstanding requests for information from the chief. Coun. Allan Hubley wants to know whether the police are collecting enough money from cost-recovery agreements — like when there’s a major event and organizers pay for extra police attention. Citizen member Sandy Smallwood wants to know how police decide what gear to wear on duty, particularly on potentially risky jobs like serving warrants.
If what police wear on the job is proper police-board business, surely how we bring new officers into the force is, too. Systemic discrimination is a central issue in policing in our time. Promoting diversity within the police is a stated goal of our department, reported on regularly to the board — thanks, in part, to an official finding that the Ottawa police, specifically, pull over darker-skinned motorists way more often than they pull over lighter-skinned ones.
We ask an unreasonable amount of our police, particularly when they have to be emergency social workers for people who should have been helped some other way long before. We need to fix that, and honour the many good cops doing their best in trying circumstances. But that doesn’t absolve the police, especially at a corporate level, of living in the 21st century. The board that oversees the department for us needs to make sure they are.
I do not have the background on the issues you raise, and further, the police services board is not involved in the operations of the committee.