TRANSFORMING THE POLICE
DART was one of the most criticized units in the Ottawa police, frequently labelled by bystanders and marginalized communities as uncompromising and heavy-handed. So in came PIVOT, a new unit with a friendlier face.
In the summer of 2016, witness reports came pouring in of a man groping women at a coffee shop in Hintonburg. Two police officers rushed to the scene and an elaborate chase unfolded as neighbours came streaming out of their homes to view the commotion weaving through their streets.
It ended with the man — Abdirahman Abdi, a mentally ill Somali-Canadian — unconscious on the doorstep of his apartment building on Hilda Street. He would later be pronounced dead in hospital.
Bystander video that day would show two officers at the scene — one in a regular Ottawa Police Service uniform and the other in a specialized uniform with the word “DART” emblazoned on the back of his Kevlar vest.
The acronym stood for Direct Action Response Team — a group of highly trained enforcement officers who dealt with high-risk offenders, which in Ottawa meant a cast of characters from gang members to homicide suspects. The team primarily worked alongside the guns and gangs unit, which investigated street gang and firearms crime. DART was supposed to suppress potential offences and criminal behaviours before they happened.
That summer in 2016, DART would be thrust into the spotlight — and not just because of its officer’s involvement in the fatal altercation. In the wake of what happened on Hilda, questions were raised about what DART was, what it did and the equipment and protective gear that were issued to its officers.
Abdi’s death also reignited tensions between the unit and racialized communities, which had long complained about the use of what some argued were ham-handed tactics that only fractured the relationship between police and community.
What has followed is the high-profile and unfinished manslaughter trial of then-DART Const. Daniel Montsion for the death of Abdi. Montsion has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. Questions about what happened that summer have started to be answered through evidence, but no finding of cause or fault has yet been established. What’s largely gone unnoticed in the aftermath of Abdi’s death is that in the growth of the city, in the continued fight against gun violence and in the renewed talks about race relations with the police, DART, as it was once formulated, no longer exists.
In 2018, before the trial began and long after any charges were laid against the officer, the Ottawa
Police Service changed the name and mandate of the unit. DART was out, Prevention and Intervention of Violence in Ottawa (PIVOT) was in.
PIVOT is now the “social arm” of the guns and gangs unit. While the unit is still expected to knock on doors and make sure offenders are abiding by their court-ordered release conditions, there was a growing realization that the enforcers needed co-operation from communities to deal with street violence and gang activity. Officers couldn’t be alienated from the communities they policed. The more integrated they were, the greater the chance for success.
If DART was a unit singularly focused on enforcement and suppression — and often viewed by bystanders and community groups as heavy handed — then PIVOT is the evolution of officers toggling between community and enforcement. It’s the carrot and the stick — two necessary sides of the same coin.
The change means one of the Ottawa police force’s most hardline, highly visible and heavily scrutinized units is remaking itself as it attempts to gain the trust of and build stronger relationships with marginalized communities, which have so often felt pushed to the fringes.
Even after the unit’s name change and mandate shift, the primary work of PIVOT is still to hold offenders to account and suppress criminal activity, which is what its officers spend the bulk of their time doing.
It’s a Friday morning in September. Multiple PIVOT cars are parked in a lot in the east end, waiting for their target to get out of bed and emerge into the world, usually sometime around noon. He was under surveillance for some time as the suspected gunman in a shooting. The gun was discarded and found several blocks from the scene, where police allege the man popped off several rounds at a vehicle. There were no injuries.
Prior surveillance of the man gave police information — his behaviours and patterns, his associates. Detectives finally have the evidence to charge him and PIVOT gathers for the takedown.
There’s a false alarm when a man matching parts of the target’s description is seen. Then, the suspect emerges in a red, black and white Adidas sweater and officers see him loading up in a black Honda Civic. One transmits over the covert radio: “Our boy” is out.
The target is with another man, who is behind the wheel and driving with a suspended license, officers know. They can do a valid traffic stop to pull them over, now that the car is in motion, if they need to. But something’s off — the car is manoeuvring oddly and police fear the men might have identified their unmarked vehicles.
“He’s (messing) around here. I don’t know if he knows we are on him,” an officer says over the radio. Plainclothes detectives in unmarked cruisers and PIVOT officers in uniforms and marked vehicles are all on the Civic’s trail, with PIVOT hanging back waiting for the call to move in.
The plan now is to get one of the police vehicles in front of the Civic and box it in.
“Just go ahead and light him up, then.”
Nearly a dozen police officers, moving like a synchronized team, get out of their vehicles and descend on the Civic. No one inside will open the doors. Bystanders see the commotion at a busy east-end intersection and spill out of nearby businesses, phones out to record the takedown. The target finally exits the car and gets down on the ground. But the driver won’t open the door and the vehicle continues moving before tapping the police car in front of it. An officer reaches into the Civic once the driver’s door is open and puts the car in park.
It’s all over in a matter of seconds. Both men are handcuffed and taken into custody.
Police charge the 20-year-old target with a slew of weapons offences and breaching his conditions.
If you’re looking to understand how marginalized communities and suspected and known gang members in Ottawa viewed DART, look no further than social media. Years of YouTube videos show users blasting the unit, labelling takedowns as police brutality and alleging rights breaches or warrantless searches.
DART launched in November 2007, modelled on the Toronto police force’s gang-suppression unit, which formed the year before in response to what was then record-high gun violence in 2005, the so-called “summer of the gun.”
The Ottawa team was initially intended to monitor gang activity and identify youth at risk of joining gangs. Within hours of its debut, officers charged a gang member and seized crack cocaine valued at about $11,000.
The prevailing thinking at the time was that having officers out in the community dedicated to gang work would be a strong deterrent. Officers were ensuring known gang members weren’t violating their court-ordered conditions, gathering intelligence, educating at-risk youth and diverting them elsewhere.
The team began as a pilot after the province committed funding to help police services outside of Toronto
combat increasing gang activity. The unit was supposed to be highly visible and high profile and, by nature of the work, deployed to high-crime areas. You were to take notice of DART. And people did.
West-end rappers, known to guns and gangs, would warn that “DART’s watching.”
DART was the only unit with a modified police cruiser. All of the decals, which continue to be used by PIVOT, were light grey against the white car. In the dead of night or on a sunny day, in the right angle, you might not even know it’s a police vehicle. Their particular appearance prompted local gangand drug-involved suspects to call them “ghost cars.”
“Goddamn, that’s a DART car,” lyrics would lament. “F--- the f----g DART squad.”
Bad guys were, expectedly, displeased by the unit’s crime-fighting efforts, but that distrust was seeping into the community, too.
Leo Russomanno is a criminal defence lawyer who’s defended people charged by guns and gangs, DART and PIVOT.
“I think in racialized communities in Ottawa, DART was perceived as basically the sort of front lines of overpolicing of racialized communities,” he says. “To the extent that they were involved in community policing, it was for the purpose of criminalizing those same groups, so it’s not surprising the amount of mistrust for that unit, given that their interactions often ended in criminal charges and not a lot of trust building.”
In 2017, DART’s predecessor in Toronto was disbanded amid growing criticism from the judiciary and community about rights breaches and the practice of “carding” or street checks. But officers there felt the unit was doing what it was supposed to, which was keeping gangs and the criminal element in check.
In Ottawa, police created an outreach team after Abdi’s death to understand its impact on the community. The team’s final report reads like an opus on the state of the police’s race and community relations. It makes several recommendations based on how various communities see the police. Among the findings is that DART was viewed with suspicion and anxiety by racialized communities.
“DART is known as a Racial Profiling Unit within the Somali, Arab and Black communities. Somali youth have claimed beatings and confiscation of property illegally at the hands of DART members,” the report found.
Among the report’s recommendations is to review the unit’s mandate to make sure community concerns are addressed and to consider a “two-pronged approach” that would include prevention and community intervention strategies along with enforcement.
There’s no question the unit needed to be visible, but also not an enemy, says Staff Sgt. Kulvir Guram, who heads both the guns and gangs unit and the rebranded PIVOT. The same communities serving as backdrops for bystander YouTube videos — with views of busted doors and raided houses — were also the homes of marginalized groups victimized by street violence. They were the collateral damage of the drugs being sold, the homes being taken over and the bullets flying.
It was a delicate balancing act. Officers needed to respond to the concerns of the community — suppressing the gang involvement that made them unsafe — but had to do so with as little impact as possible to residents and families, who were already the victims of street violence.
“It became evident that the initial model, that DART, needed to change,” Guram says. “It wasn’t a model that was sensitive to the unique nature and characteristics of the communities in which it worked, it didn’t emphasize the importance of building relationships and trust within the community and, in many cases, was simply perceived as being a heavy handed enforcement initiative.”
That rebirth, Guram says, was driven by front-line cops.
“A number of officers, primarily racialized, who had strong connections with racialized and marginalized communities across the city and who understood the limitations of the DART model led the effort. They actually created the template on which PIVOT is based. A model for a unit that was more culturally competent, engaged and respectful of the communities they were working with.”
Police changed the unit’s name to reflect the new mission — a signal both externally and internally. To the community, Ottawa police were saying that the force was listening to their concerns. To its officers, police were telling them new skills, knowledge and abilities were needed.
Guram says he hopes “the new team is more visible in community spaces and is seen to be an ally and support for communities that are already struggling with the impacts of street and gang violence.”
PIVOT is focused on “connecting with youth and those community partners that support the development of strong and resilient youth and families.”
Strong relationships mean police are better able to “understand the challenges in our city and, importantly for the police, how we might best target those few individuals who disrupt the safety and well-being of our neighbourhoods.”
How officers target those individuals has also changed.
In 2015, police and their partners estimated there were eight active gangs with 435 members and associates. But police aren’t, by and large, dealing with organized groups with established gang colours and signs these days. What’s taken its place are disorganized, loosely connected cells of individuals willing to commit crime together for mutual benefit. The best estimates are that the bulk of those individuals are young men between the ages of 20 and 30 from a diverse array of racial backgrounds.
Police can no longer drop into high-crime areas and ask for identifying information of everyone in sight or stop people without suspicion of a crime. It was that kind of behaviour — though law enforcement argued it was necessary policing and legal information gathering — that made law-abiding members of the community wary.
I have placed great emphasis on creating a unit that is culturally competent, understands the communities that we are working with and that has the right skills and abilities to be successful.
The move to PIVOT is part of a larger discussion of Ottawa police needing to reflect the communities they serve. Not only are some of their persons of interest visible minorities, but the neighbourhoods in which gang-related crime is often committed are racially diverse.
“What I can tell you is that I have placed great emphasis on creating a unit that is culturally competent, understands the communities that we are working with and that has the right skills and abilities to be successful,” Guram says. “Part of that is ensuring that we have more women and diversity within the team. This helps us connect with young people and families and to build strong, trusting partnerships that allow us to target street and gang violence. This is much closer to the original vision of that group of racialized members who laid the foundation for PIVOT. We still have work to do, but we are improving.”
In Ritchie, a west-end neighbourhood that’s witnessed gang and gun violence, police still fly their colours.
They do routine drive-bys and walk-throughs, showing the ghost car and their vest patches — both rebranded as PIVOT. One officer calls herself a “walking billboard.”
Most offenders know PIVOT is the new DART. The young ones learn and the older ones always knew.
Residents might routinely question their presence, but for police it’s a must, says PIVOT Const. Kevin Graham. “We want to make sure no one gets killed in this community.”
Part of making people feel less weary of the officers’ presence is having the unit there for other community centred reasons, too.
On a Thursday evening in October, one of the two PIVOT teams heads to the Boys and Girls Clubhouse on Dumaurier Avenue near Ritchie, where officers can forge relationships, sowing seeds for early intervention of kids at risk of becoming involved in a criminal lifestyle.
“What are you guys doing here?” asks a little girl with a smile on her face when the team rolls in. “Chillin’,” says Graham.
A horde of kids emerges to greet the cops, running from the various activity areas at the drop-in centre. Graham, complete with a vest and all of his use-of-force options, plays a little basketball with some of the kids.
“How come you’re so good, but you’re a cop?” one asks.
Other officers will play pool, ping-pong or Pokemon cards with the children.
The team sees a little girl whose family was the victim of a house fire in recent weeks. They’re staying at a hotel in Bells Corners.
“What do they need?” asks an officer.
“Food,” says Graham.
“OK, we’ll do something.”
The next week, officers delivered hundreds of dollars in gift cards, groceries, donated blankets and clothing to the family.
The children who go to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Ottawa typically live in the same low-income housing developments, like Britannia Woods on Ritchie Street or Foster Farm on Ramsey Crescent, that have served as hotbeds for some of the city’s most violent offenders.
Community leaders know it’s a cycle and any intervention to give youngsters a reasonable path out of that is worth exploring.
The parents of the kids who use the drop-in centre are looking for childcare solutions, to divert free time and to put their kids into positive programming. It’s a place co-ordinators are happy to invite police officers.
Kim Prescott, the youth development and program specialist at the Boys and Girls Club, says the kids served by the centre, who range in age from six to 18, are usually happy to see the officers come in.
“They get excited. They want to learn, they want to ask a whole bunch of questions, they like seeing them here,” she says.
She knows the club is a safe space for kids. If officers are coming into the building, the children know they are there to help. It’s that positive relationship that police hope will translate to interactions outside of the club.
“There is a positive influence,” Prescott says. Kids feel comfortable asking why some arrests were made or what the criteria was for why someone was handcuffed.
Before they leave the club, a girl closes her eyes and asks a PIVOT officer to catch her in a trust fall. The officer catches her without any risk of falling.
From there, the team heads to an apartment building on Richmond Road where they have concerns about a vulnerable young man at risk of having his home taken over. He called police earlier, afraid and with a tip that there could be a gun in the apartment. Officers visited earlier in the day to try to help him, but arrived just a few minutes after the others in the apartment left.
When PIVOT returns in the evening, the apartment has been ransacked. Cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen are all open as if someone had gone through them, looking for something.
Police chat with the man to make sure he’s OK.
“Thank you, officers,” he says as he closes the apartment door.
The traditional work of gang suppression hasn’t fundamentally changed. PIVOT is still conducting compliance checks, knocking on doors, pulling vehicles over and taking down suspects.
Officers still show up at the shows of local rappers and disrupt gang-related patronage at local businesses. But police are trying to redefine their relationship with communities and are hopeful that the changes to DART can satisfy both the needs of the community and the duty to protect.
“I do think our community is recognizing the efforts the team is making to be more visible and approachable,” says Guram. “And from an offender perspective, they do appreciate that this team is highly skilled and competent and able to hold them to account for their actions.”
Graham, a black officer who says he has experienced first-hand the distrust some marginalized groups have displayed toward police, says PIVOT’s strategy is meant to familiarize people with the authority figures they so often vilify.
“We’re trying to do something different,” he says. “We hope they’re getting it.”
There will be moments of force and times when public safety dictates a different approach, one that will unfortunately resemble the kinds of behaviour that prompted criticism in the first place.
“We do have to come into your community sometimes and arrest people,” he says.
But the point is that it’s not the only approach.