Dispute with police ends with glum revelation
Five authors have been nominated for the 2017 Toronto Book Award. This week, the Star is running excerpts from each book to give readers a flavour for each of them. The final excerpt will run Thursday, the evening the winner is announced at a ceremony — open to the public — at the Toronto Reference Library’s Appel Salon. Today, B. Denham Jolly’s book In The Black: My Life, published by ECW Press.
When you are Black in Canada, the arrival of the police on the scene is not always, or even often, reassuring.
Three years ago, on Parliament Street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, not far from where I live, I had a fender bender. I was exchanging insurance information with the other driver when a police officer came to take charge of the situation. There was nothing really for him to do, but he told me that I should call a tow truck to get my car towed away.
I told him, very politely, that it wasn’t a problem. The car was only dented, and I could easily drive it to a garage. But he insisted.
When I balked, he immediately escalated. “You have to get a tow truck,” he said.
I found this incomprehensible — towing a car away when it only had a dent. But the officer looked at me contemptuously.
“What do I have to do to make sure you do, put a gun in your face?”
For a moment, I could not believe my ears. A threat like that, made almost casually on a busy Toronto street. I was in my late seventies and my first thought was, what if I had been a Black kid in his twenties? Would he have threatened to draw his gun or have simply done so? Far too often in Toronto’s recent history that had been the case, and dozens of Black kids had been killed that way.
That thought angered me, but I was not seeking a confrontation. I said nothing. I called the tow truck.
But I did not want to let the matter pass. I filed an official complaint with the department. I made it clear that I wasn’t asking that the officer be fired but that he receive some kind of counselling to address his threatening behaviour before someone was hurt.
At first, the department brushed aside my complaint with the excuse that the officer was already in trouble for other indiscretions and he was about to be charged. This turned out to be untrue. I pursued my case as far as I could, but it was clear the Toronto police department wasn’t interested in dealing with it. I complained and appealed all the way to the chief of police, Bill Blair.
The department’s investigation showed that the officer had his body speaker turned off during the confrontation. They believed him when he denied saying those words. The verdict was clear. “We can’t substantiate your claim.” End of story.
I did get to see the police report, however, and the opening phrase told me everything I needed to know about what was behind the incident. The report began with, “The complainant, a seventy-seven-year-old Jamaican immigrant . . .”
At the time, I had lived in Canada more than fifty-five years, longer than the officer had been alive, and I had been a citizen for almost fifty years. If I had been a white man, my origins would have been irrelevant. But a Black man, by definition, had to be identified as the “other,” not as someone who had been a Canadian for half a century. I was forever a “Jamaican immigrant.” That is why he could threaten to put a gun in my face and then lie about it.
Who would believe a Jamaican immigrant?
Part of my story is about Canada’s uncomfortable struggle with Blackness, which I experienced that day on Parliament Street and on thousands of other occasions.
This is a reality in Canada. Excerpted from In the Black: My Life by B. Denham Jolly. © 2017 by B. Denham Jolly. Published by ECW Press Ltd. ecwpress.com.