WRISTBAND ‘EROSION’
Wearing wristbands to support accused city officer doesn’t help, MPP Naqvi says
Police should focus on rebuilding trust, Naqvi says
The province’s attempt to rebuild the reputation of Ontario’s police forces is at risk of being undermined by officers who choose to wear wristbands supporting one of their own who’s accused of killing a black man in a violent arrest, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi says.
“I think our collective focus as a community, and on the part of the police, is to make sure we’re rebuilding trust and respect in the community, because they’re one and the same. And actions like these could have an impact on that,” Naqvi said Friday.
“We need to make sure that we’re working hard to build that trust and respect so that communities that are served by the police have that important trust in place in terms of our safety and security.”
The Ottawa Centre MPP was back in Ottawa after releasing a report in Toronto the day before, a massive study of the way police forces are overseen and individual officers are disciplined, by Justice Michael Tulloch.
The government picked Tulloch, the first black judge on the Ontario Court of Appeal, for the task after a series of killings by police officers in Toronto — most particularly of Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old black man with mental illness, in the hallway of his apartment building.
The Special Investigations Unit concluded the officers involved in shooting Loku shouldn’t face charges, outraging plenty of Torontonians. The reasons for the conclusion were kept secret, as is the custom with SIU investigations, until public pressure got them released.
One of Tulloch’s big conclusions is that concealing the evidence behind decisions to not charge officers who kill people is bad for public faith. We’ll change that practice immediately, Naqvi said upon the report’s release Thursday.
On Friday, he chose to reinforce the point at home — in a room at the Hintonburg Community Centre, a couple of hundred steps from where Abdirahman Abdi was violently arrested last summer, where messages of support are still chalked in white on the bricks of his Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization apartment building.
Here, we’ve got a near-perfect mirror image of what happened in the Loku case.
Const. Daniel Montsion of the Ottawa Police Service is charged with manslaughter and two counts of assault in Abdi’s death. Montsion was one of several officers who responded to a call that Abdi, whose family says was mentally ill, was acting out in a Bridgehead and allegedly assaulting female customers. They chased him to the door of his nearby apartment building, took him down and — according to people who’ve seen security footage that has not been made public — Montsion hit him with hardened assault gloves, allegedly after he was incapacitated.
Now that Montsion has been charged, some police officers and supporters have bought wristbands declaring their solidarity with the accused officer.
At face value, they’re expressing fraternal support for a fellow officer in a bad spot, the same way family members might go to court with a loved one who’s accused of a crime.
At any other level of scrutiny, the wristbands make their wearers look like they’re taking sides with an accused criminal against a state that’s persecuting him and against activists who object to the way Montsion treated Abdi.
The police need to trust and be trusted if they’re going to do their jobs. They have trouble as it is getting young guys to admit they’ve been shot even when they’re bleeding in hospital, let alone say who might have done the shooting. Having cops expressing support for an officer accused of lethally striking a black man when he was already in cuffs is not helpful.
“We’ve heard from many communities that they’ve been concerned about that,” Naqvi said. “For me, I want to double our efforts in building that relationship, so we can get back on the path of community policing, exactly the sort of thing we have done well for a long time.”
Naqvi’s position is delicate. As attorney general, he’s Ontario’s chief law officer, the overseer of the court system through which Montsion’s case has just begun its journey. More broadly, Naqvi’s in charge of overseeing reforms that need buy-in from both police officers and the public to be effective. But he’s also Abdi’s MPP, a high-profile cabinet minister who’s a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan.
So he had a few lines and he picked his way through them haltingly. He said repeatedly that Ottawa police officers are professionals and he has complete confidence in their work. But appearances and perceptions still matter.
“I think we all have a collective responsibility to make sure that we all work very hard to have that strong relationship between the police and the communities. I think erosion in that trust is always dangerous,” Naqvi said. “We know one of the big genesis around this report and the work we are doing to strengthen police oversight and making it more transparent and accountable in the province of Ontario has been around that erosion of trust, which is dangerous. We have to be mindful of that. We have to continue working.” dreevely@postmedia.com Twitter.com/davidreevely