Police need to face up to racism problem
We are almost all racist.
I am not referring to the overt racism that brings some people out flying Nazi flags during protests against the removal of the Confederate battle flag from public buildings and store shelves. That is more akin to pure hatred.
I’m referring instead to that much more subtle form of racism that leads us, out of ignorance of people of another race, to assume any member of it is likely to behave in a certain negative way.
In an opinion piece in the Star on July 20, Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, argued that recent allegations of police racism are baseless. He maintained that the repeated encounters between the police and black men ending in the death of the black men have nothing do with their colour. He argued it is only because of their behaviour as individuals.
Mr. McCormack argued further that policing in Toronto as a whole is done free of any greater racial bias than pervades the population in general.
What Mr. McCormack did not focus on is that when a police officer with racist beliefs brings his biases to bear he does so armed with a firearm.
Those of us who are so often exposed to people of other races behaving at their worst are vulnerable to developing especially negative racist beliefs. As a criminal defence lawyer who grew up in then allwhite Whitby, I have to remind myself constantly that most of my exposure to people of colour has been limited to learning about them based on their very worst moments. I have to also remind myself that my potential ignorance and misunderstanding of them is immense. I readily admit it is a constant struggle for me to function in a way I believe is free of racism.
I do not know if I would consider myself safe to decide whether to use a gun in my worst moments of racist fear. How can we risk a police officer who does have to decide fearing the person he is dealing with is inherently more likely to pose a threat because of his race? We must constantly work to purge these beliefs from the minds of front-line officers, or at least to ensure they recognize when they are allowing their decisions to be governed by them.
Racist beliefs are even more likely to develop if police officers are not exposed to people of the other races behaving positively.
This is my particular concern with the Toronto Police Service and racism: most of its officers do not live in the city. Torontonians are not policed by their neighbours. They are policed, in large part, by people from other places. Many of their police officers drive in from their homes in far less racially and culturally diverse suburbs, places particularly free of large pockets of concentrated, impoverished people of colour.
If your exposure to Torontonians is lim- ited to driving around in a police car only stopping to interact with them at their very worst moments, how can you possibly like them? In fact, how can you avoid developing a deep disdain for some of them?
Toronto Police Service Deputy Chief Peter Sloly conceded a few months ago that as many as 85 per cent of the force’s officers don’t live in Toronto.
It is much easier to understand and empathize with your neighbours than with strangers. Whatever the accuracy of my concern, people who make their living in the public service have an obligation to put their personal or group interests aside and face the truths that endanger the public good.
This is equally true for people like Mike McCormack and me who made our careers on the basis of public pay: McCormack for years as a police officer, and me who built his practice on clients who retained me through legal aid. We who are indebted in this way to the city have to put our associations and our law firms and our businesses and our sales numbers aside and confront racism in ourselves and others or it will rip our social fabric asunder.
How is the Toronto Police Service ever going to properly guard against the effects upon itself of the cancer of racism if the guiding force of its members’ union so resists admitting it is a problem?