Too few held accountable,
For many of us who grew up in Toronto, the Toronto that was, cops spoke with English, Scottish and Irish accents. They were not our friends. They were domineering. They were feared. They were the law unto themselves, and banged heads. Best to steer clear of the whole bunch.
The police have diversified since, in ancestry and colour, if not necessarily attitudes.
When they do wrong, there is rarely a price to be paid. Juries give them a pass; judges continue cleaving to the view that officers are an extension of the justice system they uphold, meriting the immense latitude they’re granted; and disciplinary hearings routinely come down to the blue judging the blue, an inside job.
Belfast-born Supt. David (Mark) Fenton, with 26 years and 11 months on the force, is old school. When he cast his eyes upon the mayhem unfolding during the notorious G20 riots five years ago, he saw a mob “engaged. . . in terrorism,” not greatly different from the violent scenes witnessed during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.
And on one of the nights that June weekend, Fenton wasn’t far wrong. The Black Bloc had descended on the city with the specific purpose of causing havoc.
They burned cruisers and smashed storefront windows. Afterward, they removed their balaclavas, their bandanas, and melted into the crowd.
But that was Friday, June 25, when officers mostly stood by and — to their shame — did nothing as Toronto became a city unrecognizable to those who lived here. By the following afternoon, as Fenton began his shift as incident commander — responsible for overall operational and tactical control of all units assigned to the G20 Summit — the shocking violence had spent itself.
Half a dozen people had been arrested that day in possession of golf balls and frozen water bottles, while a handful of Black Bloc anarchists were discovered either preparing Molotov cocktails or in possession of incendiary devices.
Thousands of participants had gathered on the Queen’s Park lawn for a scheduled demonstration, and protest marches wound through the streets.
These were peaceful protesters, exercising their constitutional right to holler or jeer or whatever — well within the law.
But Fenton, hard-nut cop, seemingly didn’t see a peaceful tableau — and indeed, there were violent clashes with police at the Legislature, provoked by both sides, with cops wading into the crowd and Black Bloc members, throwing sticks and objects, using that crowd as a buffer between themselves and police as they darted down side streets.
Doubtless dismayed by what he’d observed the previous evening, and alert to a directive that had purportedly come down from chief Bill Blair through deputy chief Tony Warr to “take back the streets,” Fenton set about doing that to a monstrously unreasonable degree: hundreds of innocent protesters “kettled,” blockaded in two separate masses of writhing and miserable humanity outside the Novotel Hotel on the Esplanade and at Queen and Spadina, the latter held through a frigid downpour, with no egress route for anyone who wanted to leave, even uninvolved bystanders and journalists.
Fenton didn’t see un-threatening protesters. He saw terrorists.
For the unjustified orders he issued that day, Fenton was convicted Tuesday on two of three charges of exercising unlawful or unnecessary authority, and on one of two charges of discreditable conduct.
Sentencing — which could range from a reprimand to dismissal — won’t be made until at least December, by which point Fenton might have taken retirement, thus placing him beyond the reach of retired judge John Hamilton, who presided over the disciplinary hearing.
Part of me feels some sympathy for Fenton, career cop with an unblemished record. Those were chaotic days, the Summit, with law enforcement given insufficient time to prepare a security plan after Prime Minister Stephen Harper abruptly moved the event from Huntsville to downtown Toronto.
Cops searched and arrested with- out due cause, operating under an obscure, secret and deplorably applied regulation passed by the Ontario government mere weeks earlier. (It was only scrapped this past June.)
All the stars misaligned in what Ontario Ombudsman André Marin, in a subsequent report, described as “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”
From the head-banging, baton-jabbing and boot-stomping that occurred over that weekend, only one cop — Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani — has been convicted in a criminal court, and his teeny 45-day jail sentence was later replaced with probation and community service.
Of the eight officers found guilty by police disciplinary tribunal hearings of committing serious wrongdoing, only four received penalties, ranging from a reprimand to five days’ docked pay and a two-month demotion.
And now, more than five years after the fact, Fenton.
On the surface, the police hearing verdict — conducted by a respected outside judge appointed by Blair — suggests a culture change in policing accountability. But it’s a dog’s bone all the same.
“What we witnessed in the downtown streets was far from the protest mantra of ‘This is what democracy looks like,’ ” Hamilton told the hearing yesterday, distilling the facts and testimony contained in his 158-page decision.
Public order units and uniformed cops were “barely able to keep up with the hooligans.” But of course there were hooligans and non-anarchists thrown together.
Fenton, said Hamilton, was “frustrated by the lawlessness . . . fearful about what was yet to come. For all the planning and sophisticated operational documents, and the command hierarchy put in place by the RCMP and the Toronto Police Service, the public service officers on the ground during the G20 were caught flat-footed.’’
Fenton’s “carte blanche decision” far exceeded his authority even if, as Hamilton noted, evidence had indicated the superintendent expected bystanders would not be arrested at either location.
“Had bystanders been excluded from the containment, and not subject to arrest, that still would have left legitimate protesters. They had the right not to be subject to arrest for making noise, chanting and sitting in the public street.
“The decision to order mass arrests demonstrated a lack of understanding of the right to be protest . . . His use of power was not rationally connected to the purported risk to be managed.”
On the stand, Fenton assumed what’s commonly called the Nuremberg defence — just following orders from a superior. But whose order, really? Whether it came from Blair is a crucial detail we may never know. Hamilton ruled that the chief could not be subpoenaed to testify because the Police Services Act didn’t allow it; Blair could not be compelled to testify, as lawyers representing the complainants had sought, because, technically, the chief is the hearing’s officer, with Hamilton his designated representative.
Further — and this was jaw-dropping — Hamilton ruled the Blair’s evidence would be irrelevant to the hearing.
Blair is no longer a cop, he’s a Liberal candidate in the federal election. He’s given no indication of wishing to explain his role in these controversial events, now tied firmly to one of his most senior and trusted command officers.
On the hustings, somebody must ask:
Et tu Bill? Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.