You can’t legislate police decency
Toronto’s police just can’t help themselves. They know we are paying unprecedented attention to their interactions with residents, but many police continue to bully rather than serve us. On Wednesday, the province released a set of regulations meant to restrict carding, the police practice of stopping civilians who are not suspected of a crime and documenting their information.
The Wynne government is finally acknowledging that residents’ stories of intimidation and surveillance are credible, and deserve a response. It’s a welcome, if long overdue, development. But new rules cannot, on their own, reverse a police culture of aggression and hostility towards residents, especially black Torontonians. We can’t regulate decency and respect in policing, but we must nevertheless demand it.
On a windy Sunday afternoon in September, I met a young man named Mike Miller in the common room of an apartment building near Jane and Trethewey. Miller asked to interview me for a community project he’s working on to inform local residents of their rights when dealing with the police. I was happy to spend time with him and to meet other residents who have concerns about negative police interactions.
As the Star reported this week, Miller was accosted and intimidated by local police the day after I met with him, as he attempted to film an interaction between the police and a young man in his neighbourhood. Additional officers arrived at the scene, got right up in Miller’s face to block his view, and demanded to know why he was recording the events.
Miller, who is black, held his own admirably and tried to keep filming. He knew he had the right to do so in public. But that didn’t stop officers from the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Service (TAVIS) from treating him like a criminal suspect and invading his personal space.
He noted that when residents try to assert their rights, they often receive this kind of treatment from police: “They want to put you in your place and belittle you and make you feel humiliated.”
The officers’ reprehensible behaviour is probably not against any law, and will not be explicitly banned by any provincial mandate. Police say they are reviewing the officers’ conduct — even if they are disciplined, the secretive nature of police oversight means we may never hear about it.
Miller’s knowledge of his rights did not prevent officers from antagonizing him, and he must now live with the effects of their intimidation.
Too many residents — especially those who are black, indigenous, homeless or living with mental illness — can recount stories similar to Miller’s. They rarely have the video evidence to prove what we should all collectively know by now: the police regularly abuse their authority when dealing with vulnerable and marginalized people.
New rules and technologies can help discourage bad behaviour and hold officers to account when they transgress, but without tackling the ingrained culture of police intimidation no real solution to this problem is possible.
Indeed, the arresting officers in Miller’s incident directed their TAVIS colleagues to “turn the camera on that guy,” to use their recording devices as a tool of intimidation. Equipping police with body cameras is different from insisting that police respect all residents, and ensuring that those who do not are taken off the streets.
Likewise, provincial rules on carding, which have simply not existed until now, can’t fully eliminate arbitrary police stops or disproportionate police suspicion of black people.
It makes no difference that the TAVIS officers who accosted Miller are themselves black; if the expectation in police culture is to treat black residents with greater suspicion and less respect, all officers must fall in line, or must face internal scrutiny for failing to play the game.
It took too long for the province to object to carding. It will be many months before the new regulations are critiqued, modified and passed. Even then, it will be up to local police services boards, many of whom have shown no interest in stopping carding, to make the proposed changes real. But carding is just an ugly manifestation of the dominant social belief that blacks and other marginalized people need to be kept in line with aggression, dominance and disrespect.
We should not need stories like Miller’s, which Toronto residents have been telling in vain for decades, to spur us into action. It’s a given that police will sometimes abuse their power, especially when dealing with people the general public is already reluctant to defend.
So bring on the new rules for carding — they will never be a substitute for decency in policing, for a broader commitment to protect marginalized people from abuses of power.
On that score, our work is only beginning. Desmond Cole’s column appears every Thursday.