Racism at centre of inquest debate
Lawyer files last-minute motion to address ‘elephant in the room’
The final day of testimony at the Andrew Loku coroner’s inquest homed in on racism and implicit bias, though not before an impassioned debate between lawyers and an 11th hour motion to allow for the explicit mention of racism.
Now into its third week, the inquest has explored the causes contributing to the police shooting death of Loku, a Black mentally ill man killed by Toronto police Const. Andrew Doyle while Loku walked toward him holding a hammer.
As the last witness called, Dr. Kwame McKenzie, a psychiatrist and the director of health equity at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, stressed the need for organizations to acknowledge that racism exists in their institutions as a first step to enacting change.
“It’s 2017. Everyone knows that racism exists,” McKenzie told the inquest.
“Good people in good organizations put their hands up and say: ‘We know it exists and we’re going to do something about it.’ ”
Prior to taking the stand, McKenzie’s testimony caused some last-minute debate among the inquest parties, which include lawyers for the officers involved, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders and rights groups.
These groups include the Black Action Defence Committee (BADC), the Canadian Mental Health Association and Across Boundaries, a mental-health organization serving racialized communities.
While implicit bias had been approved as part of the scope negotiated by parties before the inquest began, racism was not.
In discussions in the absence of the fiveperson jury Monday, lawyers debated the use of the word, which has been included in a summary of McKenzie’s anticipated testimony.
Howard Morton, lawyer for Across Boundaries, the group that called McKenzie as a witness, said there was “nothing wrong with confronting a live issue like racism.”
“To deprive me of the use of the word racism . . . it just confounds me and I’m flummoxed to the nth degree about why we’re all afraid of that term,” he said. Marianne Wright, a lawyer representing Saunders, said the parties “should stick to the notions which are within the scope of the inquest,” including issues of intercultural competence.
“I’m struggling with the emotional content of the word racism,” she said.
Citing Ontario’s Coroner’s Act, which states inquests can only deal with the circumstances of the death, Carlisle ruled late Monday that “questions of the witness will not explore the topic of racism.”
The move provoked a last-minute application from BADC lawyer Selwyn Pieters asking for reconsideration.
“It is a manifest error in the context of this case to speak of implicit bias and exclude racism,” Pieters wrote in the motion. “Racism is the elephant in the room in this case.”
While Carlisle’s ruling was not overturned, in the end neither McKenzie nor inquest lawyers were prohibited from discussing issues of institutional racism, on which McKenzie is an expert. Outside coroner’s court Tuesday after McKenzie’s testimony had wrapped up, Pieters said he was pleased with the result.
“Today, the witness was able to be questioned unimpeded and to delve into the issue of racism, and antiBlack racism, and I think we made some headway,” he said.
In an interview outside the inquest, Idil Abdillahi, ex-officio board chair for Across Boundaries, called for a change to the Coroner’s Act to allow for the examination of broader issues at inquests, including racism.
“We can’t ignore that this man was a Black man,” she said of Loku, who was a client of Across Boundaries. “This active refusal to engage race and racism is what we see playing out here.”
On the stand, McKenzie stressed the importance of collecting racebased statistics on encounters that result in a police officer using force. Toronto police have to-date not collected this information, in part because the forms that are mandatory to fill out after every incident are controlled by the province and do not have a field for such information.
In August 2015, one month after Loku was killed, an analysis by the Toronto Star found that, of the 51 fatal shootings involving the Toronto police between 1990 and 2015, at least 18 involved Black men, representing 35 per cent of fatal police shootings. Toronto’s black population at the time was roughly 9 per cent. In 17 cases, or 33 per cent, it was not possible to identify for certain the racial background of the person killed.
“If you don’t count things, then people don’t count — and the people who are not counted really don’t count,” McKenzie said.
Earlier this week, jurors heard from Toronto police Insp. Chris Boddy, who said the Toronto Police Service is committed to collecting racebased data on use-of-force incidents and is in the midst of drafting of a new form. It will then advise the province for final approval, he said.
“I can tell you that we are going to be collecting race-based data,” he said, adding that changes are also being made to the Toronto police’s own form on the use of conducted energy weapons, in order to capture race and mental-health information.
Asked about whether the Toronto police wanted to gather this data in order to understand use-of-force is- sues surrounding the intersectionality of race and mental-health status, Boddy said Toronto police are “very interested to have and understand that information.”
“And I know the community is as well, so we’re going to do it,” he said.
Boddy also stressed that there is an explicit goal within the police service, communicated to all officers in mandatory annual in-service training, to have zero harm and zero deaths in encounters with the public.
The inquest also heard Monday from Staff Sgt. Ali Virji, who told jurors about the bias-free policing training recently adopted by the Toronto police. Every one of the approximately 5,000 uniform officers have received the one-day training, and elements of it have also been incorporated into the annual in-service training. “We are hoping for zero bias,” Virji said.
The inquest resumes Friday, when the coroner will formally charge the jury, who may make recommendations on how to prevent similar deaths. Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca