HE SHOULD BE HEARD
Parking cop who publicly admonished drivers parked in bike lanes shouldn’t be silenced.
Kyle Ashley became a hero to Toronto cyclists. After years of complaints to Toronto police that often went nowhere, cyclists finally had their champion cop. Armed with a ticket book and a smartphone, he doled out fines and took to Twitter to publicly admonish drivers and corporations who routinely parked in bike lanes.
Then last week, he went silent as his Twitter account disappeared.
Officially, he deactivated his account on Nov. 3, after being visited by two Toronto Police Service supervisors who admonished him for his tweets and said his account is being reviewed for “appropriateness” after “numerous” complaints.
If Toronto police always responded to “numerous” complaints this quickly, issues like the random carding of young men of colour would have ended a long time ago. In this case, Ashley’s tweets were often cheeky, and he posted selfies while making funny faces at the illegally parked vehicles he was ticketing. He was also a very human tweeter, wearing his heart on his sleeve; emotionally involved in work he genuinely seemed to love. In short, he was the public advocate bike lane protection needed.
Where he crossed a line was likely when he criticized city Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a bike lane opponent, and MPP Yvan Baker, who targeted “distracted pedestrians” with his recent private member’s bill rather than drivers and bad road design. Councillor Shelley Carroll, who’s a member of the police services board that oversees the force, said she was worried his tweets were veering from advocacy to “purely political” territory.
Indeed, getting political in public can be dangerous. Anybody who works for somebody has to worry about this. What if certain political views aren’t in line with the boss? Or the boss’s boss? Or the people who buy the boss’s product? Or the people who vote for the boss? Public opinions and feelings are a tricky business. Whether or not that’s fair is another debate.
It’s an interesting question, though. What is political? For those who don’t care to tweet, think of tweeting as standing on the corner and speaking your mind aloud. Somebody’s inevitably going to come along and not like what you’re saying.
As a freelance writer, I have among the most liberty to tweet as anybody, yet still I have to think about what I say. There’s this newspaper that lets me write for them that I have to think about. There’s the University of Toronto where I teach to think about. There’s my mom.
All of those institutions, mom included, allow me a lot of liberty to express what I hope is an informed opinion, more than average employers, but ultimately it’s my own reputation that I have to think about. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts, but can they be backed up with reason and truth? And if so, is it the right time to express them? It’s as important to know when to keep the powder dry, as it is to know when to light it all up to make an important point.
That’s probably why Ashley’s tweets in defence of the bike lanes were so powerful and fierce, and why many people saw him as a hero: he lit his powder at the right time and brought needed attention to the issue. He’s a public servant, though, whose head rose above the rest, taking a principled stand in defence of the work he was hired to do.
Other public servants in higher positions have felt the heat when they’ve done that.
At Statistics Canada, chief statistician Munir Sheikh resigned in 2010 when the long-form census was cancelled, and in 2016 Wayne Smith resigned from the same position over his agency’s loss of independence. Closer to home in Toronto, TTC chief general manager Gary Webster was fired in 2012 when he resisted Mayor Rob Ford’s subway scheme, and many see chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat’s recent departure as a result of her early public resistance to Mayor John Tory’s championing of Ford’s subway plan.
With this climate in mind, Ashley’s strong voice from the ground was likely doomed.
What’s curious about Ashley’s case is other kinds of politics have made their way into police tweets without this kind of response. This past summer, the Toronto District School Board was debating whether or not to keep controversial “School Resource Officers” in certain schools that critics said targeted racialized communities and gave schools a prison-like atmosphere.
Though the TDSB ultimately decided to temporarily suspend the program, a number of members of the police force tweeted support for it. That every one of their Twitter accounts wasn’t shut down in order to review their tweets for appropriateness is a continued indication of where bike lanes fit into the hierarchy of what matters in police headquarters.
Most people aren’t on Twitter, so the politics that play out there may not seem to matter, but an awful lot of Toronto’s political machinations, and some of its theatre, play out on Twitter. It’s part of what the ancient Greeks called the “agora,” a civic gathering space. Not all citizens choose to visit their agora, but it’s where things that affect them happen.
So Ashley’s tweets defending bike lanes, something he was hired to do, were important and he should be allowed to continue. Lots of cops on Twitter tweet passionately about the dangers of drinking and driving. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Ashley’s advocacy for road safety was in the same tradition.
The line all civil servants walk when doing their job in public is between speaking truth and speaking truth to power. Ashley likely got in trouble when he spoke truth to power in criticizing his political bosses.
Let him defend what he’s been trained to defend and speak, or tweet, that truth as he did.
However, truth to power is best left to voters and others with more liberty, because for a civil servant with limited powder, that’s the nuclear option and can only be used once. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef