Public needs quick answers
Something went very badly wrong last week when Toronto police responded to urgent calls for help at a west-end apartment building.
That much is self-evident. When the family of Regis Korchinski-Paquet called 911 they were looking for help for a person who was apparently in mental distress. Instead, the 29-year-old Black woman ended up falling to her death from the 24th floor of the building.
That’s a failure by any measure. But what exactly happened? What role, if any, did police have in her death? Is anyone to blame, and if so, who? Amid the justified rage on both sides of the border over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, people are rightly seeking accountability, justice and answers.
There’s no mystery how Floyd died. A white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes as he cried out “I can’t breathe.” His life was literally choked out of him while cameras recorded the entire scene.
It was an appalling act, and Floyd’s name joins a long list of Black people who have died at the hands of U.S. police in recent years. The anger has understandably overflowed in protests and riots across the country.
Canadians, too, have poured into the streets in their thousands, protesting not just the deaths in the U.S. and here but the systemic racism that blights the lives of far too many people — a reality starkly highlighted in recent weeks by the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken in minority communities. Racism, it turns out, can kill in many ways.
But if the cause of Floyd’s death is tragically clear, that of Korchinski-Paquet is anything but. Her family and the public are in the dark about what happened in that apartment and likely will be for quite some time to come.
That vacuum of information is filled with the darkest kind of speculation, shaped by suspicion about police conduct in a string of incidents involving people in distress. From Sammy Yatim in 2013 to George Loku in 2015, to D’Andre Campbell in April of this year, people in crisis in the Toronto area have ended up dead after encounters with police.
And in too many cases it’s never quite clear what happened for the simple reason that Toronto police don’t wear body cameras.
Just about everyone agrees that bodycams are a good idea in principle: If police misbehave, or worse, in encounters with the public all that will be recorded, and if police conduct themselves according to the rules officers will have a way of defending themselves.
In Toronto, body cameras have been debated at the highest levels since 2015 and the force even conducted a yearlong pilot project to iron out issues from privacy to battery life. In December, Chief Mark Saunders said they’d be rolled out late this year — too late for them to be in use when his officers answered the call from the family of Korchinski-Paquet.
Saunders now says that was a “textbook case” of why bodycams should be used, and he’s right. There’s a financial cost involved, but it would be well worth it.
There’s another problem: the veil of silence that descends on an incident once the provincial Special Investigations Unit takes charge. Now that the SIU is looking into Korchinski-Paquet’s death, police can say almost nothing publicly while others speculate freely, further ramping up suspicion.
SIU investigations typically take a long time — the average in 2017 was five and a half months — and it can take more weeks after that for results to be made public. That’s far too long in a high-profile case like this.
Ways must be found for more information to be released as it becomes available and for the investigation to be speeded up, as Toronto Mayor John Tory has requested. Public trust in policing hangs in the balance as never before.