Get on with police reform

Mayor John Tory calls a series of proposed reforms that the Toronto Police Services Board will consider next week “ambitious” and “sweeping.”

A more appropriate label would be “fairly modest and long overdue.”

The reforms include such measures as expanding the Toronto Police Service’s mobile mental-health teams to cover crisis calls 24/7. Publishing a line-by-line breakdown of the $1.2billion police budget. And giving the force more power to crack down on officers involved in repeated violent incidents.

It should not have taken a massive, continentwide uprising against racism and police violence to prompt the police services board to get going on changes like this. All of them address problems that were obvious to many people long before the recent protests.

Still, positive change is welcome, even if it comes late. And by historical standards, the reforms outlined in a report by board chair Jim Hart could indeed be considered ambitious. Previous attempts at change have been half-hearted and met with major pushback.

The key will be getting them done, building on the momentum of the past several months when the pressure for reform became irresistible. Tory outlined the direction he would like the police force to go in late June, and this would be a significant step in the right direction.

The board should approve this plan when it meets next week, and city council should support it as well. It isn’t perfect, but it would be an important starting point.

Take, for example, the proposal to expand the Toronto police’s Mobile Crisis Intervention Team program, which pairs police officers with mental-health nurses in an attempt to better respond to people in crisis.

At the moment, it has enough resources to respond to only 20 per cent of the 30,000 crisis calls that come in every year. In most cases, police officers are left on their own to deal with people in crisis and we have seen all too often how that can go tragically, sometimes fatally, wrong.

Expanding the teams to deal with many more calls is a good step right now, but it isn’t ideal. As many have argued, armed police shouldn’t be the ones responding to most calls from people in distress. They don’t have the right training and their very presence can increase the possibility of violence.

Abetter solution would be to create a new way to respond to such situations that operates independently of the police. But it will take time and research to get that right, and in the meantime police can’t simply refuse to deal with such calls. The proposed change should be seen as a transitional measure to what Hart’s report calls “an even bolder approach” — handing mental-health issues to a more specialized team.

At the same time, Tory is right to make clear that funding must be found in the existing police budget. He and the police services board have resisted calls for “arbitrary” cuts, but at this point there is a clear public expectation that spending on police should be going down, not up.

In that regard, it’s high time to shine a bright light on police spending, and ensure that over time the budget is reduced as other agencies take over some police functions. The proposals for an audit of the police budget and a line-by-line breakdown of spending deserve strong support. It’s absurd that the public and its elected representatives don’t have a good idea of how more than a billion dollars of taxpayer money is being spent.

Likewise, proposals to give the police service more power to discipline officers with a pattern of misconduct or involvement in violent incidents should be welcomed. At this point the public rightly expects much stronger accountability from police, from the top command to the officer on the street.

There’s no time to waste in getting on with these changes. There has a been a sea-change in public attitudes in recent months and a flood of evidence, including new research this week from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, about the harms done by flawed police and justice systems, to Black and Indigenous people in particular. This needs to be fixed, and quickly.

It should not have taken a massive, continentwide uprising against racism and police violence to prompt the police services board to get going on changes