What if it had been you?
The prosecution of accountant and gentle family man Umar Zameer for the first-degree murder of a plain-clothed Toronto police officer — Zameer had done no such thing — will reverberate among Ontario Crown attorneys, the attorney general’s office, police, criminal defence lawyers and the public for many years.
As in the equally egregious 2013 Forcillo case where a gun-happy cop shot Sammy Yatim eight times, it was a matter of police denying what their own eyes told them.
The justice system failed both Zameer and Const. Jeffrey Northrup, who died in a horrible accident, but poor Northrup’s death was used for police grandstanding. Police hunted Zameer to win public sympathy. And now? After the judge suggested there may have been police perjury or collusion in testimony, police Chief Myron Demkiw has asked the OPP to investigate.
That’s worse. Don’t ask cops to investigate cops. There is something about the paranoia, toxic masculinity and peer pressure within police forces that makes it grindingly hard to extract the truth, even with dental instruments and law.
Everyone’s on the defensive. As the Star reports, “Crown attorney Michael Cantlon — the head of one of Toronto’s four Crown offices, who prosecuted the case alongside long-time Crown attorney Karen Simone — said that the circumstances surrounding Northrup’s death ‘warranted a trial to determine accountability.’ ”
We can only speculate as to why Cantlon and Simone didn’t forcefully tell their bosses in Attorney General Doug Downey’s office that the first-degree charge was absurd. Maybe the prosecution wanted to keep the police happy, one legal observer suggested to the Star.
We’re all human, a kindly way of saying that most people follow orders, even orders they deplore, to save their job. Their options are as circumscribed as our own. We are rarely brave.
Cops clump together. Even good cops bow to pressure to tell the same story the other cops are telling. You can refuse. But you’ve seen other cops’ daily lives turn to hell when they tell their own truth. You are not one of us. You’re a traitor, a snitch.
To be fair, this happens in many workplaces, but generally ones where co-workers don’t have guns. In a speech at the University of Toronto, activist Ralph Nader once asked us all, “Do you go along to get along?” We said no. We aged. We did.
I’ll turn to those who stuck to their principles: Justice Jill Copeland who initially granted Zameer bail, ignoring what she knew would be squeals from the unprincipled and the unlettered; Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy, who apologized to Zameer; defence lawyers Nader Hasan and Alexandra Heine, who did their work expertly; and members of the public who were aware enough to be mystified in the first place.
A man out for the day with his family? Planned to murder a cop? In the city hall parking garage? Sounds implausible. What if it had happened to you? What if you had been there with your family, the wrong place at the wrong time and had been rushed by three big rough-looking people? Would you get bail?
Those who back harsher bail rules — take Pierre Poilievre’s exciting “Jail not bail” rhyme — damage their cause by going overboard. They take the American-style path of instant and overheated reaction. Whatever happened to the Canadian “reason over passion”?
Do cops ever discuss personal shame? We’ll never know because the police union demands that officers speak as one. The union must realize that when their lawyers drag things out so that bad cops are suspended for years at full pay, the public takes notice.
Thanks to good Canadians, Zameer’s family’s GoFundMe has reached its $200,000 goal, but I hope it keeps going. His wife and three young children need more help than that after their three years of perfect hell.