And just like that, it’s over. Bill Blair is no more as Toronto police chief.
At NOW press time Wednesday, July 30, came the shocking news: the Police Services Board will not be renewing his contract. Blair will be out officially as of April 2015.
“After considerable discussion related to the Toronto Police Service’s continuing need for organizational renewal, the Board has decided not to renew the employment agreement of Chief Blair,” the statement reads.
Was last Thursday’s press conference at police headquarters announcing the recommendations in former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci’s report Police Encounters With People In Crisis the last straw?
At times it felt like a turning point in the history of local policing.
For the first time, it seemed police and advocates of the mentally ill were singing from the same hymn book on an issue that has tormented both. The event had the solemnity befitting the occasion.
Then reality intruded on the proceedings when media asked the chief about the timing of the report’s release, almost a year to the day after 18-year-old Sammy Yatim was shot on a Dundas streetcar by officer James Forcillo and only days after it was revealed that Yatim’s family had filed suit against the department.
A reporter ventured that Iacobucci’s report had “handed Officer Forcillo a defence.” (A June preliminary hearing committed the officer to stand trial on a second-degree murder charge.)
The chief responded that there had been no effort to speed up the report’s release, which was supposed to be ready in June.
But last week wasn’t just the anniversary of Yatim’s death the Friday after the press conference, July 25, marked a personal deadline for Blair – the date by which he was to let his civilian overseers on the Police Services Board know if he’ll be seeking an extension of his contract. The board had until August 25 to advise the chief whether it would be renewing his contract. We know how that turned out.
Thursday’s presser looked very much like a dress rehearsal for an unprecedented third term. For Blair, there was loads of unfinished business.
On his watch, a string of controversies has caused alarm for both supporters on the left and critics on the right.
The G20 mayhem was the most spectacular of these, but indiscriminate “carding” of young black men and lingering questions about the perhaps botched investigation of Mayor Ford’s alleged ties to drug dealers have also eroded confidence in Blair’s leadership.
The promise of progressive policing he rode into office on has all but evaporated, his commendable efforts to bring more visible minority recruits into the fold aside. He’s was staking his professional future on another reform of police culture vis à vis people in crisis.
He made that point in dramatic fashion at the press conference, holding Iacobucci’s document aloft and emphatically stating, “This is not a report that will gather dust. It is a report that will gather momentum.” The sound of camera shutters filled the room.
Blair said later in video posted on the force’s website that “our goal has to be zero deaths.” Apparently, it was too little, too late.
Iacobucci’s report certainly covers all the bases: the need for more Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams, body-worn cameras for cops, training that emphasizes de-escalation techniques and communication rather than force.
But the ex-justice warned that there may be privacy and “resource issues that may prove to be difficult” in outfitting cops with cameras.
In fact, not much in Iacobucci’s report hasn’t been recommended repeatedly in the past.
Better police training and the need for the force to be more selective in its recruitment have been the subjects of coroners’ reports on the deaths of the mentally ill for more than a decade.
It’s not just talk, Blair stressed. The force will immediately act on one of the report’s key recommendations by setting up a special advisory committee to oversee the implementation of Iacobucci’s proposed changes.
And the chief announced that he would assign one of his most senior officers, Deputy Chief Mike Federico, to the file – not to “abrogate” his own responsibilities, Blair added a little defensively, but to ensure that, as he put it, “this organization doesn’t take its eye off the ball.”
However, it’s worth noting, as some police reformers did last week, that Federico, who’s in charge of the force’s Mobile Crisis Intervention Units, has long resisted the idea advocated by mental health experts – and now by Iacobucci – that MCITs be first responders in incidents involving people in crisis. Perhaps he’s come around on that.
In the end it proved another ass-covering exercise for a chief who must have surely known he was on the way out.
Blair leaves a spotty record, his vaunted commitment to community policing never really acted on.
While he seemed to enjoy the support of the Police Association, his backing in the rank-and-file was always questionable.
At the Police Services Board, there was an attempt by the chief’s supporters to silence vice-chair Michael Thompson, one of Blair’s harshest critics, with a code-of-conduct complaint. That complaint was only days ago withdrawn. Blair seemed to have enough of the board on side to win reappointment, but the damage done by Blair to the public’s trust proved a trickier proposition for the board to reconcile.
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
