Newly minted police Chief Mark Saunders had a golden opportunity to mend fences. Instead, he found himself schooling a prominent lawyer, dismissing black community worries about public safety as “wordplay” and offering vague assurances on how he would resolve concerns over carding.
In his first formal address to the black community, Toronto’s first black chief delivered a short, sombre speech at the second annual African Canadian Summit at the Ontario Federation of Labour building on Gervais on April 29.
Saunders reiterated his commitment to “treat everyone fairly.” But not surprisingly, he spent most of his time on the de-fensive. Two of the organizations sponsoring the event, the African Canadian Legal Clinic (ACLC) and Midaynta Community Services, had openly endorsed Saunders’s rival, Deputy Chief Peter Sloly, for the top job.
When the moderators opened the floor for questions, the hands never stopped going up, even though organizers said there was only time for two. How will you keep our community safe from the police? What do you mean when you refer to those affected by racial profiling as “collateral damage”? How many black people have to die before justice is served? But it was the inevitable, and repeated, questions on racial profiling and carding that became the major flashpoint.
They were all variants of the same question: when will police stop targeting black people unfairly?
The chief started his answer by retracting a statement he’d made days earlier at his inaugural press conference when he referred to innocents caught up in carding as collateral damage. The term he should have used was “social cost,” he said.
Again he stressed that he would listen to input from the black community. But his vagueness was met by anguish from participants, many of them activists, lawyers and professors who feel there’s been enough talk. Participants kept coming back to the same question: What exactly is his strategy for working with the community?
“I can give you all the words that you want to hear right now, and they’ll sound perfect,” Saunders said. But “it is mostly the actions that I’ll be measured on. You have my word that those actions will be geared to help young men and women out there that are in harm’s way, to teach, to work with the community on a day-to-day basis, and to work with the police to make sure that they have proper training to understand what their roles and responsibilities are as police officers.”
And on it went.
Anthony Morgan, a policy and research lawyer with the African Canadian Legal Clinic, says Saunders’s words “had an element of speaking at the community.”
“His comments come off as if he hasn’t been sitting in the Police Services Board meetings where there have been countless deputations,” Morgan says later. “He’s speaking to them as if he were hired straight out of Vancouver or the city of Winnipeg, dropped into the city of Toronto without adequate understanding of what the issues are on the ground.”
The final audience member permitted to ask a question zeroed in on the chief’s repeated use of the term “community safety.”
Margaret Parsons, executive director of the ACLC, began respectfully by congratulating Saunders on his appointment. That brought applause from the crowd. Among those asking questions, Parsons was the first not to begin with a direct challenge. But her positive tone was quickly followed by some strong criticism and another tough question.
“‘Community safety’ is code for over-policing,” Parsons charged. “Is community safety about keeping us safe from the police as well?”
Saunders waited for the ensuing enthusiastic applause to die down before responding.
“Having been cross-examined by some of the best, I always know that whenever they start out with something really nice, the bomb’s gonna drop,” he said.
It was a moment of levity. For the first time that morning it seemed as if Saunders had actually connected with the crowd.
But his more serious response accusing Parsons of “wordplay” could not have been more disconnected.
“Anyone that knows law understands that the law is complex,” he told Parsons, who is a human rights lawyer. “There are case laws that redefine things over and over and over again. So you can’t just have a template for one word and then say, ‘This is the only definition, this is the only restriction.’ Law is complicated.”
That response was a fundamental misstep, according to Morgan, who tells NOW after the summit that Saunders won’t get very far building relationships with the community by explaining legal definitions “to a lawyer who’s been at the forefront of community advocacy.”
“I don’t think any credible leader in this city will try to explain to Margaret Parsons the complexities of law and the issues of policing,” Morgan says. “I don’t think that was the appropriate way to engage in that confrontation – to reduce it to a definition and say it’s a complex thing. It’s not that complex.”
Another word that Saunders bristles at is “abolish.” When reporters ask him in a scrum after his speech if he will abolish carding, his response is, “We have to know what our roles and responsibilities are, and that’s the key point. If we wordsmith this to death, then here we are playing semantics. I’m not interested in that.”
Saunders did make one concrete pledge: to address the randomness of carding. It’s a start, but people are questioning if he can bring meaningful reform in a climate where frustration and anger seem to be mounting every day among a disenfranchised community.
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