My favourite story about Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack: that time he dropped by the NOW offices on Church for an impromptu interview and was so excited he spilled his Starbucks on the floor. He quickly got down on his hands and knees to clean up the mess.
He said he happened to be in the neighbourhood, but it was right around the time the police union was trying to get rid of Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee, so it’s hard to know for sure. He’s a real charmer that McCormack.
Back when he became union head in 2009, McCormack moved quickly to embark on a public relations campaign, partly designed to dispel the police union’s bad rep and partly to fix his own.
As a cop in Regent Park, McCormack had been a bit of a folk hero among the rank and file, not to mention the son of former police chief William McCormack. Compared to his predecessors, McCormack talked a good game, at least for the cameras, saying all the right things early on about the importance of community policing and, as the issue emerged, about the ballooning police budget.
It was enough to make us forget, sort of, his own scrapes with the law. Like, for example, the insubordination charge stemming from an unauthorized back-ground check he conducted on a Star reporter working on a story about his big brother, Billy, also a cop, and Billy’s alleged involvement in the shakedown of bar owners in the Entertainment District. Before that there was a dis-cipline charge over Mike’s efforts to help an ex-con car salesman with ties to organized crime get back his licence to sell luxury cars. McCormack was cleared of that one.
During the Rob Ford years, McCormack hid in plain sight. After copping a lucrative four-year contract for his members, you barely heard from him, not even amid those rumblings of rank-and-file cops running interference for Ford during the crack scandal. And making sure the former mayor got home all right all those wasted nights he spent wandering around town.
Now deep into his second term as union head, the guy who couldn’t get enough of the blood-and-guts brand of policing when he wore the uniform has quite possibly become the city’s biggest dick – and he doesn’t even wear a badge. (Directors of the police union are not technically cops. They’re required to turn in their badges.)
Nowadays, McCormack is still walking around with a chip on his shoulder, spending most of his time defending rogue cops – the type he once was. Who could forget his not-so-veiled threat after Constable James Forcillo was convicted of attempted murder in the shooting death of Sammy Yatim earlier this year that the verdict would cause cops to think twice about their duty to protect the public?
We probably should have seen it coming.
In the ongoing public debate over carding and the police shootings of black men with mental health issues, McCormack has been front and centre, letting Chief Mark Saunders and Mayor John Tory repair to the background. It makes you wonder who’s really in charge. I mean, if it hadn’t been for McCormack and the union’s backroom arm-twisting, would “cop’s cop” Saunders even be chief?
In the Saunders and McCormack good cop, bad cop routine, McCormack has enthusiastically embraced the latter role. He doesn’t even bother to pretend he gives a shit what anybody else, least of all politicians and critics, thinks. To him it’s all so much “political masturbation” – the words he used to describe some of the goings on at council over last month’s Black Lives Matter tent-city occupation outside police headquarters.
Specifically, he was talking about Councillor Mike Layton’s motion calling on the province to review “the mandate, procedures and outcomes of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU),” the agency charged with investigating serious incidents involving police. The motion went further, calling on the province’s review to be conducted “with an anti-Black-racism and anti-racism lens.”
It’s McCormack who’s looking the jerk-off now.
On Friday, April 29, the province announced its appointment of Ontario Court of Appeal Judge Michael Tulloch (who also happens to be the first Black judge appointed to that court) to conduct a review of the SIU and the other two provincial agencies charged with overseeing police conduct: the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, which handles public complaints against police, and the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, which conducts hearings and adjudicates disputes related to police discipline.
The sweeping directive handed Tulloch includes an evaluation to determine if current police oversight bodies “are effective and have clear mandates.” Tulloch’s undertaking follows a separate examination of the Police Services Act announced by the province last year for which public hearings concluded on April 29.
Along with Tulloch’s appointment, the province also released details of SIU director Tony Loparco’s report to the attorney general on the July 2015 police shooting death of Andrew Loku.
Critics have pointed out that only the last 10 pages of the director’s 34-page report have been made public. The province cited privacy concerns for that decision, although most legal experts agree there’s nothing preventing the province from releasing the entire document and the findings of other SIU investigations in their entirety. That would certainly help the public evaluate the conduct of police and would go a long way to restoring public trust in the evidentiary basis for the SIU’s decisions. As it stands, not even family members of the victims of police shootings are privy to those details.
But the report’s release is still remarkable for what it does reveal.
The SIU director had some pointed words about the efforts of a non-witness officer “to review and download the video recordings captured by cameras” in Loku’s building. Turns out the crucial few seconds when Loku was shot are missing from the tape.
Loparco does not suggest there’s anything “nefarious” about that. The gap is explained as a glitch. “Based on the unit’s forensic examination of the recording,” Loparco re-ported, “it would appear that the camera had simply not recorded the shooting,” although he has not received “an adequate explanation for the officer’s intervention.” He goes on: “That explana-tion, however, becomes much more difficult to accept when police unduly insert themselves into the post–incident investigation.”
Loparco doesn’t mention any officers by name, but he refers to “this incident and others like it” involving Toronto police and suggests the ministry “strongly consider” amendments to regulations governing SIU investigations “to more clearly address and rectify what is clearly a recurring problem.”
Indeed, when it comes to investigations of police, the SIU’s mandate has never been clear.
Let me rephrase that. The mandate should be clear enough. It’s set out in Section 113 (9) of the Police Services Act: “Members of police forces shall co-operate fully with the members of the unit in the conduct of investigations.”
Only “cooperate fully” means something different to the cops.
In order to obtain some level of compliance from police, the province has made compromises. These are expressed in the protocols elaborating the act on everything from when police must notify SIU of serious incidents involving police to the turning over of notes and making officers available for interviews.
Officers who are the subjects of SIU investigations, for example, still do not have to submit to interviews with the SIU. They’re required only to turn over their notes, which are supposed to be written as soon as possible after an incident and without consulting other officers who may have been witnesses to the incident.
But that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, there has been evidence of police collusion in the making of notes and giving evidence in the past, including most recently in the Forcillo case. In the Loku shooting, the notes made by the subject officer weren’t turned over until eight days after the incident.
During his tenure as director, Ian Scott wrote former Toronto police chief Bill Blair on more than 125 occasions over the failure of officers to cooperate with SIU investigations.
Theoretically, the chief of police could order his officers to cooperate with the SIU and discipline those who don’t. An SIU investigation is followed by a chief’s administrative re-view, which is supposed to ex-a-mine all aspects of an incident, criminal and non-criminal. But it amounts to a paper exercise: it’s kept confidential except when Police Services Act charges are laid, which rarely happens.
The SIU essentially relies more often than not on the police version of events. The predictable result is that few charges are laid except in exceptional circumstances – or on the off chance there’s video. Even when there is video, charges aren’t guaranteed, since the Criminal Code gives police significant latitude when it comes to the use of deadly force. As long as such force “is reasonably necessary to protect against loss of life or grievous bodily harm,” it’s legally justified.
In clearing the cop involved in the Loku shooting, Loparco says in his report that “there was no evidence that police were aware of the fact that Mr. Loku had any mental health issues” when he approached them with a hammer. Or that Loku’s mental health issues had anything to do with his death. (Loku had three times the legal driving limit of alcohol in his blood.) “It is as likely that his intoxication was the reason that he acted in the way he did,” Loparco surmises.
Which brings us back to McCormack, who wrote in the Star on March 30 that three hours before Loku was shot, police spotted him “riding a scooter on a busy highway in downtown Toronto [and] officers assisted Mr. Loku by loading his scooter in a police car and driving him home,” which raises more questions. Did police who responded to a report of an alleged assault in progress at Loku’s apartment building know of his encoun-ter with police earlier that day, and if not, why not? Might that information have shed a different light on Loku’s behaviour?
“Those who are promoting baseless accusations of race being a factor in Mr. Loku’s death have no legitimate place in this debate,” wrote McCormack, who instead blames a failure to outfit all frontline officers with tasers, “a less lethal force option in their tool belt… as has been recommended by a dozen Coroner’s inquests.”
It’s a convenient view. Coroner’s inquests have also recommended police be trained in de-escalation techniques. Loku was dead within seconds of officers’ arrival. And 30-plus years after the first inquest into such a shooting, Black men with mental health issues continue to be disproportionately killed by police.
As for equipping all front-line officers with tasers, McCormack seems unenthusiastic about finding the $24 million that would cost in the police budget. The Iacobucci report into police confrontations with people in cri-sis recommended body cameras, but there, too, McCormack has balked. Go figure.
It was always going to be up to the province to rein in the Toronto police force and its union – our mayor is too much of a scaredy-cat. The Wynne government has at least shown a willingness to do something about police accountability, although it went only halfway on carding, bringing in rules that didn’t ban the practice linked to racial profiling. The question is, will the province include legal and procedural restrictions on whatever changes it does make to the Police Services Act to buy police support?
There’s nothing like fear of the cops’ political clout to discourage change. And on that front, the hysteria being whipped up by McCormack has been unmatched.
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
