[URBAN NOTE] "What Toronto Can Learn From the Police Shooting of Michael Brown"

[rfmcdonald]

My initial response to Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy and Zakaria Abdulle's Torontoist post was "^This."

It might be comforting to think that the tragic shooting of Michael Brown—an 18-year-old unarmed black man—by a white police officer on August 9 and the resulting chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, are distinctly American phenomena. The history of racial tensions, the heavy-handed policing tactics, the disproportionate criminalization of young black men—these are issues that have long plagued the United States, a country so obsessed with law and order that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

But look a little closer, and the lines between Ferguson and Toronto begin to blur. The photos of police officers in full riot gear brandishing body shields and tear gas canisters at protesters start to look a lot like the images from the G20 summit in 2010. The Ferguson police’s racial profiling mirrors the Toronto Police Service’s (TPS) practice of disproportionately carding and documenting young men of colour. And the six shots fired against the unarmed Brown while he attempted to flee echo the tragic killing of Sammy Yatim, who was shot repeatedly on an empty Toronto streetcar, or Michael Eligon, who was killed after walking toward police officers while brandishing two pairs of scissors.



Much of the discussion surrounding the events in Ferguson has focused on the discrepancy between Ferguson’s majority African-American population and the nearly all-white police force. Only 20 years ago, Toronto also had a police service that was 94 per cent white. While outgoing police chief Bill Blair has received many accolades for attempting to diversify the police force during his tenure, by 2010 only 18 per cent of the force was female, while less than 20 per cent belonged to a visible minority—a small step for a city where women make up half the population and half of all residents are non-white.

Toronto has a police force that still does not accurately reflect the communities it is meant to protect. A particular case in point is the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), a unit born out of 2005’s “summer of the gun.” TAVIS officers are not stationed in a specific neighbourhood, but are instead deployed to different parts of the city depending on criminal activity. Described as a “racial profiling unit” by community members, TAVIS is notorious in low-income neighbourhoods for conducting public strip searches, assaulting individuals, and pointing guns at unarmed teenagers—just like the Ferguson police. It’s not surprising that TAVIS has the highest rate of stopping and documenting black individuals of all TPS units.