To Serve & Protect - or - Academy of Assassins?

Canada is a country of heinous crimes of grief and mourning, a land of human misery without any hope. An ocean of human tragedy, that their fierce waves drag millions of shattered lives.

- Nadir Siguencia                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                              The Iacobucci report’s unwise colour-blindness

Over the past 26 years, 73 per cent of those in mental distress killed by the Toronto police have been non-white. So why wasn’t race a consideration in a recent report on the problem?

Darren Calabrese / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci says the issue of race was beyond his mandate as he prepared his report on police use of force.

By: Anthony Morgan Published on Tue Jul 29 2014

Does race matter when a Toronto Police officer encounters a person in mental distress?

Revisiting our recent past is a good place to turn to help us answer this question.

Since 1988, 11 families have had a loved one in mental distress killed by a Toronto police officer. In memory of these individuals and out of respect for their families, it is important that we do not forget their names or when we lost them: Sammy Yatim (2013); Michael Eligon (2012); Sylvia Klibingaitis (2011); Reyal Jardine-Douglas (2010); Byron Debassige (2008); O’Brien Christopher-Reid (2004); Otto Vass (2000); Tony Andrade (1997); Edmond Yu (1997); Wayne Williams (1996); Lester Donaldson (1988).

We should regard the life of these people as being equally endowed with inherent value, worthy of being afforded the same levels of dignity, honour and respect that every human being deserves. Not one of these losses is more or less tragic than another.

But if diversity is truly the strength of our city, we cannot afford to take a colour-blind approach to this issue. Together, we have to confront the fact that racialized minorities, especially black males, are dramatically overrepresented in incidents of police use of deadly force when confronted with a person in mental distress.

Unfortunately though, a colour-blind approach seems to be exactly what Justice Frank Iacobucci applied in his sweeping report, “Police Encounters with People in Crisis,” released last week.

During the news conference where the 413-page review was released, Justice Iacobucci and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair were asked on three occasions if race was explored as a factor that may influence the decisions of officers to use lethal force against a person in mental distress. They responded by saying that considerations of race fell outside of Iacobucci’s mandate and instead, the review’s focus was to be a “more holistic” overview of this sensitive issue.

Over the past 26 years, 73 per cent of the people in mental distress that the Toronto police have killed are non-white. This in a city where racialized people are still a minority of the population.

So how could race not be considered a relevant factor that contributes to incidents of police shooting people in mental crisis? And how does a 413-page review ignore almost 75 per cent of the racialized identities in these cases?

Individuals do not experience mental distress in a vacuum. Mental distress is experienced in relation to many components of the complex and multi-faceted identities that make up an individual’s full humanity. The race, ethnicity, nationality and citizenship status of a person do not disappear into irrelevance with the onset of a mental crisis.

In their recent book, entitled Racialization, Crime and Criminal Justice in Canada, professors Wendy Chan and Dorothy Chunn support this point by noting that: “Experiences of mental illness and distress, regardless of their origins, take place in a social, cultural and historical context which includes environments of discrimination.”

This should not be a new revelation. The importance of considering race as a factor that contributes to police shootings of people in mental distress was recognized throughout the inquest into the killing of Lester Donaldson in 1988 and again in 2013 with the inquest into Michael Eligon’s killing, both by Toronto police.

It has been a year since we all watched Officer James Forcillo pump eight bullets into 18-year-old Sammy Yatim with 10 or so other well-armed Toronto police officers standing by.

Witnesses say that before he was killed he showed signs of mental distress. But since his killing, we have also come to learn that he was a recent immigrant from Syria, struggling to piece his life back together in Canada.

Iacobucci’s mandate prevented him from considering any individual cases. This however does not explain why his review was silent on the overall racialized outcomes of police use of lethal force against people in mental distress.

With this in mind, Iacobucci’s report ignores the complexity of Torontonians’ racialized identities, and reads as if people with mental illness are to be approached as if their illness is the defining factor of their entire existence.

If that were true, racialized people would not be so alarmingly overrepresented in these tragic incidents.

If the police in Toronto and across Canada are to make meaningful advances on this issue, they have to face the facts as they are and not as they prefer them to be.

Discomfort should not induce colour-blindness, especially when outcomes have been so clearly colour-coded.

Indeed, race clearly matters here. If the Toronto police are not willing to face this, how can we put full trust in any of their actions to address this long-standing issue?

Anthony Morgan is the policy and research lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic.

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