{"id":50490,"date":"2014-12-11T12:50:37","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T17:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=50490"},"modified":"2014-12-11T13:48:30","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T18:48:30","slug":"burale-john-torys-policing-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/12\/11\/burale-john-torys-policing-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"BURALE: Tory needs to repair trust between police and community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor John Tory said he wanted to improve the relationship between the Toronto Police Service (TPS) and the community, and signaled his intention to sit on the Toronto Police Services Board. As an active participant in discussions about this issue, I find Mr. Tory\u2019s stated focus to be encouraging. But I believe we need a city-wide discussion on defining what we mean by \u201cpublic safety,\u201d in order to come up with a 21st century mandate for the TPS.<\/p>\n

The goal of improving relations between the police and community raises an important question: how do police officers actually build trust? It\u2019s a timely problem given the mass outcry in U.S. cities over the lack of indictments against the officers involved in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

Since 2012, I\u2019ve been working with Positive Change<\/a>, an ad-hoc advocacy group fighting to end gun violence in Toronto. With 50 unsolved homicides in Ontario and Alberta since 2005, the Somali-Canadian community in particular has been disproportionally affected by this scourge. In 2012 alone, 18% of homicides in Toronto involved Somali-Canadian men \u2013 six <\/a>were killed between June and October.\u00a0 That summer, I remember spending every other Friday at Khalid Bin Al-Walid mosque, in Etobicoke, praying for the dead and asking myself: What was going on?<\/p>\n

The only thing worse than the over-representation of young Somali-Canadian men in the homicide and incarceration statistics is the high level of distrust on both sides, police and community. The mutual suspicion has resulted in a lot of cold cases. Positive Change sought to change that dynamic so that residents would be comfortable collaborating with the police in North Etobicoke to improve community-police relations.<\/p>\n

It was a tough assignment. TPS 23 Division covered an area with a very large Somali-Canadian population, but it had no direct connections into that community. Given the level of gun violence in northwest Toronto, a police division that isn\u2019t representative of the residents they served has resulted in communication gridlock.<\/p>\n

In 2012, the TPS established the Somali Liaison Unit<\/a> (SLU) after lobbying from the community. The project was modeled after the success<\/a> of the Minnesota Police Department\u2019s move to hire Somali-American officers to spearhead a neighbourhood policing program. The problem is, 23 Division\u2019s SLU has no Somali-speaking personnel. Currently, there are three Somali-Canadian police officers serving in the TPS \u2013 they\u2019re just not in Etobicoke North.<\/p>\n

We can talk about community policing, but we need to think about what makes such initiative genuinely effective. In the case of Minnesota, those two Somali-American officers singlehandedly cut the murder rate in half, according to the CBC; there have been no homicides involving that city\u2019s Somali community for over two years.<\/p>\n

Here in Toronto, the SLU did manage to reduce crime<\/a> in the Dixon and Queen\u2019s Plate neighbourhoods, but not to the same extent. Moreover, the mere existence of this tiny unit highlights the lack of diversity among 23 Division\u2019s 200 officers, the disproportionate toll that gun violence has had in the Somali-Canadian community, and the absence of trust between residents and local police. If TPS needs a community outreach unit specifically to build trust and improve relations, what are the other officers doing when they go out on patrol?<\/p>\n

The problem of building trust also extends to the ongoing controversies around police carding, which Tory will inherent once he takes up his role on the Toronto Police Services Board. While he may have grown up in a part of Toronto where \u201cthe police officer was your friend,\u201d<\/a> most racialized youth growing up in low-income neighbourhoods like Dixon had very different experiences.<\/p>\n

When my youngest brother was in Grade 11, he once had a police cruiser follow him and his friends as they were walking across an open field. The officers drove across a park to interrogate and card these three young black males. They were asked for their identification and offered no apology once the computer check revealed nothing. Incidents like that have happened to him over and over again \u2013 five times to be exact \u2013 and in fact to most of the black men in my life. It is a common<\/a> coming of age ritual for some Torontonians and not others, among them the new mayor.<\/p>\n

The carding policy is based on the assumption that police officers do not know who they\u2019re serving and protecting and therefore need to keep track of who\u2019s who in each patrol zone. As such, it will always pose as an obstacle to trust. Carding in of itself is not the problem. The issue lies in the frequency of street checks, where they tend to occur, and who gets stopped. For so long, the discussion around police-community relations has focused entirely on the merits of the process (carding) that we forgot about the purpose (public safety).<\/p>\n

In marginalized communities in areas like Etobicoke North, the city and the TPS urgently need to repair this fractured relationship in order to build trust as a means of improving public safety. The two goals should go hand in hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mayor John Tory said he wanted to improve the relationship between the Toronto Police Service (TPS) and the community, and signaled his intention to sit on the Toronto Police Services Board. As an active participant in discussions about this issue, I find Mr. Tory\u2019s stated focus to be encouraging. But I believe we need aContinue reading “BURALE: Tory needs to repair trust between police and community”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8251,"featured_media":50492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21758,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBURALE: Tory needs to repair trust between police and community - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/12\/11\/burale-john-torys-policing-agenda\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"BURALE: Tory needs to repair trust between police and community - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mayor John Tory said he wanted to improve the relationship between the Toronto Police Service (TPS) and the community, and signaled his intention to sit on the Toronto Police Services Board. 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