Here is the status of calls to disarm, defund and reform Ontario police amid anti-racism protests
The growing outrage over anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism in Canadian policing - reflected in higher use-of-force rates, higher arrest rates, over-representation in jails and prisons and failure to investigate crimes particularly when the victims are Indigenous women and girls - has renewed the public push for reforms.
But what should they be?
Solutions have been offered in dozens of reports, including from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, judicial reviews, the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry and numerous inquests including into the fatal police shooting of Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old Black man, in 2015.
Some recommendations, like better training, are predictable and long-standing. Others, like the push by activists for defunding the police, are gathering steam in an unprecedented way.
Here are eight police reforms being called for in Canada and how effective they could be in reducing bias and increasing accountability:
Over the past few decades, police have been given more and more responsibility while social services including mental health supports have seen funding cuts, said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who researches race and policing.
We increasingly have police dealing with issues of poverty and homelessness," he said. Police have also become first responders to mental health issues."
Proponents of defunding police services - by cutting their budgets and reducing their responsibilities - say more frequent interactions with officers increase the criminalization of Black, Indigenous and vulnerable people and the likelihood of a violent encounter, particularly in cases of a mental health crisis. When we ask the police to address issues they are inequipped to address, then we are funding them to fail," Owusu-Bempah said, paraphrasing one of his students.
Police have also increasingly become involved in youth programming and crime prevention initiatives that could be better done by non-police organizations, he said.
Until recently, calls to defund police have had limited mainstream appeal. Police budgets remain the most expensive line items in many cities' budgets, including in Toronto, where the budget is more than $1 billion.
Advocates say these budgets should be cut and the money invested instead in mental health responses and in addressing the root causes of crime. For Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, it means ultimately replacing the police with something different rather than continuing to try and reform a fundamentally broken institution.
More independent civilian oversight
In Ontario, there are two main external oversight bodies for police: The Special Investigations Unit, which investigates incidents involving police where there is a death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault, and the Office of the Independent Police Review Director which handles public complaints against police.
In 2017 the Tulloch report into independent police oversight recommended the OIPRD investigate all public conduct complaints itself rather than the more common practice of referring them back to the professional standards unit of the police force where the complaint originated. Independent investigation would help foster public trust in not only the complaints system, but policing more generally," the report stated.
This recommendation is not among the changes made to the OIPRD under Premier Doug Ford's Community Safety and Policing Act, which was passed last year but is not yet in effect.
The new Law Enforcement Complaints Agency will handle complaints pertaining to chiefs or deputy chiefs and complaints determined to be in the public interest" internally but continue to send other complaints to the originating police service or another police service.
The value of civilian oversight comes from being independent from police, said Kate Puddister, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph who researches police oversight. If the body tasked with investigating complaints against the police simply sends them back to the very same police service, the goals of civilian oversight are compromised," she said.
Meanwhile, the SIU suffers from a significant public trust problem, the Tulloch review found. Since the report, some changes have been made, including that reports are now released where no charges are laid and that the SIU must be notified when an officer fires a gun at a person.
But the Ford government's new legislation also narrows the watchdog's mandate. Police will no longer be required to notify the SIU in the cases of deaths such as a suicide or from a heart attack, unless the police chief reasonably believes" that an officer's conduct may have been a contributing factor in the incident. This is a controversial change that some have warned could lead to confusion about when the SIU should be notified.
For the watchdog to function, it must both have the tools to hold police accountable and be seen by the community as fulfilling this responsibility," Puddister said. The public needs to understand the nature of the investigations by SIU and the evidence from which SIU makes its decision either or not to substantiate charges against police officers."
Puddister noted that the SIU has issued more frequent updates than normal on the high-profile investigation into the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from the balcony of a High Park apartment building in the presence of Toronto police officers. She hopes the same can be done for other cases.
This is a frequent, almost inevitable, recommendation in reports and inquests. Millions in funding for unconscious-bias training for police was part of the federal Liberal election platform (a spokesperson for the Minister of Public Safety did not say how much money had been allocated to this so far).
In Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has released a detailed report on what training to combat racial profiling should include. Many police forces, including the Toronto police service, already have mandatory annual bias and diversity training. The Ontario Police College also includes training on bias, which the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said should include the impacts of under-policing on Indigenous communities.
But, Hudson said, more training is not the answer. I don't know what additional training we haven't thought of yet that could possibly be implemented that is going to change things now in 2020," she said.
More diversity
Police forces have been criticized for failing to reflect the communities they serve - and for the fact that many officers live in other cities than the ones they police.
Diversity in a police force is important for two reasons, said Owusu-Bempah. A diverse workforce would ensure the only interactions a police officer has with a Black or Indigenous person are not through policing. It also means more people will see themselves reflected in the institutions.
But diversity means little if police cultures and police mandates don't change, he said. We can't expect a Black officer, in an organization that is slow to change, to address broad societal issues."
More transparency
Advocates have long called for better access to officers' disciplinary records as a measure for public accountability. The OIPRD posts tribunal decisions on public complaints in a searchable database on its website, but this does not include complaints resolved in other ways and does not include internal records of misconduct that do not go before the police tribunal. Full disciplinary records are rarely released publicly other than through civil cases or inquests - unlike in some U.S. cities like Minneapolis where a summary of an officer's disciplinary history is publicly available.
Similarly, some U.S. police forces release the names of officers involved in fatal shootings. In Ontario, officers who are investigated but not charged by the Special Investigations Unit are not named. Their identities are also often only revealed through inquests and civil cases. Criminal defence lawyers have also called for better access to disciplinary records and a more transparent process to identify police officers who have been found to have lied in court.
More data
The Toronto Police now has a policy mandating the collection of race-based data, which currently is limited only to use-of-force incidents but will expand in the future to include stops and arrests.
The data collection was part of a push by several advocates and the Ontario Human Rights Commission following inquiries into racial profiling and findings of disproportionate use-of-force against Black people in Toronto. The data is to be used to ensure racial disparities are documented and addressed. It could also allow patterns involving specific officers to be detected.
Similar policies may be adopted at other police forces, said Owusu-Bempah, who was involved in developing the Toronto policy. But, he said, there needs to be caution in monitoring the quality of the data, including how it is being collected. The data also needs to be publicly accessible and updated on a frequent basis, he said.
More technology
There are growing calls for police forces in Ontario to use body cameras, and Toronto police Mark Saunders has announced he will be fast-tracking their deployment. But there is mixed evidence when it comes to how useful they are for police accountability and reducing use of force.
Hudson and others have said the significant investment that would be required may not be worth the cost when that money could be spent in community programs. Police investment in additional and controversial surveillance measures, such as Stingrays and facial recognition technology, have had broad privacy implications and should also be reconsidered, Hudson added.
Fewer weapons:
As with defunding the police, the push to reduce police reliance on both lethal and non-lethal weapons is growing. Advocates for disarming police, including limiting the use of guns, Tasers and other weapons, often point to the U.K. and other jurisdictions where police officers are not typically armed with a gun.
Hudson said there should be an examination of police budgets to see how much money is being spent on weapons and what is being bought. Why are allowing the police to arm themselves when that does not increase our safety," she said.
With files from Jacob Lorinc, Wendy Gillis, Jennifer Pagliaro, Jim Rankin and Douglas Quan
Alyshah Hasham is a Toronto-based reporter covering crime and court for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alysanmati