WPCH members Rebecca Hume and Nickita Longman marching at the National Gathering for BIPOC Families Against Police Violence in November 2021 · Photo by Emily Leedham

Picture this: you’re ready for a good night’s rest. You crawl into bed around midnight, and just as you are about to fall asleep, thunderous juddering and whirring erupt above your house. You sit awake, startled as the Winnipeg Police helicopter circles around your neighbourhood, its bright spotlight creeping and surveying. This disruption is a regular occurrence for you, one that leaves you anxious, overwhelmed, and exhausted. According to the activist group Winnipeg Police Cause Harm (WPCH), this is a reality for many Winnipeg residents.

WPCH began its work in September 2019 after the murder of four BIPOC people at the hands of the Winnipeg Police—Chad Williams, Machuar Madut, Sean Thompson, and Randy Cochrane. The volunteer-based, non-hierarchical group advocates for the abolition of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) and the reallocation of its funds to community-led alternatives.

“I think a lot of us recognized that there truly were no present organizations or groups or anything [in Winnipeg] pushing back on these things,” says Nickita Longman, an activist working with WPCH. “The reason why we all got together was because we really wanted to address that.”

Raising consciousness and community engagement are two key pillars at the heart of the group’s work. WPCH has presented to city council and the Winnipeg Police Board, distributed posters, created “Know Your Rights” wallet cards, and amassed a following of over 9,000 on Instagram alone as of January 2022. WPCH’s community efforts led to its designation as Winnipeg’s favourite grassroots group by local Winnipeg newspaper The Uniter in 2021, despite working under the pandemic’s restrictive parameters.

“There’s a lot of our work that does better in person and does better in community,” says Longman. “We had to really be creative with the ways we were present online.”

To address the community’s frustration over police helicopter disruptions, WPCH launched an online “Copter Complaints” campaign in February 2021. The campaign encouraged people to come forward with noise pollution and surveillance complaints.

Based on the survey’s results, WPCH created a map showing where the Winnipeg Police Service’s helicopter heavily circulated—predominately the north and west ends—in comparison to areas cops reside. WPCH shared the map with helicopter operating costs on its website, corresponding with its “Porkchop Prices” Twitter account to raise awareness on how the WPS’s helicopter use detracts from other valuable community resources.

“The cops have been saying only four people a year complain about [the] noise,” says James Wilt, another organizer with WPCH. “We know, based on the survey we did … hundreds of people care very deeply but just don’t have a mechanism to respond.”

According to Wilt, the police were giving complainants the runaround. If a resident had a complaint, the WPS directed callers to the 24-hour hotline at the airport where the helicopter is housed. When residents called the 24-hour hotline, the hotline would tell them to call 311. Then, when they contacted 311, 311 would direct callers to the non-emergency line.

When WPCH made their case to the Winnipeg Police Board, they read the anonymous complaints word for word. In response, the police conceded by posting an official form on their website that submits complaints directly to the head of the helicopter unit.

“Our hope is that we can eventually get hard numbers on people filing complaints,’’ says Wilt. “We didn’t get the helicopter grounded or sold, but we hope the outcome will raise consciousness.”

WPCH is eager to continue building its community presence. They hope to coordinate events in March 2022 on the International Day Against Police Brutality and in April 2022 to commemorate the deaths of Eishia Hudson, Jason Collins, and Stuart Andrews—three Indigenous people shot and killed by the Winnipeg Police over 10 days in April 2020.

Getting back into the community will also involve tabling at local events. Wilt shares that tabling has given WPCH the unique opportunity for face-to-face engagement with people who sometimes offer their opinions, stories, and experiences with the police.

“I think having the feeling that someone cares about what happened is really significant even if we can’t do anything about it,’’ says Wilt. “Just being a set of ears is helpful.”

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS YEE

When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by police in the United States, sparking protests across the world, Avnish Nanda, an Edmonton lawyer, approached Bashir Mohamed and Oumar Salifou with an idea for a podcast investigating anti-Black racism and policing in Edmonton. Within a week of launching in June, Is This For Real? had raised over $4,000 (U.S.) per month on Patreon.

“We wanted to take the social issues that were happening in the moment and then make them relevant in a local context,” Salifou says. “I think there’s a big misconception that racism is an American problem and that police brutality and racism, and anti-Black racism, is an American problem. And I think that Canada has its unique problems when it comes to having systemically racist institutions that exclude and actively hurt Black and Indigenous people and all people of colour.”

In episodes released about twice a month, Salifou and his co-host, Hannan Mohamud, investigate topics ranging from police mistreatment to School Resource Officers (armed police officers stationed in Edmonton schools) to Canadian media’s coverage of racism and police violence.

“We have to make people understand that when the police say that they’re being criticized for a problem that happened very far away, they’re ignoring the fact that there’s a long history of really bad things that have happened to people—violence inflicted on people, murders, different systems of oppression that have kept people down—that are unique to our context,” Salifou says.

Threaded throughout the investigations is an emphasis on the personal—Salifou and Mohamud ground the podcast in their experiences growing up Black in Edmonton and interviewees are given ample space to share their stories without interruption. In ep. 4 of the podcast, titled “Protect Our Children,” Mohamud says, “We want other people to take a step back and—rather than just feeling shock and shame and these emotions that would limit them from learning—to kind of hesitate and just take it all in and process it slowly as we go.”

In future seasons, the Is This For Real? team plans to investigate anti-Black racism in other institutions. “Knowing the fact that in most mainstream newsrooms there are very few Black people, it’s amazing to have the opportunity to do a project that’s getting the support that it’s been getting, and being able to have the editorial control to actually tell the stories how I think they should be told,” Salifou says.

On August 25, 2003, a transgender woman named Cassandra Do was found dead in her apartment on Gloucester Street in Toronto’s LGBTQ Village.

I don’t know much about Cassandra aside from some essential facts: She was 32, she did sex work, she was once in nursing school, she was Vietnamese. In one of the first Toronto Star articles about her death, her friends mentioned she had a “penchant for French antique furniture.” But her story remained untold.

Forensic evidence from the scene of Cassandra’s apartment suggested her murderer was someone who had committed a sexual assault back in 1997, targeting another Southeast Asian sex worker. The 1997 victim survived the attack and was able to provide the police with a detailed description of the perpetrator as a large cisgender man in his late 30s or early 40s. But from then to 2003, Toronto police did not make the public aware of it until he struck again.

As a trans woman of colour as well as a sex worker, Cassandra was at high risk of experiencing everyday violence, discrimination, and mistreatment by the police. In fact, for many sex workers and for trans people of colour, some form of police harassment is a regular occurrence. While national statistics on transgender people are hard to come by, provincial and local research illustrates what most of us already know: A 2010 survey of trans people in Ontario by Trans Pulse (a project collecting data on access to health care in the trans community) found that roughly a third of trans people who have been incarcerated reported transphobic harassment from the police; the same study notes roughly a quarter of racialized trans people and a third of Indigenous trans and Two-Spirit people reported harassment from the police due to racism.

Yasmeen Persad—an educator, facilitator, and community worker who provides training for racialized LGBTQ people and HIV-positive LGBTQ women in Toronto—encounters this regularly with those in the trans community. “When it comes to law enforcement, there are a lot of challenges,” Persad says. “Because of their identities, of who they are, by default it sets them up for more police scrutiny. Many [people I work with] are newcomers, immigrants, sex workers, living precariously, in the shelter system, under-housed—these people who are often on the fringe of everyday day-to-day survival have real challenges with the police.”

When they are targets of violence, both sex workers and trans women are often dismissed as victims of their of circumstances. Not having a fixed address, being potentially exposed to drugs, and subverting assigned expectations of gender and sexuality contribute to a public perception of carelessness and deviance that tells people and institutions how much they have to care about those they see as putting themselves at risk.

Talking about the lives of trans women is frequently a conversation about risk, and the kinds of risks that cisgender communities and institutions take for granted. Stories about Cassandra’s murder in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail focused on the details of her transition, her sex work, and her past in nursing school. According to the site Accozzaglia, a transgender history project run by long-time trans community members in Toronto, the message was clear: “Journalists fabricated a narrative on morality which could try to rationalize how Ms. Do probably brought this death on herself, because she was a woman of colour, trans, and had earned her living from sex work—throwing away a more ‘acceptable’ nursing career.”

The way that the police and the press treated Cassandra’s case was typical of their treatment of trans women at the time. That same year, a trans woman of colour named Shelby Tracy Tom was murdered in Vancouver by a man named Jatin Patel. Reports at the time referred to Shelby only as “an Asian transsexual prostitute.” Police took several days to inform other community members of what happened to Shelby, prompting harsh criticism from other sex workers who felt that withholding information unduly put them at risk.

We still don’t know the identity of the man who killed Cassandra. In February 2016, the police unveiled their new cold-case site, which aimed to publicize information about unsolved cases to engage the public in looking for new information. The next day, the police posted a two-minute video to YouTube describing her case, taking care to disclose the status of her medical transition. Interest in Cassandra’s case briefly renewed, 13 years after she was murdered by a man who had a history of violence against sex-working women of Asian descent. But it soon fizzled out. There was nothing new to be learned.

II: Deanna Wilkinson

Yasmeen Persad’s office at The 519, a queer community centre located in the heart of Toronto’s Village, the area surrounding Church and Wellesley streets. There, she leads the Trans-Identified People of Colour Project. “We work with a lot of trans women who in the summertime might be hanging out in the park because they might be accessing the shelter system, and during certain times of the day the shelter might be closed,” she tells me. “Police see them as troublemakers, like they just shouldn’t be there.”

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has seen some significant changes over the last few decades, particularly with how the area is policed. According to Patience Newbury, a scholar of transgender issues related to public space well-versed in the history of the Village, the 1990s saw numerous incidents of assault and vandalism where police would avoid getting involved, or admonish those living there who stood up for themselves. But around the mid- to late ’90s, things shifted. Cisgender people, mostly gay men, began to buy up storefronts and needed to work with police. They wanted cleaner sidewalks, less noise and sleaze, and fewer homeless people, so as to maintain the value of their properties.

Newbury says among the biggest losers in this new closer relationship between cis gay people and police were the trans women who lived and worked in the area. Property ownership in the Village that was accessible to cisgender people was completely out of reach for trans people, especially women, who are relegated to informal and unprotected work. For trans sex workers, the Village was, and remains, one of the key spots to conduct street-based work. The main stretch of road where many trans women make their livelihood is just east of Church and Wellesley, on a street called Homewood Avenue.

Business has taken a hit, largely due to changes in who formally occupies the space. And in the absence of good-faith regulation and worker protections, many sex workers are unduly put at risk as a result of law enforcement.

Since 2014, some laws around sex work have changed in letter, though not entirely in spirit. Sex workers no longer face the direct threat of imprisonment as a consequence of their work. But the risk hasn’t disappeared: It’s still illegal to purchase the services of a sex worker, and to “communicate” for the purposes of doing so, which forces many people into underground and unsafe positions. Police also respond to neighbourhood complaints by stopping and questioning sex workers, a form of casual harassment. Most studies on the legal status of sex work have found that enforcement creates greater risk of harm for sex workers than otherwise, by forcing workers into worse-lit, less accessible, and more isolated locations to avoid police.

Trust in the police is understandably low among sex workers. There’s a long history of exploitation and sexual violence at the hands of law enforcement, especially against women of colour. Just last winter, a member of the Vancouver Police Department was exposed for allegedly exploiting vulnerable sex workers that they had been charged to protect.

“I think any sex worker is threatened by police,” says Monica Forrester, a program coordinator at Maggie’s, a safe community space and resource centre for sex workers in Toronto. She’s been involved in activism on behalf of sex workers and the transgender women for years. “The police will harass the girls mostly when there’s complaints. The girls work in an area where I would say more gay men live, and there has been some friction with the gay men in the area where they work. Police will respond to any sort of call—like that’s there too much noise, you know what I mean? And they’ll push women off of their corners, or tell them to go somewhere else—which can be dangerous considering that they’re trans.”

***

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has been in the news lately because police believe the area was the hunting ground of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who, at the time of this writing, has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder. But McArthur is not the first serial killer to make a name for himself in the Village. That title belongs to a man named Marcello Palma, whose victims were three sex workers: Deanna Wilkinson, Shawn “Junior” Keegan, and Brenda Ludgate.

Palma murdered Ludgate, Keegan, and Wilkinson on the night of May 20, 1996. Of the three, only Brenda Ludgate was cisgender; Palma murdered her in the city’s downtown west end. Junior Keegan was only 19 years old when they were murdered by Palma, and while most reporters called them a “transvestite,” it is probably more accurate to describe them as genderqueer.

Deanna Wilkinson was a 31-year-old transgender woman. In the excited reporting days after her body was found, she was referred to only by her former name. Both Keegan and Wilkinson were shot to death on Homewood Avenue, where they worked.

I’ve been thinking about the Homewood murders for several months after learning of them through transgender and sex work activist Morgan M. Page’s history podcast, One From the Vaults. As she tells it, in the wake of the murders, trans women came together to develop a range of community programs designed to help sex workers go about their work with less danger—meal transports, meetings, safe sex supplies.

This was front of mind when I spoke to Persad, who told me about the programming currently underway at The 519. She’s doing good work, but it’s not without its challenges—particularly from police, who often mistreat the trans people of colour in her program. “There’s constant harassment,” she says. “Police see them often like targets, or disposable people who shouldn’t be there, who shouldn’t be around.”

Hours later, I couldn’t stop thinking about those words—targets, disposable. Palma was known to be violent with his wife, and admitted to his psychiatrist that he fantasized about killing street people and sex workers. Despite this, no one tried to intervene in the months leading up to the night Deanna was killed. In fact, Palma was able to freely amass a veritable arsenal of handguns, including the one he used to murder three sex workers.

III: Grayce Baxter

“Transgenderse are also ignored by the police,” writes Viviane Namaste in the 1995 edition of Gendertrash From Hell, a radical transgender zine made in Toronto. Edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa, Gendertrash published a total of four issues in the early 1990s—an indie, alternative means of reaching community. In her piece, Namaste mentions three women to illustrate her point: Marsha P. Johnson, whom the New York police called a victim of suicide despite witnesses stating she had been targeted for violence; Tammy Ross, whose sudden death the Montreal police chalked up to suicide; and Grayce Baxter, who disappeared in Toronto in the early ’90s.

“If this is the first time you’ve heard these names and these stories, think about that for a moment,” writes Namaste. “Transsexual sex trade workers are too far removed from the suburban middle class, too marginalized to warrant media coverage, activist demonstrations, or commemorative ceremonies.”

Grayce was 27 when she was murdered in December 1992 by a corrections officer named Patrick Daniel Johnson. She was a sex worker, and Johnson was her client. When newspapers began covering her disappearance, Grayce’s work was just about the only thing journalists could focus on. Described as a “high-priced call girl,” a “prostitute,” and a “transsexual,” reporters conjectured that she was involved with hard drugs, and disclosed both the status of her transition and her former name. She was painted as a caricature, and it was assumed that Grayce’s murder was connected to a sensationalized depiction of what was supposedly a risk-taking, drug-using, party-girl lifestyle. Accozzaglia writes: “Ms. Baxter was murdered by a member of law enforcement. His motive was not drug-related. It related to his own impotence: his purchased time with Ms. Baxter expired before he could climax. So he strangled her to death, cut her into pieces, and dumped the pieces down the apartment tower’s trash chute.”

Community memory runs deep. Grayce’s murder at the hands of law enforcement and her case’s treatment by the police department and media set the tone for what trans women, especially those in sex work, could expect from cisgender institutions and the criminal justice system.

In the ’90s, the stakes for trans women who encountered the police while working were horrifically high. A criminal record could often disqualify someone from participation in gender identity therapy (which includes qualifying for subsidized bottom surgery). There is still only one medical centre in Canada where trans women can get bottom surgery, and the procedure is often prohibitively expensive, even with subsidization. If an encounter with law enforcement went wrong and a trans woman ended up with a criminal record, it would effectively cut off access to further transition-related health care.

Though this is no longer the official policy, many women continue to face similar risks because access to transition-related care often depends on the training and biases of individual service providers and how they choose to interpret government regulation.

The fall 1993 issue of Gendertrash featured an interview with a trans woman and sex worker named Justine Piaget. She describes several instances of being attacked by clients, including once having to cut a man’s testicles “just about off” during a bad call in Montreal. The same issue also features a full-page warning about a dangerous man targeting trans sex workers in the Church and Wellesley area.

This was in 1993. But not much has improved. This February, Monica Forrester told me about her experience seeking police protection after a violent incident with an armed man. “When I was doing outreach, a few women were voicing a guy threatening them. Then he threatened me and he pulled a knife. I did a report, and then I hear, two months later, ‘Oh, well there’s nothing we can do,’” she says. “And they know where he lived, but they said they couldn’t get video surveillance—you know, just a bunch of crap to say, ‘We did what we can do,’ and that’s it.” She saw it as the bare minimum attention required to close the issue, but not to take an active interest in her safety as a trans woman and a sex worker.

Forrester believes that, if it ended up becoming more serious—if he had acted on his threat—we’d quickly see that police would get the necessary information to investigate him after the fact. “It just goes to show that with sex workers, their experiences are considered not as important as someone who might not be a sex worker or who might not be trans,” she says.

Police took two months to begin their investigation into Grayce’s murder back in ’92.

Her remains were never found.

IV: Alloura Wells

I tried three times to get in touch with the Toronto police for this story. When I finally got on the phone with Constable Danielle Bottineau, Toronto Police Service’s LGBTQ Liaison Officer, I was surprised by both her frankness and friendliness. Constable Bottineau had no illusions about the kind of history that Toronto police are grappling with in moving forward with the LGBTQ community. “Historically, as an institution, policing has never been good at being transparent and having those tough conversations,” she says. Because of this difficult history, combined with a failure by police to make known their processes and mandates, Bottineau worries there is a climate of misinformation in which people are quick to come to their own conclusions or fill in their own answers.

A lack of answers has been a recurring theme for the transgender community’s relationship with the Toronto police for three years now, starting with the death of Sumaya Dalmar in February 2015. Toronto police didn’t classify Sumaya’s death as a homicide and provided no further public updates. Many were unsure how to react.

The 26-year-old model was widely beloved both within and beyond her Somali community, and people were heartbroken over her loss. At that point in 2015, six trans women of colour had already been murdered in the United States, all under age 36—a rate of about one murder per week. Many felt afraid and vulnerable, unwilling to believe that Sumaya’s untimely death was not a homicide.

“I still don’t know what exactly happened with Sumaya,” says Abdi Osman, a Toronto visual artist. Osman knew Sumaya personally, and she was the subject of his 2012 documentary Labeeb, which explored gender and sexuality in the Somali community. According to Osman, many of her other friends are still in the dark. Because she had such an important place in her wider community, the silence that followed her death was hard to make sense of.

I spoke to another friend of Sumaya’s, whom I’ll call Shamir (he requested his name be excluded for privacy purposes). Shamir says Sumaya was the first in their circle to come out publicly, and her pride and excitement was infectious. Shamir was very close to Sumaya, and he was with her family the night her body was found. According to him, Sumaya’s family had requested privacy for the course of the investigation, and because family meant a lot to Sumaya, Shamir thought it best to respect their wishes. That meant no police announcements, no public follow-up, no feeding the rumours. “As much as we wanted to put pressure on the police, we wanted to respect her family’s wishes,” says Shamir. He had to become comfortable with silence.

Though it upheld her family’s requests, the silence around Sumaya’s death contributed to the impression that many share of the police taking a hands-off approach to the deaths of marginalized trans people.

Shamir contrasted Sumaya’s case and the police’s cautious silence with the case of Alloura Wells. People who knew Alloura described her as quiet but well-liked. But she was without a fixed address for years, making her part of a population that is at greater risk of death or disappearance.

According to research collected by anti-homelessness information centre Homeless Hub, trans women are overrepresented in the shelter system, especially as youth. Yet, one in three trans youth in Toronto are rejected by homeless shelters due to transphobic discrimination. Research reveals that homeless trans women and women of colour, especially those of Indigenous descent, are frequent victims of discrimination and mistreatment through the shelter system, though issues with data collection make exact statistics hard to find.

Still, reports by Toronto-based researchers found that police harassment of homeless people has remained disproportionately high over the past two decades, ranging from abusive language to physical assaults. In 1992, one in 10 homeless people reported having been assaulted by police, and a 2009 survey of homeless people in Toronto found that over half of the respondents (58 percent) had been victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement.

Alloura went missing in Toronto in July 2017. Folks at Maggie’s organized a search for the 27-year-old, but found nothing. In November, several months after the body of a transgender woman was found in a midtown ravine in August 2017, Toronto police were able to identify the body as Alloura’s.

“I think the situation with Alloura was just total police negligence,” Shamir says. “The situation with Sumaya wasn’t comparable in that sense.” He stressed that in Alloura’s case, he felt the lack of consistent outreach with the trans community only served to break down whatever trust had been built between trans people and the Toronto police.

Maggie’s Monica Forrester sees Alloura’s case as a prime example of police indifference to marginalized trans women. “They didn’t reach out to the community to see how to identify this person, they didn’t do any public awareness around this trans body. It shows you that trans people are not looked at as important or worthy,” she says. “And that’s something that’s still very prevalent.”

Forrester was in contact with Alloura’s father, and encouraged her family to file a missing person report with the Toronto police. But when her family reported her disappearance to the police, they claimed that police officers blew them off, giving them a non-emergency number and refusing to begin the investigation themselves. Alloura’s father says he was told that she was not a “priority” because she was homeless. Forrester was disappointed, but unsurprised. “They knew that this was a trans body they found. Because she was homeless, they really didn’t care,” she says.

In the days following, Toronto police announced that they would begin a review into how they handle sensitive missing persons cases. Police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Toronto Star that it was “not the proper response from any part of this organization,” and said police had attempted to apologize to the Wells family.

Toronto is an increasingly unaffordable city; it’s hard to survive without access to protected employment, stable housing, and friendly service providers—a situation rarely available to the overwhelming majority of trans women.

When someone is lost, it becomes easy for institutions like the police or the media to dismiss them. Osman called it “victim-blaming.”

***

Everyone I talked to for this story spoke to a sense of feeling worthless in the eyes of police. And as long as we remain locked into a system designed by and for cisgender people that treats transgender women as disposable, that feeling is not going away.

What struck me when researching this story was how close many of the women were to each other. There are women who have had to bury multiple colleagues. They took care to tell their friends that they loved them, because there was no guarantee they would see each other again. That care spilled over into searches, memorials, protests, and news stories, demanding that their sisters be remembered with love.

This city is not friendly to trans women, especially not to those who do sex work, who don’t have fixed addresses, who have been exposed to drugs or violence, who need help and protection. Their disappearances are not the inevitable result of the risks inherent to being transgender; whether by murder, drugs, disease, suicide, or poverty, every trans woman’s death is the product of multiple interlocking systems of exclusion and marginalization.

Each one of them is a preventable tragedy. Each one of them is a priority.

Domestic violence takes place in up to a staggering 40 percent of law enforcement families. But police forces mostly ignore the problem, writes investigative journalist Alex Roslin in his award-winning book, Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence. The excerpt below is adapted from the book. His 2004 article in This about an RCMP officer who killed his ex-girlfriend was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

At 3 p.m. on April 26, 2003, Crystal Judson-Brame was speaking with her mother Patty on a cell phone while walking from her car to the pharmacy in a shopping mall parking lot.

“I think I see David,” she said referring to her estranged husband David Brame, the chief of the Tacoma Police Department, just south of Seattle. Brame had just pulled into the parking lot in another car with the couple’s two children.

Crystal’s father, Lane Judson, at home with Patty, told his wife, “If she sees him [David], tell her to get the hell out of there.”

But Crystal ended the call. “I gotta’ go, I gotta’ go, I gotta’ go,” she said.

Patty Judson tried to call her daughter back seven times in the next 12 minutes, but there was no answer. In the parking lot, Crystal returned to her car. But David slipped past her into the driver’s seat and sat with his feet on the ground, stopping her from getting into her vehicle. Witnesses heard raised voices.

“Oh no, don’t. Don’t!” Crystal was overheard saying.

David Brame suddenly pulled Crystal’s head down—or she may have crouched to protect herself; it’s not clear. The police chief drew his .45-calibre Glock service pistol and shot Crystal at point-blank range behind the left ear.

Crystal fell forward, a quarter turn to the right toward the rear of the car. David then shot himself in the right temple and fell backward while the couple’s two young kids sat in the other car nearby.

The children ran to their parents, their eight-year-old daughter screaming, “Daddy shot mommy! Daddy hurt mommy!”

With attention nationwide focused on the terrible incident, Tacoma city officials at first said Brame had been a good police chief and that the murder-suicide was “completely unexpected.” But evidence soon emerged that officials had covered up for Brame and refused to heed warning signs or take action that may have averted the tragedy.

Investigators quickly found that red flags were apparent even when Brame was first hired as a cop. As part of the screening, a psychologist recommended against his hiring. A second psychologist said Brame was “deceptive,” “defensive,” and a “marginal” applicant. Brame had also failed the behavioural portion of the entrance exam at another local police agency, the second psychologist noted.

The Tacoma Police Department ignored the concerns and hired Brame, the son of a cop, anyway. As a police officer, Brame was the subject of a rape complaint and an allegation that he had threatened a girlfriend with his gun, though investigations never led to charges. He rose through the ranks and eventually became chief of police.

At home, David Brame was reported to be exceptionally controlling, checking on his wife’s whereabouts and receipts and giving her $100 every two weeks for household expenses for the family of four. He reportedly called her “fat” and “ugly,” saying no man would want her.

“He would say, ‘You know, I can choke you out so quickly or I can snap your neck,’” Crystal’s mother Patty later said. He reportedly tried to badger Crystal into participating in threesomes and foursomes.

In a declaration she filed as part of a divorce application a month before she was murdered, Crystal said her husband had tried to choke her twice in the previous six months, said he could break her neck and pointed his service gun at her saying, “Accidents happen.” “I do remain very afraid of my husband,” she said.

Around the time of this declaration, Crystal told Assistant Police Chief Catherine Woodard that David had threatened to kill her, investigators later learned. Instead of reporting the allegation or starting an investigation, Woodard turned her notes about the conversation over to David Brame.

Stories about the abuse allegations came out in local media in the days before Crystal was murdered. Instead of taking any action, city manager Ray Corpuz defended the police chief, saying Brame was “doing a great job.” Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma also dismissed the allegations as a “private matter,” calling Brame an “outstanding chief.” Also unheeded was a recommendation from city human-resources officials that Brame’s gun and badge be taken away.

Crystal’s parents and other family members filed a $75-million wrongful-death suit against the city of Tacoma and the local county, saying officials failed to deal with Brame’s behaviour and protect Crystal. In 2005, Tacoma agreed to settle the suit by paying the couple’s orphaned children and Crystal’s estate $12 million. As part of the settlement, the city also pledged to improve police procedures and declare April 26 each year Domestic Violence Awareness Day. In a separate settlement, the county agreed to create the Crystal Judson Family Justice Center, which offers free food, help and shelter to domestic violence survivors.

Crystal’s parents also took their campaign to the state legislature. As his daughter lay dying in the hospital after the shooting, Lane Judson, a retired U.S. Navy chief petty officer and former manager at Boeing, had promised her he’d do everything he could to prevent such crimes from happening to others. In 2004, the Judsons’ campaign convinced the state of Washington to adopt a law requiring all police agencies to have a strict policy on domestic violence involving police officers.

But the Judsons knew the problems went beyond their state. They continued their campaign on the national level and scored another breakthrough in 2005 when they convinced Congress to vote to create the Crystal Judson Brame Domestic Violence Protocol Program as part of legislation to extend the Violence Against Women Act.

The measure gave law enforcement agencies access to a grant fund (currently worth about $220 million annually) that they could use to create programs to stop police officers from committing domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes and to help survivors of such crimes.

The Judsons’ campaign didn’t stop there. They continued to speak across the U.S. and beyond about domestic violence in police and other homes, often bringing audiences to tears with their emotional account of the impacts on their family. “We grieve every day,” Lane and Patty wrote in their foreword to Police Wife. “How we all miss Crystal during the holidays. There are no more phone calls, just to talk. Crystal will never become a Gramma. Everything taken for granted daily is forever lost to Crystal and her children.”

***

Police domestic violence isn’t simply about a few badly behaving cops. It is by all evidence a rampant, systemic problem—a serious job hazard for many police officers—rooted in the very nature of law enforcement and likely existing in any society where police have a similar structure. It thus requires systemic solutions.

Even a zero-tolerance police policy on officer-involved domestic violence does little to tackle the underlying causes of the abuse: power and control, anti-woman attitudes and impunity. The strictest policy will deal mostly with symptoms, not the deeper structural problems.

Without deep changes, the abuse epidemic thus appears inevitable in any country where police exist in the same form. It is likely to persist so long as and wherever police carry on as an institution focused on power and control, predictably attracting abusive men who shield each other from punishment and strive to maintain a male-dominated police culture.

Professional policing is a fairly recent human invention. The first large modern-day professional police forces emerged in the 1800s in Europe and North America as industrialization transformed farmers into factory workers in quickly growing cities. The social upheavals forced governments to create the “broad historical project of police,” which had as its mission “fabricating a social and economic order,” according to a study co-authored by Carleton University professor George Rigakos.

“The police project, therefore, has a long history, emerging as a civilizing ‘science’… and eventually as an essential system of order maintenance for the discipline of the indigent, the poor and the working classes.”

Police play a similar role today. “Police power assumes its most formidable aspect when cops deal with the underclass. This is the group they’ve been pressured, implicitly, to control,” said Anthony Bouza, a former commander in the New York Police Department and ex-police chief of Minneapolis, writing in his book The Police Mystique. “When cops deal with the poor (blacks, Hispanics, the homeless and street people), the rubber of power meets the road of abuse…. The underclass must be kept in its place or the chief will lose his or her job.” Instead of addressing racism in society and other problems that create an underclass, “the usual answer is to get the police to clean up society’s failings.”

Statistics back up this view. The number of police officers per capita in the U.S., Canada and other countries is closely correlated with unemployment, income inequality and economic marginalization, particularly among women, African Americans, First Nations people and youth, according to data compiled for this book. The more inequality and marginalization, the more cops we tend to find.

It’s of course simplistic to say police exist only to mishandle calls about abused or missing women and oppress the marginalized. But the correlations do support Chief Bouza’s claim that policing the “underclass” is a central part of a cop’s life. A key tacit function of the police seems to be to preserve order in the face of the disruptive impacts of women’s inequality, poverty, economic marginalization, discrimination and subjugation of First Nations people. By so doing, police in effect help to preserve these injustices.

The data on correlations tells us an ugly truth about policing in our society—and in turn about what’s really needed to stop police domestic violence. The family troubles of police officers are inextricably connected to the marginalization present in a highly unequal, divided society.

Those who hope for a more just society would do well to make police domestic violence a key priority. The issue is a critical fulcrum for the entire system. That means abused police wives hold a key to sweeping social change. They are a terrorized and powerless underclass, literally at the heart of power and without voice, with the massive might of the state arrayed against them. Their conditions are so atrocious and precarious that not only do they almost never speak out in their own name, but they also can’t usually join other women and advocates to work together to improve their collective situation.

Most other disadvantaged groups collaborate publicly to build lasting social movements. Not police spouses. They usually wage their survival struggle utterly alone, in anonymity, with little or no help or knowledge of others in the same situation, each woman reinventing her struggle anew. Their unique position is why their condition is so little known and why improving their lives is so difficult. Real improvement can’t happen without deep social changes on many levels.

But despite the powerlessness of abused police spouses, they do hold great power in their hands over not only their own fate, but also the entire social order. Because of the resilience and resourcefulness of the human spirit, police spouses do break free and speak out, and they do so more and more. In their titanic struggle, their accumulating voices are not only testimony to the horrors they personally overcame, but also to some of the most extreme conditions of inequality and injustice existing in our society—an indictment of a social order that makes their condition inevitable.

That is the ultimate truth of police domestic violence. It is a mirror reflected back on ourselves.

Find a longer free excerpt at Roslin’s blog.

Black Lives Matter Toronto’s tent city. Photo courtesy of Desmond Cole via Twitter.

Last year, Black Lives Matter Toronto concluded #BLMTOtentcity, a 15-day occupation of Toronto Police headquarters. What began as a protest against the death of Andrew Loku, a Black man shot and killed by Toronto police in July 2015, became a public retrospect on the reality Canadians love to ignore: We too have a police violence problem. Our systems of law enforcement are predicated on the incessant criminalization, re-enslavement, and macabre disposal of Black bodies.

The tent city was initially planned as a City Hall campout that would last mere hours, but when officers arrived, we moved to Toronto Police Headquarters. On the first night there, the police attacked protesters, kicking, punching, and raiding the area. In a show of defiance, we stayed put and protested for more than two weeks. Through #BLMTOtentcity, Black Torontonians organized in a scale not seen since the 1992 Yonge Street Riot, a response to the growing number of Black men killed by police. Tens of thousands of people participated in demonstrations, direct actions, and arts-based community healing spaces. For the first time in a generation, the struggles of Black Ontarians captured the world’s attention. Our stories were being told to millions—from news stations to Twitter feeds across the globe.

#BLMTOtentcity was about the reclamation of a space that carried our community’s trauma. It was a manifesto of how we envisioned a close-to-utopic Black-centric space: everyday people curating their own liberation, activism from a transfeminist lens, and solidarity with Indigenous communities.

A year after #BLMTOtentcity, 25 years after the Yonge Street Riot, and centuries after the creation of Canada’s first policing institution, our issues remain unchanged. Black communities continue to be police targets. The public remains desensitized to alarming rates of racial profiling, sentencing disparities, and death by trigger-happy cops. It has become norm for our slain bodies to be flashed across screens—Black bodies killed during routine traffic stops, in their homes, in front of their families, and in most cases, with little to no consequence for the officers who kill them.

This crisis is exacerbated by police-violence deniers, coordinated campaigns by police sympathizers, and police associations who insist this is a problem exclusive to Americans. These myths negate evidence that paint a very different picture: In 2017, police continue to terrorize Black communities and act with impunity.

Today, Black people are still being carded in Ontario. Carding, or arbitrary street checks, allows police to criminalize Black people simply for being. Once in the system, a person is seen as known to police, even when there’s been no arrest. Their file expands each time they are carded. Carding victimizes thousands of Black Ontarians, stripping them of their dignity and right to presumed innocence. The police claim carding was necessary to fight crime, a position they have yet to prove with any data.

The province responded to the global condemnation of the act by promising its ban, but instead established regulations, which came into effect this year. In reality, the “ban” on carding is simply a set of bureaucratic policy that amount to a how-to-guide for the practice’s continuation. Under the new regulations, the police must give a reason for stopping civilians and inform them of their right not to give identifying information. This means that as long as an officer presents a plausible reason for stopping civilians, say a theoretical crime in the area, then one can still get carded. Additionally, regulations do little to curb racial bias within police forces. In Ontario, the police continue to target Black communities, as evidenced in the case of 15-year-old Devonte Miller Blake and 10-year-old Kishwayne McCalla, who were stopped on their way home from school by seven (yes, seven) police officers pointing guns at their faces simply because they “fit the description” of a criminal suspect.

Today, the families of Jermaine Carby, Andrew Loku, Marc Ekamba-Boekwa, Abdirahman Abdi, Kwasi Skene-Peters, and Alex Wettlaufer—Black Ontarians who were killed in the last two years by police—are still waiting for justice, waiting on Special Investigations Unit (SIU) reports that will inevitably grant the officers impunity.

Twenty-seven years ago, Black activists pushed for civilian oversight of the police. The SIU was created and lauded as the provincial police watchdog, with a mission to “nurture public confidence in policing by ensuring that police conduct is subject to rigorous and independent investigations.” In reality, the SIU’s record proves otherwise. Under the SIU’s watch, there has been a dearth of police officers charged and barely any convicted. Of 3,400 investigations, 95 have had criminal charges laid (less than three percent), 16 have led to convictions, and only three have served time.

School resource officers facilitate the school-to-prison pipelines. Over-inflated police budgets are the largest line items in municipalities. Anti-violence task forces continue to rip apart Black communities. It is within this context, and in response to the abhorrent conditions that Black people are expected to live in, that Black Lives Matter Toronto organizes, drawing on the brilliance and strategies of past Black liberation movements.

In retrospect, #BLMTOtentcity was a desperate plea from people who have had enough, who were tired of having their issues brushed aside. #BLMTOtentcity was not just a protest, but a vision for a world free from state-sanctioned violence. Perhaps most important, #BLMTOtentcity showed us that we could indeed win, there can be an end to police brutality.

We have more work to do.

How Ontario’s failed police accountability system lets our authorities get away with systemic abuse of society’s most vulnerable populations

When Greg Spoon accepted a beer from a friend on Monday, May 3, 2010, he can’t have imagined what would happen. The 40-year-old Lakota Sioux man, known as “Iggy,” is soft-spoken, personable, and articulate according to friends, “when sober and in a good space.” He also suffers from serious Type 2 diabetes and has lived on the streets of Toronto for the better part of a decade. That May evening, he was hanging around Sanctuary, a well-frequented drop-in center for those in need, on Charles Street in downtown Toronto. His friend had taken the beer from what appeared to be an abandoned backpack. When the owner of the bag returned, passersby called the police. Soon Spoon was charged with theft, handcuffed, and allegedly beaten by police during what witnesses said was a diabetic seizure. He spent the night in a cell in 52 Division.

It’s no secret that Toronto’s most marginalized, including people who are unemployed, under-housed, or struggling with their physical or mental health, have often been on the receiving end of police misconduct. The most recent Toronto Street Health report in 2007 showed that one in eight homeless respondents, like Spoon, had experienced police violence over the past year in the form of direct physical assault. Three quarters of those in the Street Health report did not file a formal complaint, and nearly half said they were afraid of the repercussions should they lodge a complaint—something Spoon initially also feared. The same number said they didn’t feel a complaint would achieve anything.

“We have two solitudes in Toronto,” says Anna Willats from her office at George Brown College where she is coordinator for Women Transitioning to Trades.  There’s the experience of white, middle-class people who rarely encounter experience the police directly, she says, and then there’s everyone else—the latter of which experience patrols of their neighbourhoods and constant surveillance. A longtime activist and member of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, Willats says the distinction is divided along race and class lines: “certain groups get more attention from police.”

In 2009, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director was created, in part, as a fix. At its most basic, the OIPRD’s mandate is to provide civilian oversight of officers in Ontario, and to curb the insular cycle of police investigating police. As an independent office, the OIPRD also allows complaints to be filed online and by a third party if needed, in theory making the complaint process more accessible to people, like Spoon, who might find it intimidating to file a complaint. In fact, of the roughly 3,500 complaints received every year, about 400 are third-person complaints. Despite such lofty goals, however, five years after its launch, promises of improved accessibility and civilian oversight are still coming up short—especially when it comes to justice for street-involved folk.

The Toronto Police Accountability Coalition reports that from 2010 to 2011 the OIPRD received about 4,000 complaints and dismissed 2,000 off the cuff.  Of the 2,000 they did review, only 26 (0.5 percent of all complaints) were substantiated and deemed serious.  By the end of that first year, just one case had lead to a non-criminal internal police disciplinary hearing, with two other hearings not yet started. In the other 23 serious, substantiated cases, there were no consequences at all. The OIPRD cost taxpayers $5.4 million for 2010-2011.

Today, the OIPRD is heavily criticized as a bureaucratic and understaffed system, still wedded to police culture. In September 2013, the Toronto-based Scadding Court Community Centre (SCCC) released a report that summarized comments heard in a forum it held the previous fall—the first time the OIPRD has been evaluated publicly since its initiation in 2009. Its conclusions were clear: the OIPRD needs to improve on basically everything, from its legal structures and its outreach, to its general procedures and investigation process. “It is clear that the majority of Ontarians do not even know what the OIPRD is,” says Alina Chaterjee, director of redevelopment, development and community engagement at SCCC who co-prepared the final report. “And if they do, are unclear on how to access their services.”

The police accountability system has been under review almost perpetually since public support for scrutinizing police behavior began to rise in the ’70s. The first police complaints system was launched on a trial basis in Toronto in 1981. The system established a Public Complaints Investigation Bureau and created the role of Public Complaints Commissioner, which was later changed to Police Complaints Commissioner (PCC), to review investigations. The system became permanent three years later, eventually expanding to include the rest of Ontario in 1990. It was killed not long after in 1996, however, by then provincial premier Mike Harris. In its last year of operation, the PCC only investigated 24 of 3,549 complaints.

From 1996 until the OIPRD, Ontario had no civilian oversight body to investigate public complaints about police conduct. During this time, complaints about the police were brought directly to the division. The force’s professional standards unit—the internal corrective and investigative body—would then deal with the complaint, if deemed serious enough. In 2002, the City of Toronto’s Auditor critiqued the paltry system for its lack of accountability; the system came under fire from the Ontario Human Rights Commission the following year.

In 2005, the Honorable Patrick LeSage, former Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court, released a thorough review of what was left of Ontario’s police complaints system. To complete the report, LeSage met with community groups and police from the province and held public meetings, hearing from over 200 individuals and 85 community groups between June–November 2004. Community groups critiqued the system for being “inherently difficult to navigate” and individuals said they felt intimidated making a complaint at a police station. People also reported being discouraged from making complaints by police. The result was The Independent Police Review Act, 2007, which mandated the creation of the OIPRD. The goal: accountability by way of civilian oversight.

Officially, the OIPRD is an arms-length agency of the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General. Unlike the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of Ontario set up in 1990, which investigates cases that include sexual assault, homicide, and serious injury, and which can charge officers with a criminal offense, the OIPRD is essentially an administrator of employment law. As such, it deals with complaints like abuse of power and lower degrees of physical assault (one drop-in user reported being weight-lifted by a police officer by his handcuffs which left welts on his wrists, just out of sight of surveillance cameras, for instance).

The OIPRD’s nearly 50-person staff includes only 13 investigators—half former police and half civilians. Non-police investigators come from organizations such as the Ontario Public Guardian and Trustee, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, and the Ontario Ombudsman Office. The OIPRD oversees complaints against municipal and regional police services, as well as the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)—yet investigates only a small number of complaints itself. For example, in 2012-2013, the OIPRD investigated a meager 119 conduct complaints but referred 1,316 back to the same police service where they originated. And, in the case of a substantiated complaint, it is still the chiefs of police who conduct the discipline or disciplinary hearings (which can result in a reprimand, suspension without pay, or dismissal).  “We still have a system,” says Willats, “where by and large the police investigate themselves.”

The OIPRD’s wobbly track record is especially problematic considering the recent rise in controversial police behavior, particularly in Ontario. For example, the OIPRD received a record 356 complaints after the Toronto 2010 G20 protests. According to a poll a year later, more than half of all Torontonians felt the police used undue force during the G20. In response to the uproar, the OIPRD released a comprehensive overview of police management of the event, which did little to silence critics. “It’s not really in dispute that there were massive rights violations [during the G20],” says Abby Deshman of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), which has been pushing for the resolution of many of the complaints, “the missing piece is accountability for individual officers.”

Yet, while the G20 laid the foundation for distrust of Toronto police, recent events have served to magnify it. During the past year, Toronto Police have repeatedly attracted negative attention: the shooting to death of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim and subsequent charge of a Toronto police officer with second degree murder; the assault conviction and subsequent scant 45-day sentence of Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani for his actions against G20 protester Adam Nobody; and the practice of officers carding racialized Toronto youth—not to mention the Rob Ford investigation. Most recently, the shooting of Michael MacIsaac by Durham Regional Police on December 2, 2013 reaffirmed the public’s call for de-escalation training for officers and increased deployment of mental health crisis intervention teams when dealing with psychiatric survivors.

On a Thursday night in November 2012 at Sanctuary, the drop-in is bustling with people here for the home cooked shepherd’s pie, nicknamed “God’s pie” by the cook. I’m here with Doug Johnson Hatlem, a 36-year-old staff worker. His hair is disheveled, and a faded, blue jean shirt hangs off his lean shoulders. He is slouched next to me in a black faux-leather chair. Hatlem looks relaxed, but his eyes are darting around, keeping tabs on who is coming and going out of this basement hang-out. The other day I witnessed Hatlem pry himself free of a drunken headlock. The drop-in center is loud with the clanking of dishes and conversation.

Hatlem introduces me to Jason Greig, who is also here for supper. It’s an unusually warm Toronto day for November; Greig’s wearing a tank-top that shows off his biceps. Since the food’s not yet being served, we walk outside together so Greig can smoke. We sit side by side on a concrete planter across from Sanctuary. It’s the same planter where Spoon was sitting before he was beaten. Grieg is part Anishnabek and says he has struggled with addiction ever since he was 11, when he witnessed his three year-old brother get run over by a car. In and out of prison for years, Greig has been out for about four months, his longest stretch of freedom in six years.

A friend of Greig’s wanders past us. “What’s goin’ on, my negro,” he says, giving Greig a firm hand-grab and pat on the back. Greig explains that he’s having a conversation about “when police don’t take responsibility for their actions.”   “Who, Po-Po?” his friend asks, laughing, “they don’t have to, they’ve got a badge.”

Greig, 40, tells me the story of that night when Spoon was beaten and Greig himself was charged with assault, for which he served 60 days in Toronto’s notorious Don jail. As Greig was walking down Charles Street by Sanctuary, a man he guesses was a little older than him called him over to the pay phone where he was standing and offered him a drink; “I said sure.” But Greig says the man soon propositioned him, asking how much it would cost to have him for the night. Greig told him: “More than you’ve got in your wallet,” at which point he says the man grabbed his crotch. Greig responded by hitting the man several times, after which he says the man ran away, leaving a backpack full of beer behind him. Soon after, Iggy and two friends who had been hanging out on a nearby bench checked out the bag and shared the beer.

Spoon is a well-known character around the drop-in, equal parts articulate artist and brazen alcoholic. “You’ve got to catch him on a good day,” I was advised. (Spoon agreed to be interviewed for this article, but did not show up to four appointed interview times over the course of two months.) Known for hollering in the street, Spoon’s speech is often slurred and he can appear drunk because of his diabetes, which requires regular insulin shots. It’s sometimes hard to know whether his behavior is a result of blood sugar level or blood alcohol level.  That night Iggy was having a diabetic seizure, says his friend “Seven,” who I met with while he was panhandling outside a nearby mall.

Police were called after the man Greig punched claimed he had been robbed. When four officers arrived at 10 p.m., Spoon was handcuffed for suspected robbery and did not resist arrest. Around the same time as the arrest, Greg Cook, a young staff worker at Sanctuary, was at his desk in a makeshift office at the top of the church that houses the drop-in. He began to hear yelling on the street below, and headed down. What he saw next compelled Cook, a missionary kid who grew up in South East Asia and self-described non-confrontational person, to shout.

Across the street, one of the police officers had grabbed Spoon, pushed him face down on the concrete and kicked him in the back more than five times, says Cook. “They had him in handcuffs and he was in the fetal position,” adds Seven, who witnessed the event.  About four or five police on bicycles and three cruisers were on the scene, accounting for about 10 officers. Cook shouted at the police to stop, at which point, he says, the officer “stopped kicking … and instead stood on Greg Spoon’s back with one foot.” Seven also said the police had stomped on Spoon’s head at least twice. As a roughed-up Spoon was driven away in a cruiser, Cook resolved to file a complaint with the OIPRD about police misconduct on his behalf. At first, Spoon feared police retaliation, but after a week or so, he gave Cook the okay.

Officer David Hopkinson of 51 Division in Toronto can’t resist a hardware analogy. During a coffee break at the Ontario Police Complaints System forum at Metro Hall in November 2012, I ask him to tell me his view on the OIPRD. “If you have a broken table, you can glue it, screw it, nail it or use duct tape, but if you use all four methods you know it’ll be solid,” he explains, “there’s more than one way to fix a problem.” (I try to imagine what my husband would say if I tried to fix a table with duct tape.) Hopkinson can see the doubt in my face and admits that the metaphor doesn’t totally work. The point, he says, is that there are four different ways a person can make a complaint about the police: through the Human Rights Commission, the OIPRD, the courts, or the SIU—and complainants need to keep trying until they find the right avenue.

The forum at Metro Hall is the first time the OIPRD has been examined in this way: with police, social workers, media, and the public coming together to have a discussion. Hatlem is here, and during question period addresses the panel, which includes Inspector Jeff Vibert and Inspector Reuben Stroble of professional standards. At the mic, Hatlem says he has no faith in the system and asks the panel to give him one reason why he should use the OIPRD (instead of the courts) when it comes to advocating on behalf of the homeless. Viber and Stroble frown. “If you’re not feeling like the people you are working with on the streets are getting the respect they deserve then you need to up the ante, okay?” says Viber. “And take the people who are treating those homeless people in a disrespectful manner and hold them accountable.” He pauses: “I must apologize. I wish we did a better job.”

Afterwards, Hopkinson strides over to Hatlem with a preacher’s fervor, cutting him off at the croissant and bagel table, now littered with empty cream cheese packets after the morning’s frenzy. “Can I offer you a different answer?” Hopkinson asks, launching into the duct tape table solution. Hatlem engages the officer for a minute but I can see he is edging his way past the cream cheese packets and plastic knives towards the coat rack.

Later, a young man who works with youth in Regent Park describes the everyday reality of the police-youth relationship. “Even my two-year-old doesn’t like police,” he says, adding he believes his community has never had any community efforts from police.  After he speaks, officer Hopkinson leans back in his chair and turns to the guy, pointing at him and motioning with the same evangelical fervor, “I’d like to talk to you afterwards,” he says in a low voice. After the discussion, the two men connect and Hopkinson later tells me he’ll be speaking at an upcoming Regent Park youth event. By all means, this is a man with good intentions.

Sylvana Capogreco, senior counsel at the OIPRD, also seems big on good intentions. After listening to complaints from all sides—social workers, the public, and the police, she addresses the crowd. She speaks like a long-suffering mother who has told her child again and again why, yes, they must go to school. The legislation put in place after the LeSage report is a “complex piece of legislation,” she explains slowly. “We are a neutral organization. We don’t represent the police. We don’t represent the public. We try to ensure that the rules that are in place from the legislation are followed.” She says they get a lot of complaints where people are just annoyed that they got a justified speeding ticket, for example— a complaint that would be dismissed for being “frivolous” or “vexatious.”

She responds to the critique of police investigating police with the same worn tone: “Even though the investigation is sent to the police service to investigate, when they send the investigative report back to our office we have dedicated staff who look at every,” pause, “single,” pause, “report.” Capogreco looks visibly lighter when she steps down from behind the podium. The message—is the system perfect? No, but we’re doing the best with what we have.

I catch up with officer Hopkinson after the forum. His bulletproof vest is slung over his boardroom chair. His radio lies idle on the table. Many of the officers at this event have used the idea that each person has their own truth; that there is perception and there is reality, and officer Hopkinson is no exception. “Perceptions are stronger than the truth,” he says when asked about the ongoing critique of so-called police culture, “it’s not the same as the movies.”

Several times, Hopkinson asserts that anyone in his position—including Anna Willats, who is representing the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition at the forum—would do his job the same way he does. I ask Hopkinson if he believes anything has changed with the introduction of the OIPRD five years ago. He waves a hand towards the PowerPoint presentation. “This means nothing,” he says, “anyone can complain about me … as long as they get my good side.” He believes police work puts people in uncomfortable situations and, because of that, the public is bound to complain. “I believe I’ve done everything right.”

Six months after Cook filed his complaint, he and Spoon had their answer: the claim was unsubstantiated. The OIPRD said other witnesses, including an Intelligarde security guard, four police officers, and four civilian witnesses, claimed the officers did not use excessive force. Cook requested a review, but again the matter was found to be unsubstantiated. Hatlem is still livid—particularly considering what he saw as false testimony from the security guards. Sanctuary staff and clients have both had run-ins with the guards before.

It’s now a Tuesday afternoon in November, 2012, during Sanctuary’s womens’ drop-in. Hatlem is stationed on a landing in the church stairwell, watching a surveillance mirror to make sure the women are left alone. I sit across from him on the stairs and lay my voice recorder on the newel post between us. A few minutes later, a drop-in user excuses himself as he pushes past us on the stairs. “Eh eh eh!” stammers Hatlem, retrieving my voice recorder. “It just slipped into my hand,” the guy shrugs, and Hatlem smiles broadly, “right.”

Hatlem has begun a push for greater police accountability to address the violence that the city’s marginalized often experience. With a sister who was on the street for years, he is known to be an outspoken advocate. He recently organized direct action training to help people living on the street deal with police after the Parkdale neighbourhood death of Chris Gardian in 2011, an alleged result of police violence. (Hatlem did all this on paternity leave). And, until his recent move to Chicago in June 2013, he also led monthly street memorials in downtown Toronto for homeless people; he continues to work on a co-operative documentary about police violence in Toronto.

While we sit, Hatlem tells me he filed his first third-person complaint with the OIPRD in 2011 after months of waiting for police to file charges against two security guards who assaulted Sanctuary drop-in users in February 2010. That night, one of Sanctuary’s interns, Aylish Chantler, was sitting with three drop-in users huddled in the doorway of a nearby parking garage, drinking to keep warm. Without warning, security guards appeared and aggressively ordered them to leave. Before they had a chance to move, one of the guards targeted one of the drop-in users, Chris Van Hert, repeatedly kicking and stomping on him. Police were called and Chantler reported what she had seen. Two of the homeless individuals were arrested and brought to 52 division; the security guards continued with their evening’s work. “It’s like a completely different standard of justice,” says Hatlem.

The drop-in staff alerted the media shortly after, and the CBC was on the scene that evening. As a result, the police took statements from the two homeless men, and released them instead of keeping them overnight. But then, recalls Hatlem, “they kept not filing the charges [against the security guards], not filing the charges, not filing the charges.” When Hatlem filed the complaint, the OIPRD investigator set up an informal meeting with representatives from Intelligarde, Sanctuary, and Van Hert, something Hatlem sees as a step in the right direction. However, during the meeting Van Hert was immediately blamed by the security guards for the event. Van Hert’s response gave the company pause: “It doesn’t matter what I did,” he said, “I didn’t deserve to be beat up like that.” When the OIPRD investigator still said he would not press charges, however, Van Hert left the meeting angry. Hatlem’s complaint was later deemed by the OIPRD “serious” but unsubstantiated.

After chatting with Hatlem, I accompany Sanctuary staff worker Cook on a “walkabout,” a check-in on clients from the drop-in both on the streets and at their homes. We shop for groceries for one drop-in user and deliver them to his place. The man is a paraplegic client who recently won a large sum through the Human Rights Tribunal (the “duct tape” solution Hopkinson mentioned) for mistreatment during the G20. An aimless kitten wanders ahead of us as we step off the lurching elevator. His small apartment is so dark, we can hardly see. Cook sighs, “I forgot to get light bulbs.”

The client greets us and Cook starts putting away groceries: Frosted Flakes, quick noodles, bananas, and chocolate chip ice cream. (Cook confided in me earlier he sometimes wants to throw in some brown bread, but respects the grocery lists he is given.) At one window, diffuse daylight filters through the sheet used as a curtain, illuminating light switches surrounded by dirt and electrical sockets that hang off the walls. The other window is boarded up and there is a broken bottle in the corner by the door. It’s sadly not surprising that such people—those living in the most difficult circumstances—are having difficulty getting justice through the system, including the OIPRD. “We hold officers responsible to not have a bad day,” says Willats. “[We do that] because they are dealing with people who are having a bad day—sometimes the worst day of their lives.”

For many advocates, an ideal society would not only have more effective and independent police complaints systems, but minimal policing. While Willats admits there are times when “muscle” is needed, she argues that using police in so many places—responding to people in mental health crises, as well as in schools, as counselors and hall monitors—leads to criminalization of whole groups of people. She’d prefer society work with kids from the word “go” to learn conflict resolution, de-escalation, and mediation. That way, she says, communities could be empowered to police themselves, and professional policing could be used as sparingly as possible. “I don’t think at the end of the day that this is about minor changes,” adds Haltem. “When you hear stories like the ones we’re dealing with now, it’s a whole culture that’s…” Hatlem pauses, struggling to find the right word: “sick.”

Doukhobors stage a mass nude protest in Langham, Saskatchewan, in 1903.

In Canada, public nudity is allowed so long as you don’t “offend against public decency or order.” In fact, nudity is considered a political crime, one of the few offences that requires the Attorney General’s approval to lay charges. So, letting it all hang out among thousands of like-minded souls at the Pride Parade? You’re probably safe. But going for a naked jaunt to your local A&W—not so much. Brian Coldin, of Bracebridge, Ontario, currently faces five charges for his repeated clothing-free visits to fast-food restaurants located near his naturist resort. Coldin is fighting the charges, calling Canada’s nudity laws unconstitutional. A judge is expected to rule this fall. Until then, here’s a full-frontal look at our country’s long history of public nudity.

1918 First Canadian nudist club founded in Welland, Ontario.

1931 The Criminal Code first defines nudity as an offence in response to mass nude anti-conscription protests by radical Doukhobors, a Russian pacifist religious sect. The following year, 118 Doukhobors are arrested and sentenced to three years each for their naked protest.

1939 The Van Tan Club is founded in Vancouver by Ray Connett, the self-dubbed “Father of Canadian Nudism.” Today, it’s the oldest nudist club in Canada.

1947 The Canadian Sunbathing Association is formed. This and similar euphemisms are employed to make advertisements acceptable to newspaper and magazine publishers.

1953-54 The Criminal Code is amended to remove Doukhobor-related “parading” references. Criminal charges remain rare, however, as Attorneys General prove reluctant to prosecute. Those going clothing-free are instead usually charged with mischief or indecency.

1991 Gwen Jacob, 19, takes off her shirt in Guelph, Ontario, and is charged with indecent exposure and fined $75. In a recent interview with The Naturist Living Show, Jacob reflected on the episode: “With my hands shaking furiously, I took my shirt off and jammed it down the back of my shorts and I can’t tell you the freedom that entailed in that moment … I was scared to death, but there was a nearly euphoric sense of taking control of my own body.”

1996 The Ontario Court of Appeal rules that Jacob’s “indecent exhibition” did not pose a “risk of harm” as defined by the Supreme Court of Canada and therefore could not be the subject of criminal charges. The conviction is overturned and Jacob gets her 75 bucks back.

1998 Evangeline Godron swims topless in a Regina pool. After she declines to either leave or put on a top, police are called and she is charged. Godron is convicted of mischief a year later, and subsequent appeals are thrown out.

2011 Brian Coldin challenges the constitutionality of Canada’s nudity laws. His case is pending.

Dear Progressive Detective: I heard police arrested a man at the Pearson International Airport in Toronto after receiving a tip from Canada’s Suspicious Incident Reporting System, which alleged the man intended to join a Somali terrorist group. I’m concerned: what is SIRS, and how might the Government’s security efforts affect my civil liberties and right to privacy?

Mohamed Hersi was arrested in March as he was preparing to board a plane for Cairo to study Arabic. The 25-year-old security guard’s employer had submitted a Suspicious Incident Report based on web browsing it deemed “suspicious.” Charged with attempting to participate in a terrorist activity and counseling another person to do the same, Hersi’s case is still before the courts. Though out on bail, he’s hardly free—Hersi can’t apply for a passport or access the internet. He must be accompanied by a surety at all times.

The RCMP describes SIRS as an online service allowing operators of certain companies in sectors such as transit, finance, and energy to file reports on any suspicious activity they witness. The Mounties, CSIS, and other relevant agencies are notified upon a report’s submission. RCMP spokesperson Greg Cox says SIRS allows the RCMP to “develop crucial partnerships, support investigations, and maintain continuous dialogue with internal and external partners on shared national security concerns.”

But according to civil liberty and privacy experts, information sharing may be cause for worry. The government is collecting information about people who have yet to—or may never—commit a crime. Micheal Vonn, of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, calls this connecting the dots before knowing if those dots will be useful. To her, such “info grabs” are counterintuitive. “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says, “these systems provide more hay, not the needle.”

Vonn fears the fate of Maher Arar, deported and tortured because of “suspicions” he associated with alleged terrorists, will be repeated. “Information sharing has ramifications for privacy,” she adds, “and the sense that we aren’t being assessed as people, but by our data shadow.”

To its credit, the RCMP is fairly transparent; SIRS is monitored by the Privacy Commissioner. But any sighs of relief may—for now—be premature. As Sukanya Pillay, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, stresses, civil liberties and privacy must be respected. “Concerns arise when these liberties are chipped away,” she says. “That’s when a country starts to change.”

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Null Value.

“We do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” That was federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s astonishing response to Statistics Canada’s finding in July that crime rates in Canada now stand at the same level they did in 1973. Don’t bother us with the facts, was Nicholson’s meaning, our minds are made up. We’re going to get tough on crime—despite the fact that the criminals have gone soft on us.

Stephen Harper’s new majority government vowed last spring to pass an omnibus crime bill during the first 100 sitting days of the new parliament, a deadline that is fast approaching. The bulk of the bill is dedicated to introducing new mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offences. For instance, the last incarnation of the bill (it was never voted on before the last election and could change) specified a minimum one-year sentence for any drug crime on behalf of a gang or involving a weapon. The minimum raised to two years if the crime was committed near a school. Producing a drug nets a mandatory three years if the production posed a threat to minors or public health.

You don’t have to condone criminality to see that mandatory minimums, especially for drug-related crime, are the kind of cynical laws that play well on voter doorsteps and fail miserably in almost every other context. They don’t make the general public any safer; they harden minor criminals in the crucible of prison; and they cost a fortune.

Judges don’t like them, since they tie their hands and leave no room for context or, well, judgment (Justice John Gomery calls such legislation “a slap in the face” to judges). Prosecutors seldom like them, since they provide defendants no incentive to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser punishment. Corrections officials’ feelings are mixed at best; their budgets inevitably swell, but overcrowding causes greater problems.

Even the United States—the world capital of magical thinking on drug crime—is backpedalling on mandatory minimums for drug cases. A CBC report found a dozen states— Republican- and Democrat-run—that are repealing mandatory minimums. They cite a comprehensive array of complaints, from abstract doubts about the constitutionality of the practice, to practical, bottom-line problems with out-of-control policing and corrections costs.

The facts show that Canadians are safer than they have been in two generations, yet the Harper government is plunging ahead anyway. This policy will inflate the government’s corrections budget to $3.1 billion in 2012–2013 (including $466 million just to build new prisons). For that price tag you’d hope to bag the kingpins—but of course, that’s not what this is about. Instead we will victimize and incarcerate the most impoverished and desperate small time crooks and call it justice. If you believe that poverty reduction, alternative sentencing, addiction counselling, and evidence-based policymaking are better ideas, this government has one word for you: tough.

A suspect wanted for questioning by Vancouver police following the June 2011 riot that erupted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup playoffs. The law is still grappling with how to track crime in the age of social media and ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Image courtesy Vancouver Police.

After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable.

But this being 2011, many who broke windows with one hand held camera phones in the other. And as myriad pictures and videos of the event began to circulate, another worrying spectre emerged: social-media vigilantism. Images of those involved in violence and property damage spread quickly around the Web, often with the explicit intention of shaming, catching, and even punishing the perpetrators with acts of “citizen justice.”

“We have seen Big Brother and he is us,” portentously intoned social-media expert Alexandra Samuel to the Globe and Mail. And really, who could blame her? Anyone who has ever taken public transit or gone to a movie knows our fellow Canadians can’t always be counted on to be fair, or even terribly nice. But if our mistakes and trespasses used to be judged by the mostly neutral bodies of the State, this new technology means we now run the risk of being tried and even convicted by the body politic.

This speaks to a phenomenon increasingly difficult to ignore, as centuries-long practices of law and social norms, whether privacy, ownership, knowledge, or even statecraft, are threatened by new technologies. These are worrying prospects to be sure, partly because they’re just so new. But here’s a radical idea: rather than throwing up our hands, or simply calling for the use of less technology, we need to spend time thinking about how we will reshape our legal and social institutions to deal with the inevitable change that is on its way. To protect the relative freedoms of liberal society, we need to build policing of technology right into our legal structures.

After all, it’s not as if what we’re experiencing now doesn’t have some precedent. Take the telephone, for example. Though it was an incredible leap forward in communication, it also presented the rather sticky problem that your communication could be recorded and put to unintended ends. Similarly, having a point of communication in your home meant that people could contact you at any time, whether you happened to be eating dinner or not.

Our legal structures responded by enforcing laws about the conditions under which telephone calls could be made, recorded, and submitted for evidence in a legal trial. Maybe just as importantly, we also developed social strictures around the phone, including general rules about appropriate times for calling and the right way to answer. Like most social norms, some people follow them and some don’t, but at least legally speaking, our rules around the telephone generally seem to work.

What we need, then, is a similarly measured response that institutes civic and legal codes for how surveillance technology can be used, whether that is encouraging social sanction for inappropriate use, or articulating under what circumstances public footage can be submitted for legal evidence. In the same vein, it would also mean the legal system has to deal with the dissemination of information for vigilante purposes, and ratchet up consequences for those who take the law into their own hands. It would involve the tricky process of the law considering intent and context, but given the different degrees in murder charges and Canada’s hate-crime laws, that kind of legal subtlety seems to make our system better, not worse.

Implementing these changes will take decades, not years, because the changes here are huge, involving how the State exercises its authority, but also how we as members of a society relate to one another. Yet the purpose of the legal system has always been to police out those two aspects of our lives. And rather than only decrying the downsides of mob mentality, the unfettered exchange of private information or the Web’s detrimental impact on established business, we need to think about preserving the good in this new technology.

Because there’s another worry looming here too, and it also is about historical precedent. In the 19th century, the rise of printing technologies and cheap reading materials drastically altered how ideas were spread. The State responded by instituting literary study into the then-new school curriculum so that the young might “learn to read properly.” Certainly, there were upsides: national cohesion, shared values, and proscriptions against anti-social behaviour. But it also meant that the radical element was contained and made safe, as youth were taught to think usefully, not dangerously.

We sit at the cusp of a similar moment in the history of information, and it’s certainly true that it occasionally feels like a riot— out of control and of our very basest nature. The fitting response, then, is much like the delicate dance of riot-policing done right: a reaction that enforces some order on chaos, while still protecting the rights and privileges such acts are meant to restore.