….this shouldn’t be, but it is.

“DUI charge thrown out….”, began a Toronto Star headline over court reporter Alyshah Hasham’s byline on July 31 of this year.
“After ruling that a Toronto police officer assaulted a drunk driving suspect and told him to urinate in the back seat of a police cruiser, a judge threw out an impaired driving charge this month” (July).

Jong Won Jung failed a roadside breathalyzer test and was arrested at a RIDE stop late on February 28. Video from the police cruiser shows Jung telling Officer Amanpreet Gill that he really needed to go to the washroom as he was waiting to enter the police station. Gill told Jung to hold it ‘til after he was processed, and, according to Ontario Court Justice Joseph Bovard, “Gill went further and demonstrated a belligerent and demeaning attitude toward Mr. Jung. He told him to urinate in the police cruiser.”

Jung used a washroom eventually, and was later handcuffed to a bench in the station when he was assaulted by Gill for accidently hitting the officer with a phone receiver put to his ear to speak to his waiting girlfriend. Gill repeatedly shoved the handcuffed man, knocking his head against the wall behind the bench and then further hit his head six or seven times with the phone receiver. Constable Corey Sinclair, Gill’s rookie partner, denied witnessing an assault, and Jung didn’t complain further given a lack of response to his initial objections.

Judge Bovard ruled that 15-year police veteran Gill showed a “lack of honesty” about what happened that night, and that the testimony of both officers “lacked candour” when it came to what happened in the police cruiser…..until confronted with the in-car video. Gill and Sinclair were not forthright with the court, the judge found, and charges against Jung were dismissed.

The Ontario Court of Appeal, the province’s highest court, ‘quashed’ multiple convictions against Perth County’s Frank Strauss in a 3-0 decision at the beginning of August. The court ruled that police had violated the rights of this Hells Angel member who’d been convicted of charges that resulted in an 11-year jail sentence.

Police found guns, drugs, cash and ammunition behind a fake wall in a barn leased to Strauss, according to a report by Sean Fine, a justice writer for the Toronto Star in an August 2nd story. The police had a warrant to search but had earlier in the investigation picked a lock and broken into the same barn…..without a warrant.

“The court said the justice system’s reputation needs to be protected from what it described as blatantly illegal police behaviour”, read the article.

“A senior investigating officer and his team made a conscious decision to ‘gamble’ with the law and the courts,” wrote Justice Mary Lou Benotto in her ruling.

The Star quoted University of Alberta law professor Steven Penney, a criminal law specialist, describing police behaviour as “pretty shocking misconduct, to deliberately and knowingly violate the Charter just because they felt it was in some general public interest.”

“Policing & ‘alternative facts’”, our February 5th posting, covered an event leading to Toronto Police Sergeant Eduardo Miranda facing a hearing for use of ‘excessive force’ when he appears to repeatedly taser and stomp on a man during an arrest. The event was captured on video by complainant Waseem Khan who was told over and over he couldn’t record, even though citizens have a right to do so if they are not obstructing.

A reading of the earlier posting details what led to the complaint. Ontario’s independent police review director, Gerry McNeilly, issued a report covered by the Toronto Star in its August 11 edition, where the OIPRD found that there was “evidence of misconduct” by officers on site.

He went on, “Clearly, in my view, this matter had to be investigated, not just based on the complaint filed, but also on the videos and so on. I see what’s on TV. I found that the actions of the officer reached a threshold for misconduct based on the excessive use of force and I determined that it was serious. That means that the matter must go to a tribunal hearing. The chief has no choice.”

Against police orders, Sgt. Miranda and five constables failed to activate in-car camera system microphones upon reaching the scene. The five constables not singled out in the report will be subject to less serious informal discipline for misconduct.

Waseem Khan has full standing at the September 26 hearing, and plans to attend. He believes the police are losing public trust, and this case will underscore that operating outside the law is not “okay.”

……continuing from August 20.

This briefly touches on three items. And, it’s ‘local’ coverage. Magnify ten-fold for all of Canada.

Desmond Cole, a black 35 year-old Toronto journalist and activist, hosts a weekly radio program, and has written for numerous publications.

“The Skin I’m In: I’ve been interrogated by police more than 50 times – all because I’m black”, Cole’s May, 2015 cover essay for Toronto Life, was one of the most discussed Canadian stories of 2015, and won three National Magazine Awards that year.

He became a Toronto Star columnist in September of 2015 to cover race issues, but resigned in May of 2017 after his editor told him he had violated the paper’s policy on journalism and activism by mounting a one-man protest at a Toronto Police Services Board meeting. The Star has a long practice of using and supporting writers who were also activists, so what made the difference here?

On Thursday, April 20, Cole made a public deputation about the police practice of “carding” to the Toronto Police Services Board, and delivered an ultimatum. He insisted the board put stricter constraints on police access to the data collected through the “illicit” practice. According to the Star’s Wendy Gillis in the next day’s paper, Cole argued, “It was never your information to take in the first place. I plan to stand here in protest until you commit today, here and now, to restricting the police having our information going forward. You want to ruin another generation of children’s lives, and I’m not going to allow you to do it.” The meeting was adjourned, and then cancelled.

The Toronto Star has been a long-time critic of “carding”, covers the Toronto Police Service extensively, and is not highly regarded by police management and its officers. So, who went though the paper’s back door to get Cole removed from staff?

This city, this province, this country needs more like Desmond Cole.

Three days after that board meeting, the Star’s Jim Rankin and Wendy Gillis co-authored, “Ontario police share data from carding with Ottawa”. Ontario’s Provincial Counter-Terrorism Plan was sent to all Ontario police chiefs, the OPP commissioner, and police services boards in October of 2014. Two small Ontario police departments recently posted the latest version of the plan on-line which is where the Star found it, but it disappeared from the sites soon after.

“Front-line officers across Ontario have the unique opportunity to recognize, identify, collect and report on intelligence gathered through primary response duties, such as street checks (‘carding’), vehicle stops and criminal investigations,” the document states. Municipal police services “should ensure” that intelligence they gather “is shared regularly with key partners,” including the Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario, the Ontario Provincial Police’s anti-terrorism section, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the RCMP.

“Carding” is simply a form of intelligence-gathering without cause. It’s one thing for the police to pass on what they believe is relevant data from valid investigations, but to stop whomever they please, ask whatever questions they choose, expect truthful and reliable responses, and then use that information for supposedly genuine national security purposes is something else.

In spite of new regulations around the practice of “carding”, there is no substantive oversight on compliance. “The police are really free to do whatever the hell they want, and pass it on to whoever they want,” is how Law Union of Ontario lawyer Paul Copeland put it.

If you give up a little bit of liberty in the name of law and order, you’ll deserve both, and have neither.

“Pot arrest data reveals ‘startling’ racial divide” headed an early July Toronto Star exposé by Jim Rankin and Sandro Contenta, with Andrew Bailey analysing the data. “Police stats obtained by the Star show disparity when it comes to marijuana possession charges,” read the deck.

According to this, “Black people with no history of criminal convictions have been three times more likely to be arrested by Toronto police for possession of small amounts of marijuana than white people with similar backgrounds.”

This comprehensive study of statistics and related data beginning in 2002 indicates a pronounced tendency within the Toronto Police Service to disproportionately target poor and racialized communities. “They (the police) didn’t go into the parks of Forest Hill to shake down the rich white kids. They spent their time in the parks and community centres of the Jane and Finch corridor, and it was like shooting fish in a barrel.”, said Daniel Brown, a Toronto lawyer who regularly defends clients on marijuana charges.

Annamaria Enenajor, a criminal lawyer focusing on civil rights, describes policing bias near her office close to University of Toronto student housing. “I don’t see them doing raids on those frat houses,” she says. “It’s all drunken white boys over there. I walk by and I definitely smell weed.”

We emailed Jim Rankin at his Star office on July 10: “My adopted son, who is black, looked at this and said, ‘So this is news?’ Referring to all us white people, he added, ‘You’re just catching up on what we’ve known for years.’”

Jim Rankin came back an hour later, “Absolutely bang on!”

……..policing vs the rules

“A man left in pain and naked in a Brantford police holding cell for hours has filed a $2.5-million lawsuit against the Brantford Police Service Board, the chief of police and six police officers.”  Alyshah Hasham, Toronto Star, Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Philip Alafe, a 27 year-old Nigerian refugee claimant, in Canada since 2010, and living in Etobicoke, was arrested on an outstanding warrant late in the afternoon of July 3 in 2015 for driving offenses in Brantford. He was transported by the OPP to Brantford where he told the booking officer at the police station he had mental health issues – depression and anxiety – and suffered from sickle cell anemia. Without medication sickle cell anemia causes extreme pain. There was no indication he was suicidal, and the booking officer noted he was sober and passive.

Ontario Court Justice Kenneth Lenz stayed Mr. Alafe’s criminal charges in April of this year after ruling Brantford police, and Staff Sgt. Cheney Venn in particular, subjected Alafe to “cruel and unusual treatment”, and violated his rights under sections 7 and 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Judge Lenz described the treatment as “egregious” and “clearly degrading to human dignity” after viewing the video exhibits, and found that Staff Sgt. Venn repeatedly violated police policies on the handling of people in custody and people with mental health concerns. “They were just treating me worse than an animal,” is how Philip Alafe put it.

Simply put, Mr. Alafe spent the evening and much of the night at first being ignored when his medical needs where not met, doing what he could to protest and, as the judge put it, “was a pain in the neck” as his discomfort increased. But, the police officers on duty not only didn’t respond according to policy, they…..Staff Sgt. Venn notedly….became aggressive, belligerent, and bullying, eventually leaving Mr. Alafe naked in a cold cell. This only exacerbated his pain. It wasn’t until a shift change the next morning that matters were put right.

Interestingly, nowhere in the material does the issue of race arise. The statement of claim filed with the Superior Court in Toronto alleges the defendants “maliciously, intentionally, unlawfully and/or without justification subjected the plaintiff to an escalating course of punishment, deprivation of basic needs, physical assault, infliction of mental anguish and other infliction of harm.”

August 1, 2017

Geoffrey Nelson, Chief,
Brantford Police Department,
344 Elgin Street,
Brantford, ON N3S 7P6

Re: “They were just treating me worse than an animal”

Chief Nelson:

In the very early 60s, then a naïve country boy new to Toronto, I met with a local police commander, looking to improve relations between police and members of the community in which I lived.

That meeting did not go well. It seemed positive community relations were subordinate to intrusive control of civilians, even if it meant skirting rules, policy and the law.

Assuming Alyshah Hasham’s report in the July 22 Toronto Star is factual, your Staff Sergeant Cheney Venn’s treatment of Philip Alafe not only caused Ontario Court Justice Ken Lenz to stay charges against Mr. Alafe, but is another example of how little police culture has changed in the last half century.

Too bad. After all, when push comes to shove, it is the people who are really in charge.

Yours truly,

Charles H. Klassen

……….policing vs the rules

The Toronto Star reported in the second week of July that a Belleville judge had ‘blasted’ the local OPP detachment for an ‘egregious’ strip search of a DUI suspect, and forthwith stayed the impaired driving charges.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 15 years ago that strip searching is “inherently humiliating and degrading”, and should only be done when there are reasonable grounds to do so. Yet, police across the province have continued to conduct what judges deem illegal searches. The Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) announced last July that it was undertaking a review of police search practices provincewide as a response.

“I’ve had enough. There is no regard being given to the rules”, OIPRD head Gerry McNeilly told the Star when contacted about this case. The lawyer for the accused in the Belleville court added, “The police can no longer take the position that they were unaware of what the law was. There’s no uncertainty now. It cannot be said that there’s any question with what the law is with respect to strip searches.”

Nonetheless, what is particularly challenging in this story is that one of the officers involved testified that she has not changed her practice, in spite of advice from her seniors.

We contributed our own perspective to the OPP.

August 1, 2017

Inspector Christina Reive, Detachment Commander,
Quinte West Detachment, OPP,
3 Dixon Drive, P.O. Box 1050,
Trention, ON K8V 6E6

Re:  Say it isn’t so!

Inspector Reive:

Assuming the Toronto Star’s Monday, July 20, front page headline is correct, and Jacques Gallant’s supporting report is factual, we have a problem, don’t we?

“Judge blasts OPP for ‘egregious’ strip search” not only charges two of your officers with breaking the law, but one of them, Amanda MacFadden, testified she won’t change her practice.

Now, tell us again, why we should give a damn about respecting our police services?

Yours truly,

Charles H. Klassen

….let’s lighten the load in Ontario’s courts.

The Toronto Police Accountability Coalition received a small grant which it used for research on pre-charge screening, a practice where Crown prosecutors vet charges police wish to lay. British Columbia, Quebec, and New Brunswick were the models studied, and we’re quoting the results of the research from the TPAC Bulletin No. 104, June 12, 2017.

“The courts in pre-charge provinces have considerably lower caseloads, and average of 22 per cent lower than the other provinces. If Ontario used the pre-charge system established in Quebec, the case load in Ontario would have been 70,500 rather than 93,700. (Note: No time period specified by TPAC)

Multi-charge cases – often a sign of over-charging – are much less frequent in pre-charge provinces. Ontario has 1.5 times as many multi-charge cases per capita as Quebec.

In pre-charge provinces many fewer cases are either stayed or withdrawn. The number stayed or withdrawn in Quebec is 9 per cent; in Ontario, 46 per cent.

Pre-charge screening leads to better use of precious court time, as well as the time and energy of those in the criminal justice system, and protects members of the public from charges deemed no supportable by the court.”

More information is available from info@tpac.ca, referencing bulletin No. 104.

Bulletin: Pre-screening is not a new idea in Ontario……and TPAC is not the first to suggest the province could benefit from it.

A Globe and Mail editorial back on September 23 of 2016 commented on a MacDonald-Laurier Institute study which noted: “In Ontario, 43 per cent of charges laid are ultimately stayed or withdrawn. Of those that do go to trial, the conviction rate is just 55 per cent. Ontario has by far the lowest conviction rate in the country, and the highest number, again by far, of cases that are dropped.

In Quebec, where police must get the approval of a Crown prosecutor before laying charges, a mere 8.6 per cent of charges are stayed or withdrawn, and the conviction rate is 75 per cent. In British Columbia, where the Crown similarly has to approve charges, only 29 per cent of charges are dropped and the conviction rate is 70 per cent.”

How often police in Ontario overcharge to guarantee that something sticks is a subjective assessment, but it happens. Considering the complaints and concerns about court backlogs, the delays in bringing cases to trial, and the July 2016 Supreme Court decision in R v. Jordan setting time limits from charge to resolution, why wouldn’t the province have jumped on the pre-screening bandwagon?

Why not indeed? The question won’t get an answer, but it’s only too easy to surmise someone is protecting turf.

Confidence and trust….still an illusion.

We introduced a story on March 13 of last year, a story which began in November of 2011 when four teenage boys were stopped by police in the common area of their Neptune Drive housing complex. “Confidence and trust” positioned Toronto police chief Mark Saunders’ call for building and restoring public faith in our police service against one particular police-negative incident. We included our March 10 letter to Chief Saunders which criticized the delay in resolving the questions around the behaviour of his officers on that day in 2011, and the failure to reach an accommodation for punitive damages with these four black teenagers.

The teens, now known as ‘The Neptune Four’, filed a suit against the police. Two of the five officers named in the suit also face a total of four misconduct charges under the Police Act, the two who had originally stopped the young men. The Ontario Human Rights Commission applied to participate in the police tribunal disciplinary hearing to ensure racial profiling was considered as playing a role in that interaction with police on November 21 in 2011.

That hearing was not scheduled to begin until October of last year, five years after the incident!

We ran “The Neptune Four – an update” on October 9. By that time, the tribunal had considered the OHRC intervenor status application. That was denied on Monday, July 11 last year because a hearing officer ruled that the tribunal didn’t have the ability to grant the commission’s involvement. The Toronto Star’s Jim Rankin was as frustrated by that decision as we were, and the paper published a July 15 editorial, calling for changes to the rules, citing there was time to do just that before the hearing was to begin in October.

Nothing happened.

Since then, and shortly before the tribunal was to start, one of the two subject officers submitted a motion to have a police inspector acting as the hearing officer – the tribunal judge – removed, claiming possible bias. The motion alleged that this adjudicator had recently committed a misconduct himself and was “let off the hook” by Toronto police.

The motion said there was a reasonable perception an impartial decision could not be reached, because the lawyer representing this subject officer had previously spoken for another officer against that inspector in his own tribunal hearing, referring to an order he had issued as “unlawful, outrageous, and criminal.”

The motion to have the hearing officer removed was argued at a Toronto police tribunal in December, and with that same particular police inspector adjudicating. And, that inspector’s 78 page decision came down on Friday, March 3 of this year, clearing himself of bias. The report concluded the motion failed to show enough grounds to justify his removal from the case, and that the claims in it were assumptions only.

So now, when will all this move forward? Our only suggestion is to stay tuned.

To quote from the October 9 posting, “We shouldn’t be surprised if this hearing drags on for months, with postponements, delays, and legal challenges. One thing we can conclude with certainty. In the end, the City of Toronto and its taxpayers will be turning over a handsome albeit undisclosed and confidential settlement to the complainants.”

Confidence and trust? There are many Neptune-Four-type cases in a city the size of Toronto, each with its own champions. Some wait too many years for resolution, some never get to that point, some do. No matter. The police are first and foremost at our service, but for as long as there remains no completely impartial and at-arms-length process to referee conflicts we have with our officers, and bring these to a timely and speedy conclusion, trust remains an elusive end.

Waseem Khan was in downtown Toronto with his wife on the last Tuesday morning in January, taking his daughter to daycare. He saw one in a group of police officers pull a man from the back seat of a cruiser, put him face down on the ground, and then kick the man in the head. Khan stopped after witnessing that, took out his phone, and began recording from about 20 feet away.

The video shows an officer stomping on the man’s legs, telling him to “stop resisting”, even though the man was motionless and may have been unconscious. Two officers approached Khan, telling him to stop recording, threatening to take his phone as evidence (which they cannot do), and suggesting the man under police control might spit at him and transmit AIDS (which is not true). Khan stopped recording shortly after, but filed a complaint, calling police behaviour ‘disgusting.’

The ‘Khan incident’ captured media attention for three days in the city, and came less than two weeks after a misconduct case against Toronto Police was resolved through mediation. This was in relation to another incident where police wrongfully tried to block a member of the public from taping an arrest. And, this on top of a guilty decision against a police officer last week by an arbitration board in a GTA community when a teenager was arrested and charged, held overnight, and her phone confiscated when she wouldn’t stop recording a police action.

The proliferation of mobile recording technology has been a boon to ‘reality’ entertainment everywhere, but it has even more so too often shown police activity our law enforcement agencies would prefer remain out of sight. It is not the technology that prompts the actions that are videotaped, but rather a technology that is readily at hand to record policing in the bad light that has too commonly been accepted as ‘standard operating practice.’ For example, accompanying punishing use of force unnecessarily by ordering a compliant victim to “stop resisting.”

An interesting police response has evolved from the hours of readily available videotape, some of it taken by police bodycams and cruiser cameras, as well as so much more from the public. That is the claim that film may not reliably show the whole story, that a camera angle may be biased, or that the before and after are relevant. The objectivity of film must be tempered by subjective assessment. In other words, alternative facts, which have become watchwords in the United States in 2017, must be part of the equation.

We have just one question. With alternative facts, under what circumstance is it okay for a police officer to kick a prone man in the head?

 ……everyone’s problem

A rhetorical question from a young black Torontonian to a newspaper reporter a couple of years ago: “Just where is this mysterious black man the Toronto police are always looking for?” It seems that a common explanation given by the police for stops is the search for a suspect sighted in the area.

Here we are at the end of 2016, and carding is still taking up the time and resources of police boards in Ontario, attracting media attention, and spawning protests and objections. Data isn’t readily available but it’s likely this same conflict is raised in every urban centre in the country.

Mohamed Salih is a thirty-year-old London city councillor. As an adult, he’s been stopped 15 times by police as he’s traveled across southern Ontario, including Toronto, Peel, Kitchener-Waterloo, and in his hometown. Each time it was for no reason and each time it was humiliating.

Salih made an emotional address to London city council in the middle of November, underscoring the damaging impact of carding/’street checks’ on parts of the community, and the “devastating” realization particularly on children to know their family car has been pulled over because they are black.

At his urging to do right, and after a standing ovation from his fellow councillors, a motion passed unanimously calling for a permanent end to the practice. Not only is London the first city in Canada to ban carding, but the vote implicitly criticized the new provincial regulations for not going far enough to restrict police intrusions into peoples’ lives. Council’s decision will still have to pass London police board scrutiny to become policy.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, the police board is implementing the revised street check provincial standards which are really an attempt to mollify critics without making any substantial changes to the how and why of police stops. Desmond Cole’s op-ed in the November 24 Toronto Star makes a valid argument that the point of carding is more about control than safety.

‘Control’ is one of the tenets of police training, and understandable when warranted. However, what is also true about police training is to never surrender an advantage once gained. The practice of stopping people under whatever guise sounds reasonable has been a part of our landscape for decades. That this now is focused primarily on blacks and other minorities has galvanized parts of society into one united protest.

In truth, we could all benefit from the comfort of knowing we are the ultimate controlling social force. That so many of us turn away from what does not directly disadvantage us…..for the moment at least….is cause for refection on the state of our humanity.

Going all the way back to the July 27, 2015 posting, “A ‘carding’ game. Wanna play?”, the Toronto Star’s Jim Rankin and other reporters started a campaign to help people learn what the Toronto Police Service had collected during “carding” stops, and asked that their information be shared with the newspaper. A compilation of the results would reveal what was in the police database.

So, what happened?

I asked Jim Rankin this summer if we had blinked and missed something. “No, you didn’t miss anything,” he wrote back, “It never gained much traction, unfortunately.” He didn’t speculate as to why, but we could presume privacy issues might be a factor, but more importantly, the curious would have to submit access to information requests (the Star offered financial assistance if needed). Too much work? Fear?

Mr. Rankin suggested we stay tuned for a story he was completing about a Toronto man who had gone after the information on his own ‘cards’. While this person had never been convicted of a crime, there had been more than 40 encounters with police, and some of the notations on those cards were described as “quite troubling.”

“The man Toronto police won’t stop stopping” was published on the front page under the paper’s banner on Sunday, August 14. The story continued for a full page inside the first section.

Dale James, a slim 33 year-old black Torontonian has been stopped and ‘carded’ dozens of times by police on a regular basis over 16 years. He now stays home most days in the apartment he shares with his mother in northwest Toronto, and has stopped the trips to a therapist for treatment of depression, even though it’s getting worse. He fears for his life if he’s not able to avoid more contact with police.

Dale submitted multiple freedom-of-information requests and was able to retrieve details of 43 encounters with Toronto police from 2006 to 2015, and is appealing to Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner for what he believes are many more. The Star’s own analysis of contact card data indicates that James is correct, finding dozens more that involve him.

James and his younger brother are suing Toronto police for $2.2 million in damages, claiming an assault on James, racial profiling, arbitrary detention and search of James outside their apartment, and further, that police are “terrorizing” the entire family. There has already been one “substantial” settlement by Toronto police as the result of a 2013 lawsuit and a human rights complaint, but his lawyer says the details can’t be disclosed.

The contents of the numerous contact cards are contentious, lengthy, subject to argument, and very likely on the wrong side of the law in many instances. Nonetheless, James and his lawyer, Osborne Barnwell, visited a high-ranking officer in the local police division last year that resulted in a confidential resolution intended to develop a more positive relationship with police. The agreement also included a provision to assist with counselling services.

The latest lawsuit arises because that agreement had no impact on police behaviour towards Dale James and his family. It’s not a stretch to conclude that Toronto Police Service management did intend to resolve the issues between the two parties, but some officers on the street would have none of it.

This begs the question:  just who do our police think is in charge here, anyway?

Take a minute to review “Confidence and trust” from March 13 of this year. Four black teenagers are stopped by police a way back in November of 2011, assaulted, arrested, charged, released, and vindicated. They’ve become known as the Neptune Four after the street on which their homes are located.

The teenagers are suing the police. The two Toronto officers who first came into contact with the young men were subsequently charged with misconduct. The Toronto police disciplinary tribunal for the two charged officers is scheduled for this month, October of 2016, almost five years later!

As matters stood in March, the Ontario Human Rights Commission wanted standing at the discipline hearing. It was a rare request for intervenor status, unprecedented for a police tribunal. The OHRC intended to ensure the tribunal considered racial profiling which it believes is a clear factor in the alleged misconduct.

But, on Monday, July 11, the Toronto police hearing officer ruled that, because the tribunal does not have the ability to grant the human rights’ commission involvement in the process, its request to participate had to be denied. The Toronto Star later ran an editorial calling on the regulations to be changed.

The teens were originally charged with assaulting police, and one who did not want to answer police questions was charged with threatening death and assault with intent to resist arrest. All charges were withdrawn. The Office of the Independent Police Review Director found the youth were not misbehaving and that the stop and subsequent questioning violated their charter rights.

Jim Rankin at the Star has been on top of this story from the beginning. Given how long it has taken to get this far, we shot a note off to him in the summer suggesting we should hope these four former teenagers who are now men will not be sending their own kids to mentoring sessions before this wraps up. His response…… “Amen!”

We shouldn’t be surprised if this hearing drags on for months, with postponements, delays, and legal challenges. One thing we can conclude with certainty. In the end, the City of Toronto and its taxpayers will be turning over a handsome albeit undisclosed and confidential settlement to the complainants.

There’s a point that needs to be made here too in view of incidents like this, and the even more unsettling interactions between police and young black men in the United States. African-American and African-Canadian mothers and fathers are well-advised to “police proof” their sons at an early age.

One of many memorable quotations in the lexicon of Jack Bernstein, the revered head of film for Famous Players during the 1970s and 80s may be suitable here…..”So, to this it’s become!”