A group of new Toronto Police officers congratulate each other after their graduation at the gym of the Toronto Police College.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Before she immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong, 40-year-old Wylie Tsoi thought she had a pretty clear impression of what policing was all about.
"And it was not a good impression at all," she recalls.
"People would tell me that if you're a good person, you don't want to be a police officer because there was corruption and a thin [line]between bad cops and good cops."
Contemplating a police career, Nelvin Forde, 33, had also encountered negative stereotypes. Born to a Guyanese father and Haitian mother, he grew up in New York City, Grenada and Scarborough. And along the way he got ample advice about the pitfalls of law enforcement.
"Most of my friends were telling me, 'It's getting too bad now, a lot of officers are getting into shootouts,'" he said. "They were saying this might not be something I want to get into because I'm a family man."
Whatever their earlier misgivings, Ms. Tsoi and Mr. Forde were among the latest batch of Toronto Police Service recruits, 137 in all, who graduated Thursday at the new police college in the city's west end.
And they are a sign of the times.
Of those 137, 33 per cent are non-white and 23 per cent female; almost two-thirds speak a language in addition to English and almost one-quarter speak two others.
"Toronto is one of the top cities in the world, multiculturally," Mr. Forde says. "We need officers who reflect that."
And while the push for diversity within the TPS has been under way for almost two decades, the numbers are finally starting to mirror the demographics of a city that's roughly 50 per cent female and 50 per cent non-white.
Factoring in this class of 2010, more than 18 per cent of the 5,781 uniformed officers are female, and 19.3 per cent belong to a visible minority - by far the largest of any police service in the country.
That's a sea change in an organization that less than 20 years ago was a 94-per-cent white, male monolith.
Barbados-born Deputy Chief Keith Forde (unrelated to Nelvin Forde) recalls those days vividly.
When he joined the force in 1972, he was one of just 18 black officers in uniform, and the reactions from acceptance by his colleagues were, at best, mixed.
"The public accepted me more than the police service did," he said. "That's a hard thing to say but it's true. I heard the N-word more internally than externally; everything was totally different."
So how did it get from there to here?
It's a question constantly asked of Deputy Chief Forde, who these days commands the TPS's human-resources section and is one of two black deputy chiefs, together with recently promoted Jamaica-born Peter Sloly.
The program's genesis was ugly: A cluster of Toronto-area white-on-black police shootings in the late 1980s that created a near-crisis, laced with mistrust and accusations of institutional racism.
Those shootings spawned a provincial task force on policing and race relations, which in early 1989 toured Ontario, chronicling graphic testimony about police brutality and visible-minority alienation.
A package of hard-hitting recommendations followed, and from them arose the Special Investigations Unit, which probes all deaths or serious injuries stemming from police-civilian interaction and remains the only civilian-staffed agency in North America that oversees police.
And even further reaching was a series of amendments to the Police Services Act, requiring Ontario's 118 police chiefs to draw up long-term goals and timetables to make law enforcement better representative of the people it serves - and more trustworthy.
But how? In particular, how to enlist immigrants and children of immigrants who view police - as Ms. Tsoi once did - with entrenched suspicion?
In Toronto these days, the solution is a non-stop, multi-pronged outreach blitz.
"We try to hit everywhere," says Staff-Sergeant Sue Quaiattini, who heads the TPS's recruitment office.
The most visible points of contact are question-and-answer sessions held every couple of weeks or so at police headquarters, often advertised in small-circulation ethnic publications. In a tough economic climate, a big current draw is the fact that a first-class constable earns a salary of more than $80,000, along with generous benefits and real job security.
Yet of the 100 or so people who stop by, only a handful will have the determination and qualifications to earn a badge and a gun.
So in the hunt for qualified would-be cops, the net is cast far wider.
Staff-Sgt. Quaiattini lists some of the venues, organizations and events where booths are set up, leaflets handed out and community leaders canvassed: Chinese New Year; Mexican Fiesta; the International Muslim Organization; summer job fairs; Scarborough's Church of God; Black History month celebrations; gay-pride events; Caribana.
"If you count all our general information sessions, inside and outside the service, in 2009 we were close to 5,000," she said.
Roving "ambassadors," who include many retired officers, also pitch in to make the case for a police career, explaining that such former disincentives as minimum-height restrictions are long gone, and that the promotion process moves along much faster than it once did.
But what sets the TPS apart, in the view of its leaders, is a one-on-one mentoring system, whereby every potential applicant gets an adviser - a recruiting staffer who guides the person through the rigorous interviews, aptitude tests and college courses that lie ahead.
For 24-year-old Constable Katelyn Cowie, of Ojibwa heritage and now attached to 32 Division, misgivings about policing were twofold.
One was her build. Standing just five-foot-three and weighing 130 pounds, "the physical testing was the most difficult part for me."
And on the Georgina Islands reserve where she partly grew up, "a lot of people tried to convince me to do something different; there was a lot of mistrust of police, a lot of hostility."
On both counts, she says, what made her take the plunge was the mentoring she got from recruiter Constable Ramon Manota.
"The big thing for me was the confidence boosting. They're incredible at that kind of stuff, if you want in."
And when immigrants hail from countries where police are bad news, even that kind of attention may not be enough.
Parents and grandparents sometimes have to be reassured, too, and that's especially true of would-be cops with origins in South Asia - India, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan - who collectively constitute by far the biggest pool of Toronto's new arrivals.
"Somebody said, 'Appeal to the families,' so we did," said Deputy Chief Forde.
"We said, 'Lend us your sons and your daughters,' and we had to show them the benefits, and the [scope for]advancement. We had to say to them, 'This is Toronto, this is what will happen to your kid. We guarantee your kid will be part of an inclusive organization, on the flagship for change.' So they began listening to us."
Still, not everybody buys in. Whether borne of suspicion or vulnerability, hard-wired cultural obstacles remain.
"There's still fear in those communities about reprisals for joining the police," said an officer with long experience in combatting Scarborough's gang culture.
"The Tamil community in particular, because of what they've come through [in Sri Lanka]"
Also unreceptive he says, are many Chinese.
"They're very private, and you just don't go talking about other people's business to the police, that's a long-standing [legacy]of Communist rule - it's really, really tough, culturally, to break that one."
Among the Spanish-speaking community, "there's a huge distrust there too … it's got to do with the drug trade and the feeling down in the [United] States that they're second-class citizens."
As for the "no-snitching" code of conduct, commonly cited as a barrier between police and blacks, he sees that as "manufactured" - a North American rather than a Caribbean phenomenon that gained particular traction from Stop Snitching , a notoriously popular gangsta-rap DVD.
Enlisting non-white women remains a particular challenge, the recruiters say.
Female achievers have recently climbed to the top ranks, commanding the homicide, fraud and sexual-assault squads. Of the service's 17 divisions, three are led by women.
Yet Staff-Sgt. Quaiattini and her colleagues still have trouble attracting enough visible-minority women, whose cultural heritage sometimes pulls them more toward marriage and children than an unpredictable job marked by split-second, high-stakes decisions and years of shift work.
So, among other things, Staff-Sgt. Quaiattini's unit holds women-only preparation sessions for candidates eyeing the Applicant Testing System - the written and physical tests that comprise the first concrete first steps in becoming a cop.
The special attention given to certain recruits doesn't sit well with everyone on the force. Some see it as form of reverse discrimination.
"I think most people on the force are buying into all this, but the fact is, good white male candidates are getting overlooked to fulfill the gaps," said an officer who spoke frankly on condition of anonymity.
"The bottom line is that if you're a female and a visible minority, you're put in a different pile. That's known out there and it's created some bitterness."
Deputy Chief Forde is unimpressed with that complaint.
"Come to any graduation," he says. "Still today, over 50 per cent of the class is male whites."
For the police union's new leader Mike McCormack - whose father, former chief William McCormack, created the TPS's aboriginal peacekeeping unit - the drive for diversity is laudable, providing the quality of the recruits doesn't decline.
So far, Mr. McCormack says, he's seen no sign of that.
"Obviously we want to have the best candidates for the job, and certain standards have to be met. As long as they are, the union's fine with the hiring practices.
"What we want is for the police to reflect the community … and if they're looking at those types of numbers, they have to get those people in."
Within some of the sought-after groupings, money can be another barrier.
The ATS exam, which roughly one-third of applicants fails the first time, costs $280 and is non-refundable. There is also an $8,000 fee for the 13-week course at the Aylmer Police College, which all Ontario police recruits must complete.
Low-interest loans ease the sting, but the average fourth-class constable will begin her policing career at least $10,000 in debt.
While would-be cops come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, none are wooed more keenly than those who have seen poverty and deprivation first-hand and resolved to succeed.
As Crime Stoppers officer for Toronto's schools, Constable Scott Mills predicts the city's new School Resource Officer Initiative (designated officers are attached full-time to 50 different high schools) will be "a cornerstone" in attracting fresh talent.
"The schools I'm in have a large visibility component, the kids identify very well with officers who are like themselves and they become a lot more hopeful when they see someone who's from their background - that really inspires them," he said.
Jamaica-born defence lawyer Courtney Betty, who remembers well the negative police-black climate of the late 1980s, shares Constable Mills's view that trust becomes the crucial selling point.
"The key part in all this is trying to connect the police directly to young people in high schools," he says. "That way they're exposed to policing as a career."
And Mr. Betty gives high marks to Police Chief William Blair, who a few weeks ago addressed full-on the perennial hot chestnut of racial profiling.
"Racism is a human failing, racial profiling can occur," Mr. Blair said.
"We've acknowledged that right up front and that has really enabled us to work with our community partners to do something about it."
"That's a major step forward for a chief to say," Mr. Betty said.
"I see this police force as a great model in terms of diversity, which is not happening in the downtown Bay Street law firms and is not happening in many corporations."