Justin Ling is a Montreal-based freelance journalist.
In the past eight years, Minneapolis Police restrained 428 people by the neck, the dangerous move that killed George Floyd, a Black man. Of them, two-thirds were Black. The officer responsible for Mr. Floyd’s death had 18 prior complaints made against him. An independent autopsy, ordered by the county medical examiner and Mr. Floyd’s family, revealed that he died of asphyxiation, and his death was ruled a homicide.
These facts have entered into a body of evidence demonstrating that structural and systemic racism is real and pervasive in American law enforcement. That evidence is driving widespread protests across the United States right now – and that same evidence would not be available in Canada.
Policing in this country, like so many aspects of the state, is needlessly opaque. The U.S.'s levers and tools to ensure at least some level of transparency – if not accountability – are either woefully inadequate in Canada or do not exist at all.
We don’t even know how often police in Canada use lethal force. Police departments have rebuffed journalists’ requests to provide such information; it took a CBC team months just to build a partial picture, when its 2018 investigation revealed that more than 460 police encounters turned deadly in Canada since 2000.
There have been reports – including the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s damning one in 2018, which found Black people were 20 times more likely than a white person to be involved in a fatal shooting by police in Ontario – that have revealed stunning conclusions. But much of the data used in such research simply didn’t exist until organizations started asking. The Ontario HRC’s study prompted the Toronto Police to finally agree to start compiling and analyzing racial data around all use of force – a critically important step. But other police agencies are not following suit.
Shootings are only part of the picture. Some police departments will not disclose anything beyond the top-line data, meaning we do not know the degree to which Canadians of colour are represented in use-of-force incidents.
It can be even harder to obtain data around mental health, but it’s clear police continue to have a problem with responding to such episodes. In April, Peel Regional Police officers fired their tasers and sidearms at D’Andre Campbell, killing the 26-year-old. And on June 4, Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman, was killed in Edmundston, N.B., during a wellness check.
Mr. Campbell’s death is now before the civilian review board, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). As a result, police are not commenting, the officers’ names haven’t been released and we don’t know what officers did or did not do to de-escalate the situation. This is par for the course with the SIU, and we saw this in full display when Regis Korchinski-Paquet fell to her death outside her home in Toronto last month, with police on the scene; Chief Mark Saunders has cited the continuing investigation in saying nothing about anything gleaned from interviews or security footage, even as he dropped public hints and as someone with knowledge of the investigation leaked information to the Toronto Sun.
And yet Ontario is better off than other provinces. Saskatchewan doesn’t even have a civilian oversight body for its police services. The civilian review body for the RCMP, meanwhile, does not even publish the results of all its investigations; the most recent publicly available one is three years old. It’s only through investigative journalism that we know that federal police shot and killed 22 Indigenous people over a 10-year period, constituting a third of all fatal RCMP shootings. The RCMP “Subject Behaviour/Officer Response Database” tracks use of force, including the mental-health state of the individual, but the RCMP have consistently refused to release information from that database, including through the access to information system. The RCMP do not even collect racial data in its use-of-force database.
Some Canadian law-enforcement agencies have no oversight at all. The Trudeau government promised to bring in independent oversight of the Canadian Border Services Agency, which has faced a litany of allegations of racism and excessive use of force; in five years, they have failed to do so.
Video evidence is rarer in Canada as well. Most Canadian police are not equipped with body cameras. Pilot projects in Toronto and federally have recommended the cameras be adopted, but police forces have ignored those reports.
Charges are, sometimes, laid against officers in cases that clearly rise to criminality. But there are so many cases that don’t end up in the justice system that simply disappear.
Transparency measures aren’t about making the police look bad or frustrating routine efforts to keep the public safe. Basic visibility into how police operate, especially when things go wrong, is about making sure officers are following their own departments’ standard operating procedures. This can be done in a way that doesn’t compromise the judicial process.
There has been much talk in recent days about making lasting change. Understanding what we’re changing, here in Canada, would be a good start.
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