June 2020 – The "True" North

As I marched through the streets of Ottawa with hundreds of others on June 20, I said to a Black activist friend that, if someone had told me two years ago that 2020 would see thousands of white people marching in the streets of the world’s cities yelling Black Lives Matter!, I would have said they were on crack (the person telling me the story and the 1000s of white people they imagined). Yet, here we are…

Two weeks earlier, I had marched with thousands of others in Ottawa and marvelled at white people holding signs saying, WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE and DEFUND THE POLICE.

This was surprising on many levels, the first being – who the hell had ever heard the word “defund” before? Second was the fact that white people were calling for the defunding of an institution with which they have a fundamentally – and historically – different relationship than Black people.

In the U.S., the original idea of policing came from the south when slave patrols were hired to recapture escaped slaves. Then, when slavery was abolished, police enforced Jim Crow laws for even the most minor infractions. Canadian policing has a similar history. The Mounties were created for a specific purpose: to assert sovereignty over Indigenous people and their lands. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald got the idea for the Mounties from the Royal Irish Constabulary, a paramilitary police force the British created to keep the Irish under control. MacDonald envisioned his own Royal Irish Constabulary — except instead of the Irish, they would control the Indigenous people already living on the land.

Racist policing has led to racialized people, especially Black and Indigenous people, having a very different relationship with police than everyone else. Comedian Andrew Shultz sums it up succinctly in his YouTube video, “Black people. I’m going to say something that’s going to be incredibly surprising to you and incredibly obvious to white people: I love cops!” He explains that white people love cops so much they named a band The Police and spend hours happily watching the show Cops (at least they did until the Paramount Network recently cancelled it amid protests over police brutality).

So, white folks screaming to take money away from something they love isn’t something we’re used to seeing everyday…in fact, ever.

But what does defunding the police mean?

For some folks, like Nova Scotian prison and police abolitionist activist, El Jones, it means getting rid of the police completely. In her Washington Post article, Black Canadians are suffocating under a racist policing system, too, Jones argues for defunding the police because they don’t increase safety for anyone, “It is past time to stop believing in the fantasy that arming the police, increasing their surveillance powers and allowing them to commit violence with impunity upon black people keeps the public safe.”

For me, right now, defunding means immediately replacing armed police with people able to provide a non-lethal, compassionate response to people experiencing mental health crises. I speak from personal experience…

My older brother is schizophrenic and lives in Toronto and has workers from the Canadian Mental Health Association that check on him almost every day. He used to have occasional runs-ins with the Toronto Police but I can’t remember the last time that’s happened since the CMHA workers have been helping him. I am sure that they are a key part of the reason my brother is alive today. Why not shift police funding to the CMHA to provide more workers to help people from getting into crisis in the first place (which would, no doubt, be cheaper)? (But if they do end up in crisis, send people like the CMHA folks, not the cops.)

In addition to being for defunding certain police activities, I’m also against increasing funding to buy something that many of those calling for defunding are calling for: police body cameras.

One thing that has gotten very little coverage since George Floyd was killed is the fact the media is making money – and lots of it – off the images of Floyd’s death and the protests and riots that followed. These images and videos attract lots of eyeballs and lots of online interaction and allow mainstream and social media companies to charge more for ads. Body cameras would simply provide more lucrative footage of Black people dying – but wouldn’t stop us from getting killed. This is especially true since the police have to turn the cameras on before going to a call and can turn them off if something’s happening that they don’t want people to see.

Another issue is officer pay. A friend who lives in Toronto says they pay their officers very well and therefore attract officers with higher education. He argues that this leads to more outcomes like the one seen in the viral video of Toronto Police officer, Ken Lam, confronting, but not shooting, the white guy who had just mowed down several people with his van. My friend argues that, “People with masters degrees don’t shoot people.”, and that higher salaries attract people with higher education. If that’s the case, then why did a 2018 Guardian article report the results of a study showing that Black Toronto residents were 20 times more likely to be shot by police? Is it only those cops with undergrad or college degrees doing all the shooting? I haven’t seen anything to back that up.

One police officer who should get a raise, though, is Ottawa’s new police chief, Peter Sloly.

Sloly was sworn in as the Chief of the Ottawa Police Service on October 28, 2019 following an intense campaign by local activists to get him to come to Ottawa from Toronto. Since he arrived, he has reinstated the disbanded hate crimes unit and created a new Respect, Values and Integrity Directorate, led by former Inspector Isobel Granger, who Sloly promoted to superintendent to lead it. He also took swift, decisive action on the racist meme circulated around the Ottawa Police, leading to an officer being charged.

He continued setting himself apart from his predecessors by what he did during the June 20 march. Hundreds of us marched from the police station to City Hall to protest police violence, proclaim that all Black lives matter and remember Abdirahman Abdi who died after being pursued and beaten by Ottawa police in August 2016. Like the June 5 march, it was remarkable by the complete absence of police. I didn’t see a single officer from the time we started marching until the end of the demo – with one exception. When the march reached City Hall, and the temperature reached near forty degrees Celsius, one of the main organizers took to the stage, passionately talked about Abdi and stated the group’s demands. Standing in front of him, was one lone police officer in full uniform, standing with his hands crossed…just listening. It was Chief Peter Sloly.

Sloly is a smart guy. You don’t become a partner and Security & Justice lead at Deloitte if you’re not. Before he did that, Sloly was on the Toronto Police force for 27 years, rising to Deputy Chief. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Masters of Business Administration.

He also clearly understands the power of symbolism and the need to back it with real action.

Give that guy a raise.

The global response to George Floyd’s death has got people talking about other incidents where white people did bad things to Black people. One of those incidents surfaced in a viral video of a white woman threatening to call the police, then doing so, on a bird-watching African-American man who asked her to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park. Amy Cooper’s apology to Christian Cooper (no relation), following her being fired, is a classic case of too little waaaay to late.

In his New York Times article, How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror, Charles M. Blow argues that what Cooper did was simply the latest in a long history of white women using themselves as weapons against Black men. And Blow adds, “There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.” I agree and here’s why…

In the fall of 2017, I got a new boss. She was my sixth boss in 18 months and she immediately began micromanaging me on a level that, to me, qualified as my first case of professional harassment. I told my union representative about it and he told me he had informed the Director General. I heard nothing from the DG for about a month while the situation with my boss worsened. Then, one day, after a tense email exchange with my boss, I went to a meeting in a boardroom full of my colleagues, who were mostly white women. When I entered the meeting, I saw my boss sitting at the table, went to her and asked, “Was my email clear?”. I was angry and tense when I said it. In response, she sent an email to my DG that said, “He is getting in my face in a threatening way.” (I got the email through Access to Information – i.e. the federal government equivalent of taking part in a slave rebellion.) A few minutes later, my DG entered the room, came over to where I was sitting silently in the corner and said, in front of all my colleagues, “ Robin. Do you have an issue? Because we can’t have you threatening your colleagues.” (This is the same person who, as I explained in Tales from the Plantation #1, had me banned from all of my workplace buildings without informing me.)

Despite the many complaints I have filed since that day, neither my former boss nor the DG have been held accountable, in fact, the DG got promoted. The global reaction to George Floyd’s death provides some perspective on why that is.

Systemic discrimination means it’s normalized. Black folks suffer it every day. It’s not unusual. It’s not spectacular – and it’s rarely, if ever, filmed. However, like the cops who killed Floyd, the people abusing Black folks in the federal public service know exactly what they’re doing.

Blow’s argument that white women know what they’re doing is counter to the idea of “unconscious bias” that is so popular in government discussions of systemic discrimination. The idea is that, since the bias is unconscious, all we have to do is make it conscious for people through awareness training and all will be well.

However, my experience shows that isn’t the case. All that great awareness I’ve raised by taking the risk to speak out and file complaints has only made my harassers more aware that what they’re doing is wrong – but hasn’t stopped them from doing it. It has also resulted in me being hit by one sanction after another for the last two years.

That’s because systemic discrimination privileges certain groups over others and those on top don’t want to share the goodies. We must recognize that folks act in their own interest so, to get them to do the right thing in terms of diversity and inclusion, we have to change the system so that there are much bigger rewards for doing the right thing – and much bigger penalties for doing the wrong thing.

They should start by setting targets for executives, like actually hitting their legally mandated Employment Equity Act numbers by hiring, and promoting, all the talented Black folks around, and withholding their performance bonuses if they don’t.

Black lives matter – but docking performance pay gets results.