Month: March 2023

Categories
OPSB

The Ottawa Police Services Board doesn’t want to hear public delegates – and doesn’t care what people say when they do

I just spoke at the Ottawa Police Services Board, as I do almost every month. Below is what I said…

“Well, here we are at the first meeting being held under the draconian and authoritarian new rules you all voted to implement at your last meeting. But, before I continue, let me define what draconian and authoritarian mean because I suspect some of you don’t know. Draconian means “excessively harsh and severe” and authoritarian means, “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.” Let me also state for the record what changes you made to public delegations. You limited delegations to only one hour when there was never a limit on the total # of delegations before. You kept delegations to 5 minutes but, under your new rules, if more than 12 people sign up for the hour time slot, each delegate will be cut to 3 minutes. You said you are giving priority to people who haven’t spoken in the last 3 months, which appears to directly target myself and other activists who make the effort to speak regularly. And, finally, you now require people to submit their remarks in writing beforehand. And, although even your own motion doesn’t say we have to provide our written remarks word-for-word, Chair Valiquet is forcing us to even though that’s not what you voted for.

Now, you said you wanted our written remarks beforehand so you could better prepare to engage with delegates and, seeing as I complied and sent you my remarks 3 weeks ago, and because I suspect that I am one of a few, if not the only, delegate today because of these new rules, I certainly won’t waste the Board’s valuable time reading my remarks now but will, instead, spend the rest of my time taking your questions.”

Not one Board member asked a question. What follows are the full written remarks I sent the Board March 3:

“You said you made these changes so the Board can have time to do its important work of ensuring Ottawa has adequate and effective police services. So seeing as you just gave the OPS a $15 million raise I will spend the rest of my time talking about how effective – or not – the OPS is.

The OPS is very effective at its own propaganda. We saw an example of that last month when, during Black History Month, Chief Stubbs attended a service at Parkdale United Church where George Floyd’s brother Terrence spoke. And I gotta hand it to you, that was a brilliant PR move. A photo op with George Floyd’s brother, with former police chief Peter Sloly on one side and Ottawa community activist Gwen Madida on the other. Too bad it got zero attention. What also got little attention was what happened to Gwen a few days later. A few days later Gwen posted a picture of her bloodied face saying she and a young Black man she was with had just been assaulted by a white man who called them the N-word repeatedly while he was doing it.

And the whole thing was caught on video…Gwen called the police…so was their response an example of effective policing? Did they charge the man with a hate crime like they rightly charged the students who committed the act of antisemitism at an Ottawa high school last fall? We still don’t know and this really makes us question how effective the OPS hate crime unit is.

So we question how effective the OPS is at stopping people from hurting Black people…and we also question how effective the OPS is at stopping young Black men from hurting and killing each other. We know the OPS has a Guns and Gangs unit that had 22 officers as of last year. So, how many guns did the Guns and Gangs unit seize last year…especially those from the US? We ask because in July last year media reports said that of all the handguns involved in crimes in Canada that were traced in 2021, 85% came from the U.S.

We tried to find out more about this but couldn’t find anything on the OPS website giving any detail at all about the success – or lack thereof – of the Guns and Gangs unit. And there’s no point filing a Freedom of Information request because the OPS has denied every one we’ve submitted.

Why would the OPS make it so hard to find out how effective they’re being at reducing the numbers of illegal guns in neighborhoods where lots of young Black men live? 

But let’s change focus and look at how effective the OPS is at addressing one of the main issues identified by the majority of Ottawa residents: traffic. The OPS budget you approved last month says that, in multiple public surveys, Ottawa residents identified road safety as a top concern and that it remains a number one priority for the OPS. However, during the March 1 budget meeting, Councillor Sean Devine said he had spoken to Deputy Chief Bell about his constituents’ concerns about traffic and that the Deputy Chief had told him policing is not the answer to speeding and road safety. Really? Even with a budget of more than $400 million dollars that includes 37 officers in the Traffic Services Unit? Do you really think that is effective?

Perhaps the OPS will spend some of their $15 million increase on some expensive traffic tech saying that it will increase their effectiveness. Because that’s what they tell us about tech like body cameras. The OPS says body cameras will reduce police violence. But, in June 2020, Ottawa Police Service Board acting chair Sandy Smallwood asked Chief Sloly his opinion on body cameras and the Chief said research was mixed at best on how useful the cameras are at decreasing use of force by officers. He also said that the financial impact of the pandemic on the police force would mean trade-offs would need to be made between investments in body cameras and other OPS and board priorities. Chief Stubbs acknowledged the conflicting body camera research at the Board’s February meeting – then you and Ottawa City Council approved the budget that includes a body camera pilot project – and everything else the OPS asked for. No trade offs needed. Our view is that, rather than helping to make the OPS more effective, body cameras will just lead to more trauma porn.

So, despite all the evidence of the OPS’ ineffectiveness, you gave them a $15 million dollar raise. And you did that even after Justice Rouleau released his report on the Ottawa trucker occupation that countered the leaked OPS narrative that the OPS failure was all former Chief Sloly’s fault. The report says, “Much of the focus of the evidence was on Chief Sloly. It is all too easy to attribute all of the deficiencies in the police response solely to him but this would be unfortunate and indeed, inconsistent with the evidence. As well, some errors on Chief Sloly’s part were unduly enlarged by others to a degree that suggests scapegoating.” 

So if Chief Sloly wasn’t solely responsible, who else was? We don’t know because you haven’t done your job and asked those questions. You just gave millions more to the OPS despite the fact that the OPS’s own data shows they spend less than 1% of their time responding to Priority 1 calls where there’s imminent threat of bodily harm.  Meaning, armed OPS officers spend 99% of their time doing things like directing traffic, babysitting construction sites and responding to mental health calls. They also spend much of their time over-policing marginalized people including moving unhoused people away from businesses and using force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people.

So because you’re not fulfilling your mandate to ensure effective policing in Ottawa and you’re limiting public input that would help you do your job properly we’re filing a complaint against the Board with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

It’s time to continue reimagining community safety in Ottawa by finally giving up on the myth of reforming the OPS and freezing the OPS budget pending the outcome of the line-by-line audit of all city services, including the OPS.”

Categories
EDI

Jordan Peterson wants us to shut up about D.I.E., deliver his Amazon packages and DIE

I attended former University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s January 30 talk at the Canadian Tire Centre with what appeared to be about 5000 white people. Peterson has risen to fame doing things like calling “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”, “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” or DIE. And he hates DIE. I mean he really hates it.

In a January 2022 National Post article Peterson said, “Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.”

Peterson believes the current system has some flaws but essentially works on “meritorious selection”. He implies that white people, especially white men, dominate so many places because they have pulled up their boot straps and risen to that level on their own merit. He says things like employment equity (or affirmative action in the US) are misguided and lead to unqualified members of equity seeking groups getting hired because, “there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke).” 

Peterson’s claim that there aren’t enough qualified brown folks demonstrates his poor understanding of Canada’s federal Employment Equity Act. The Act does set EE group hiring targets for federally regulated organizations but those targets are based on the percentage of qualified members of those groups available in the workforce, known as workforce availability. 

So if, for example, a department is looking to hire engineers, and 7 percent of qualified engineers available in the workforce are women, they must try to achieve 7 percent female engineers in their organization. So saying there aren’t enough qualified people to meet the target makes no sense when the target directs organizations to choose only from pools of qualified candidates.

Peterson’s hate of EDI is rooted in two central beliefs: that society should prioritize individual – not group – rights and responsibilities, and that society should be based on equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.

The first belief focuses on “groups” like LGBTQ+ folks or women, asking for rights and Peterson opposing that with really logical sounding (at first) quotes like, “Groups can’t have rights because no group can be held responsible.” So what about things like the Persons case that gave women the right to be legally recognized as persons? Or what about when slavery was abolished and gave Black people the right not to be owned? In both cases it was individual women or Black people who were granted rights because of being part of a group – a critical nuance Peterson misses. 

But what about group responsibility? Peterson is right about not being able to hold groups responsible, but that’s not the point – it’s the individuals who are held responsible. Again, in the case of Black people and employment equity, individuals are held responsible for things like being honest about their qualifications and meeting their job requirements. If they don’t, they get fired (you can’t fire a group).

Peterson’s “equality of outcome” point is partly based on his misunderstanding of workforce availability and the evidence members of equity groups give to demonstrate the existence of systemic discrimination. 

Peterson says organizations like universities are forced to provide equality of outcome by being required to have the same percentage of each equity group at every staff level as the percentage of that equity group in the population. And he says that if the organizations fail to meet that target, equity groups accuse them of systemic discrimination and that’s too simplistic a way to claim systemic discrimination.

First, as explained before, Employment Equity Act hiring targets are based on workforce availability of qualified candidates, not the percentage of that group in the general population. Second, most equity groups’ claims of systemic discrimination are based on decades of empirical data that they had to fight to get collected – not assumptions.

Peterson sees Western society as having some flaws but being the merit based best system in the world that has improved the lives of millions of people. He ignores the fact that two of the “flaws” – slavery and Indigenous genocide – are the foundation of the West’s wealth. He also ignores the glaring evidence of current systemic inequity: all the brown people working in low paying, gig economy jobs at places like Walmart, Amazon and Uber.

Peterson and his followers reflect a disturbing trend. They enjoy lifestyles in a system that causes and/or aggravates problems that disproportionately affect marginalized folks, like climate change or all the systemic issues that led to COVID disproportionately killing racialized people. However, they aggressively resist collective solutions to these problems – especially those led by government – as violations of their freedom. The Ottawa “Freedom Convoy” occupation was an example of this.

Peterson and his supporters just want to be left alone – with occasional interruptions from all the brown, mostly immigrant people – who clean their hotel rooms and deliver their Amazon packages and Uber Eats. And they don’t want to talk at all about their role in contributing to the systemic discrimination that severely limits the choices – and therefore the freedom – of so many racialized people, corralling them into those low paying jobs – and keeping them there.

Categories
EDI Police reform

It’s time to give up on the myth of police reform

On February 23, we got more concrete evidence that trying to reform the police doesn’t work – and never will. Researchers with the Tracking Injustice project released their preliminary data on police-involved killings in Canada revealing there have been more than 700 police use-of-force deaths in Canada since the year 2000. And Black and Indigenous people accounted for 27% of those deaths, although a lack of race statistics means the real percentage could be much higher. So, despite the increased budgets for more training, hiring more officers – especially diverse ones – and expanding community policing, the cops keep killing people, especially Black and Indigenous people.

Police and their supporters keep telling us that the police need to be reformed, not abolished. They say we must be patient because “these things take time” but change will come. Yet, the evidence tells another story.

In May 2022, the Ottawa Police Service released its use-of-force race data showing they use force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people. OPS Deputy Chief Bell presented the use-of-force race data as if they had collected it voluntarily. They didn’t. The Ontario government ordered them to collect it over two years ago just like the Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered them to collect race-based traffic stop data back in 2013. And nine years later the result is the same: the OPS treats Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern people worse. Nine years of reform – more training, hiring more diverse officers, and expanding community policing – has done little to stop the police from disproportionately harming brown marginalized people.

Last year provided some of the strongest evidence of why the Ottawa Police Service in particular is beyond reform. 

2022 started with the “Freedom Convoy” occupation in Ottawa where the Ottawa police stood around doing nothing for the first three weeks. Then came the resignation of Ottawa’s first Black police chief, Peter Sloly, accompanied by media stories quoting “unnamed” OPS sources using the standard – and very racist – angry Black man narrative accusing Sloly of bullying and volatile behaviour that compromised the force’s ability to cope with the truck protest. Sloly had faced racist resistance from day one after he began making changes to address systemic racism and sexism among other issues. The Ottawa Police Services Board hired Sloy’s replacement, Eric Stubbs, three days before Ottawa’s election, despite calls to postpone the hiring until after the vote. And the Board didn’t just hire any guy to replace Sloly. They hired the guy who led the BC RCMP’s operation to violently remove Wet’suwet’en people protesting a pipeline being built on their land.

So, before diversity at the very top could fundamentally change the Ottawa Police Service – the OPS got rid of the diversity. Yet, the new chief keeps saying diversity and inclusion is one of the OPS’ priorities and that they plan to ensure plenty of diversity among the 25 new officers they plan to hire. But having a more diverse workforce didn’t stop five Black Memphis police officers from beating Tyre Nichols to death in January of this year. The OPS issued a statement condemning those officers supposedly because OPS officers would never be caught on video viciously beating a Black man who later died…well, except for Abdirahman Abdi.

More diverse officers don’t change policing – policing changes them. It changes them even if they work with units with nice, euphemistic names like SCORPION, the Street Crime Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhood – or Neighborhood Resource Teams, like the OPS calls its latest “community policing” initiative. It changes them. And we will soon have data that will likely back this up… 

In November, 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission welcomed changes Ontario’s Solicitor General had made to police use-of-force reporting form including allowing it to “capture important contextual information about use of force incidents, such a…demographic details about the officer who submitted the report, such as their age, race, and gender identity.” (They also added the capability to collect factors that informed the reporting officer’s perception of the subject’s race, the subject’s perceived age and gender identity, de-escalation options used by the officer and the level of physical control used.) The problem is the word “allow”. If officers aren’t mandated to include their race, they likely won’t.

Another popular reform that people argue will reduce police violence are body cameras – especially after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. In June 2020, Ottawa Police Service Board acting chair Sandy Smallwood, told former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly that the Board had received several emails from members of the public demanding body-worn cameras for police officers and asked Sloly his opinion on them. In a July 2020 Ottawa Citizen article Sloly said research was “mixed at best” on how useful the cameras are at decreasing use of force by officers and that the financial impact of the pandemic on the police force would mean trade-offs would need to be made between any investments in (body-worn cameras) and other OPS and board priorities currently underway. 

Ottawa’s new police chief, Eric Stubbs, acknowledged the conflicting body camera research at the Ottawa Police Services Board’s February 2023 meeting – then the Board and Ottawa City Council approved the budget that includes a body camera pilot project – and everything else the OPS asked for. No trade-offs needed.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that reforms don’t work, some Black folks, including some very high profile ones, continue to advocate for reform.

In February, during Black History Month, George Floyd’s brother Terrence visited Ottawa and spoke at two events. In an interview on the popular Breakfast Club podcast he explained why his Brooklyn, New York-based We Are Floyd Foundation partners with the New York Police Department, “I want to change the narrative….I want to bring the narrative back from my era where you had the police playing basketball with us…you had them understanding our culture and our community…I mean you had the bad apples but the majority…we saw them interact with us.”

There are several problems with brother Floyd’s position. The first is that the narrative he wants to change “back” to is the one the police have been pushing for years – and still are. That is the idea that the problem is only because of “a few bad apples” and that the solution is increasing “community policing”. However, despite increasing police budgets being used to hire more diverse officers (i.e. good apples) and expanded community policing, the police continue to shoot and kill unarmed Black people – including 61 people – and counting – since George Floyd’s murder.

A student who heard Terrence Floyd speak in Ottawa was quoted saying that, “hearing from Black leaders in the community and from Floyd is motivation to continue conversations around equity, diversity and inclusion. Change doesn’t take place overnight, but seeing how the eyes are open towards the issue is beautiful.” This idea that talking is the way to end systemic oppression and that those talks take time to have impact, is core to the idea of reform. And that’s because reform is a way to give the appearance of change without actually making any fundamental change.

That’s what’s led to the explosion of the diversity and inclusion illusion: performative change that looks good – but doesn’t actually change anything.

And the ironic thing is that there is such a huge push back against equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives despite so much of it being performative. Popular anti EDI commentator, Jordan Peterson, got so popular attacking EDI that he left his job as a tenured psychology professor at the University of Toronto to write books and make YouTube videos and do stadium tours promoting his content.

Police love reform because it means more money. More money to hire more diverse officers. More money for training. More money for body cameras and…more money for performative EDI that changes nothing. 

It’s time to give up on the myth of police reform and continue defunding the police and reimagining community safety.

Note: After I posted and shared this post, a fellow abolitionist shared a great article by Critical Resistance distinguishing between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact. Some of the abolitionist steps include suspending the use of paid administrative leave for cops under investigation, prioritizing spending on community health, education and affordable housing and decreasing the size of the police force.