Late last month, yet another investigation into police misconduct during the G20 was closed because Toronto’s police refused to cooperate. Last week, it was reopened after the resulting publicity brought forward new evidence. This is getting to be a pattern.
Dorian Barton, a protester, alleged he was attacked—unprovoked—during the G20 weekend by a police officer who broke his arm and bruised him badly. The investigation into the assault was closed because no other cops would identify the suspect officer. Then photos of the offender’s face emerged from an eyewitness to the attack, so the case was reopened. Then it was re-closed when 11 different police officers—one had been the suspect officer’s roommate, two others were supervisors—failed to identify the attacker from the close-up photograph. Now the case has been reopened again after the media outrage that resulted.
Remember Adam Nobody? The investigation into his allegedly unprovoked beating by a police officer during the madness of the G20 was closed last fall after fellow cops refused to identify the officer. When the Toronto Star published close-up photos of Officer Beatdown, the Special Investigations Unit reopened the investigation and Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani was charged late last year.
Every other investigation of police brutality during the G20 has been dropped because the SIU, the provincial body that investigates cops, has been unable to get police officers to cooperate. It’s starting to appear that we have a police department staffed by a mixture of thugs and cowards—some with hot tempers prone to laying a beating on citizens and others who refuse to say anything when it happens. That’s unacceptable.
Now here’s the obligatory paragraph where I say that most cops are good people and upstanding citizens who are good at their jobs. Well, sure. I’ve known some good cops. I believe there are a lot of them—the majority of the force, even. But the ongoing G20 investigation farce makes that belief increasingly hard to cling to.
Here’s the thing: some of us, me included, were not that shocked that the policing situation at the G20 got out of hand. The absolutely ridiculous temporary detention of 1,000 people without charge, the assorted beatings, the confusion about laws—all of those were regrettable mistakes that need addressing, but they were also fairly predictable. You dress up a bunch of guys in masks and riot gear, give them guns and ask them to control a crowd of tens of thousands of protesters in a confusing situation, with the threat of terrorism hanging in the air, and there are going to be some who cross the line.
But knowing that such abuse is all but inevitable is not the same as tolerating it. When abuses of power occur, they need to be rooted out and punished. The credibility of the police force—and of every single officer who is a member of it—depends on bad cops being punished. The thin blue line is only as strong as its weakest segments. And the G20 investigations are shedding light on more significant problems than what happened on one weekend last year. If investigations into these abuses, which were so well-documented by the press and by camera-wielding bystanders, are so futile, what should we think of the hundreds of other investigations into police misconduct that are closed for lack of evidence in any given year?
The police department is one of the pillars of the justice system, its officers sworn to uphold a public trust. But their “no snitching” problem suggests that the officers entrusted to “serve and protect” us are no better than the street thugs we expect them to arrest. The code of silence, the disgusting TV-cop-show cliché that famously governs how police deal with internal investigations, is a crime against society. And in as much as it destroys our trust in authority, it’s a crime against the police force, too.
If officers will not realize this on their own, then their managers need to make it clear for them. Police Chief Bill Blair should fire, without severance pay, every cop who has failed to fully cooperate with SIU investigations, and their supervisors should be demoted for overseeing such dishonourable behaviour. Our city deserves a police force we can be proud of.
