Black Victimhood

"The likelihood of a Black person being shot by police in Toronto is just as high as for a Black person in the average city in the United States."                                 "The time for debate about whether systemic racism or anti-Black racism exists is over."                                                                                                                         "It is incumbent upon us all to re-envision the practices, the policies, the procedures, and importantly, the perceptions that shape policing in our city."            "The disproportionality, and the disparities in the commission report are more than just statistics. They are Black lives and Black Lives Matter."                                    Ena Chadha, interim chief commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission

"[Black people are more likely to be] arrested, charged, overcharged, struck, shot or killed by Toronto police."                                                                                "[Black people in Toronto are] disproportionately [arrested, charged and subjected to use of force by the city's police force]."                                                                 'A Disparate Impact' report

"This disparity cannot be explained away by racial differences in criminal history, civilian behaviour towards the police at the time of the incident, civilian weapons use, civilian mental illness, civilian intoxication, or local crime rates."                   Scot Wortley, criminology professor, University of Toronto

Black Lives Matter protests in Toronto. (Evan Tsuyoshi Mitsui/CBC)

"At the end of the day, when someone calls 911 they need to know that a police officer will show up at their door." "But is there an opportunity for other community agencies to do more? Absolutely."  "[Ontario has been] very active in doing things already [by increasing investment in community mental health and addiction resources, which account for 40 percent of calls to emergency services]."                                                                                   Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones

Critics of Toronto police call for reform in the way mental health calls are treated, that mental health professionals, not police should be responding to mental health calls, pointing to the death of a 29-year-old Black woman, Regis Korchinski-Paquet who fell from a balcony while police were present in her apartment, called there by a relative who had alerted police to something going awry, wanting her taken to a mental health facility. For their part, police felt they were responding to a possible assault call. 

It's worth noting that Toronto has a (newly retiring) Black police chief, appointed back in 2015. His deputy chief was also Black, and is now Ottawa's chief of police. Many police chiefs in the United States are also Black. Some of them are Black women. Yet police in both countries are charged with prejudicial racism, that they deliberately target Blacks for suspicion of crime commission. Police are a professional public safety group. They become very familiar in the commission of their duties at every level where crime most commonly emanates from.

They also develop a fine-tuned sense of the relationship between elements of any population with the culture of crime. With gangs, drug dealing, weapons possession, and all the public/social malfeasance that follows from those propensities. Blacks do indeed become targeted for questioning, stopping, suspicion of anti-social acts, from drug dealing and weapons smuggling to competitive challenges between gangs leading to shootings, wounding and death.

That being so, they become a 'targeted' community in the sense that police, the guardians of public safety and security, are attuned to what occurs in those communities, dealing with the outcomes as best they can. Yet, in 'progressive' social cultures they come under fire by complaints and accusations that they're too hard on the criminal element among Black populations, as though being Black requires them to have special consideration. Black police and their Black police chiefs seem somehow to believe otherwise.

They respect their own cultural community to the extent that they see no reason why those within the community cannot be expected to respect society and their place within it by adhering to the public weal, eschewing criminality and living normal lives rather than choosing to be thugs, drug dealers and gang members. But the Ontario Human Rights Commission is convinced that the problem lies not with the culture of the Black underclass community but with police in general, whose reaction is too harsh.

The report published by the Ontario Human Rights commission lingered on the fact that Black people representing 8.8 percent of the population of Toronto, manage to represent close to a third of all charges. Refusing to credit the fact that smoke both precedes and follows a fire, the OHRC prefers to blame police reaction rather than a dire need for the Black social underclass to reform itself. The OHRC's first interim report after its inquiry was launched in 2017 found between 2013 and 2017 it was 20 times likelier for a Black person to be shot and killed by police than a white person.

Whether the study undertook to assess and analyze the number of Blacks shot, wounded or killed by other Blacks is as yet unknown, but that this is a problem of immense proportions certainly is not. The enquiry also highlighted that officers sometimes lack a legal basis for stopping or detaining Black people, searching them without justification, making unnecessary arrests and laying unnecessary charges. In the opinion of the Human Rights Commission obviously, which knows nothing about finely honed police intuition and experience.

The protests sparked by the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May which led to protests and demonstrations by Black Lives Matter worldwide, that were often offensive and violent and ultimately led to the impression that among Blacks white lives don't matter, did nothing to achieve sympathy other than among 'woke' progressives whose 'guilt-by-whiteness-colonialism' sought to expunge itself through unquestioning support.