Racial Profiling in St-Michel: Cops Get Their Wrists Slapped

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From today's Gazette:

$20,000 QUESTION ARE COPS TARGETING TEENS OF COLOUR?
‘ We did not profile because of race,’ police say
IRWIN BLOCK THE GAZETTE
On a steamy August night in 2003, 13-yearold Jonas Cassey, his brother Henri, 16, and four teenage friends were sitting on a low metal fence and chatting.

The three males and three females, all black, felt at ease, as most were in front of the St. Michel walk-up where they lived.

Suddenly, two Montreal police officers asked them to get off the fence because they were obstructing pedestrian movement and risked falling, the youths said.

When they refused, the boys – but not the girls – were each given $85 tickets for “using municipal property for a purpose other than that for which it is designed.”

This was a case of racial profiling, the Quebec Human Rights Commission said yesterday.

The commission recommended the city of Montreal pay $10,000 each in moral and punitive damages to Jonas Cassey, who at 13 was a year too young to be fined.

It suggested the city pay the same amount to his brother Henri and their friend Fritznol François, who was 16.

In fact, the housing unit in working-class St. Michel, home to many people with roots in Haiti, North Africa or Latin America, is considered private property because it belongs to the para-public Municipal Housing Office, not the city of Montreal itself.

In a second case from 2003, 15-year-old Feten Ounissi, who is of Tunisian descent, was walking with friends and her younger brother behind a St. Michel housing project where she lived when several police officers told her to go home.

She then went to the front of the building and sat on the stoop. Again, police told her to go home. When she refused, she was lifted off the ground by two cops, taken to a cruiser, handcuffed and given a $118 ticket, she testified before the rights panel.

Her mother, Arbia Bouganmi, who said she was prevented from talking to her daughter, also was fined.

The commission said there was no valid motive for these police actions. It ruled that Ounissi, now 20, was a victim of racial profiling and should get $13,000 in damages. Her mother ought to receive $4,000, the panel added.

Fo Niemi, executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, which supported the complaints, said the ticketing indicates Montreal police are targeting teenagers of colour in that area.

This was strenuously denied yesterday by Chief Inspector Paul Chablo, who said the department does not accept the commission’s decision because “we are convinced this was a justified police intervention.”

“We did not profile anybody because of race,” he said, but added the department welcomed the commission’s suggestions to invest more funds to improve training and track incidents with racial overtones.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy on racial profiling,” he said.

There had been “a large amount of citizen complaints” about crimes in St. Michel at the time, Chablo said.

The tickets were “immediately retracted” when it was discovered one had been issued to a 13-year-old and all the supposed violators were on private property, he said.

The commission can refer the case to the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, which has the status of a court.

Niemi congratulated the Montreal force for its recent training policies to prevent racial profiling.

“We do not want this seen as bashing the Montreal police department.We have to congratulate the leadership for their efforts.”

Jonas Cassey said that was not his first run-in with police that summer; he was also fined for “incivility” because an officer did not like the way he was jivewalking when crossing the street. Jonas did not file a complaint in that case.

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Police Harassment of Immigrants in Cote-des-Neiges: Filipinos Not Allowed To Protest In Their Own Neighbourhood

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For immediate release
Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights
September 21, 2007

Filipinos driven away from their own community by Montreal police intimidation

(Montreal, Quebec) During a peaceful demonstration yesterday in front of the Plamondon metro station in Montreal's Cote-des-Neiges area, peace-loving Filipinos and Canadians were driven away from their own community by the Montreal Police.

This rally marked the 35th anniversary of then President Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of Martial law on September 21, 1972, a period of fascist dictatorship and gross human rights violations by the Philippine government.

"The Marcos regime violated every human right imaginable including torture and displacement of communities. In Canada, where we have an international reputation as a defender of human rights, it is inconceivable that the police would disrupt, intimidate, and harass a peaceful demonstration in favour of human rights and against authoritarianism," states Cecilia Diocson, Eastern Co-ordinator for the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (PCTFHR).

Two officers of Station 25 harassed and intimated the protesters, even following them across the street when the protesters agreed to move away from the metro station. The officers claimed that they had received complaints from the Montreal Transport Commission and from commuters, and instructed them to keep their placards down and the bullhorn off, despite support of nearby community members who readily took flyers and gave encouraging comments to the protestors.

This protest was part of national actions to be held in Vancouver and Toronto later today and an international campaign to stop extra-judicial killings and human rights violations in the Philippines today under current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. KARAPATAN, a human rights group in the Philippines, has documented 886 extra-judicial killings since the Arroyo presidency in 2001.

A Filipino ghetto, the Cote-des-Neiges district of Montreal has become a hotbed of police intimidation, harrassment, and brutality particularly against newly-arrived Filipino youth. "'Racial profiling' is a common experience in our community, and is part of a growing fascisation around the world. Rather than intimidate us, we see a greater need now to further assert our democratic rights and freedoms." says Neil Castro, member of Kabataang Montreal, a Montreal Filipino youth organization. Nearly 60% of Quebec's Filipino community reside in the Cote-des-Neiges area, a multicultural neighbourhood where 40% of residents live under the poverty live.

The group of activists plan to file a complaint against the Montreal police for the intimidation and harassment during yesterday's action.

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Media contact: Josie Caro (514) 678-3901

Some context: Cote-des-Neiges is a mixed class neighbourhood tucked behind Montreal's "mountain", pretty much the northwest edge before you hit what begin to feel like suburbs. It is also one of the city's most heavily immigrant neighbourhoods, with a majority of people over age fifteen having been born outside of Canada. In recent years most of these people have come from Russia, the Philippines and the Caribbean, but the neighbourhood is home to folks from all around the world.

All across Canada, immigrants' first years after arrival in this country are often filled with hardship, but after then ones fortunes can begin to improve, but more and more this "bounce back" phenomenon is reserved for those who are white. For those who come from the Third World, even those with professional qualifications and middle class aspirations, a variety of factors conspire to proletarianize them, maintaining their communities as sources of cheap and flexible labour for the city's service and manufacturing sectors, normally without any benefit of unionization.

So when the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights talks about 40% of Cote-des-Neiges residents living beneath the poverty line, you have to understand that while initially this may hit all immigrants hard, in the long term it's hitting people hardest based on the colour of their skin.

One aspect of this racist proletarianization is police harassment, which singles out young Blacks and Asians in the neighbourhood for identity checks, questioning, tickets and arrest. Especially over the past twelve months, Station 25 has repeatedly found itself in the news, its cops charged with racist harassment, arrests and beatings of Black people in the area. Many, though not all, of these cases were attributed to "Project Advance", an anti-gang unit of some sort which has been set up in the area, but about which no real information seems to be available. It led to a situation where the local city councilor said that he had received more complaints about police this summer then in the previous ten years.

It is within this context that members of the Filipino community have also began coming forward, telling of how they are harassed and abused by the local police. Like all immigrant communities, people who come to Canada from the Philippines have there own class and political characteristics. Specifically in Cote-des-Neiges, where over 65% of Montreal 20,000 Filipinos live, these are mainly working class people, and many live in households headed by women who entered Canada as part of the ultra-exploitative Live-In Caregiver Program, whereby each year 2,000 people (mostly women, often with training as nurses or other healthcare providers) are "allowed" into Canada on condition that they work as live-in help for two years, receiving minimum wage for a "forty hour week" while in fact being on call 24 hours a day, week in and week out.

Once these women have worked for the required period of time, they are allowed to stay in Canada and their children from the Philipines are allowed to come and join them; these kids often arrive, having been part of the middle class back home, only to find that here all kinds of mechanisms are working together to push them into a new immigrant proletariat. Often, in order to help make ends meet, they must leave school and take on precarious forms of employment. As they get harassed by police in parks or on the street, there is a real fear that if they lodge a complaint or go to the media that they and their parents will be forced out of the country. When Kabataang-Montreal held a press conference last week about a young Filipino woman who was brutalized by the police, the woman and her family were too intimidated to show up, canceling at the last minute. This is the effect of racism in Montreal, and this is one of the challenges to those hoping to organize against racist police harassment in the area.

So police harassment of Filipino youth in the Cote-des-Neiges area is both part of the police's ongoing racist repression of people of colour, and of the police's ongoing oppression of working class people. An example of how, as my comrade J. Sakai has said, "'Class' without race in North America is an abstraction. And vice-versa. "

It's difficult to say how things will progress from here. While problems with police do seem to have spiked recently, it would be false to point to this as a new phenomenon; it is here that cops from Station 25 killed the young Mohamed Anas Bennis in 2005. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that this problem has been spoken of much more recently, and is much more in the public eye. Aggravating the situation are the hints of gentrification one sees in the area, still at a slow pace, but you can see it happening here and there. As police are agents of class control, the dislocation and dispossession which accompany gentrification are bound to give rise to more incidents over time.

It remains to be seen how the various lefts will respond. While certain groups do have organic ties to the community, the most politicized elements remain separated from each other, and the focus is often, understandably, on struggles in peoples' countries of origin. At the moment, the Filipino left seems exceptional in the degree to which it is focusing on people's local problems with Canadian capitalism. Grounded very quietly in a marxist leninist perspective, groups like Kabataang Montreal, SIKLAB and the Philippine Womens Centre do tie their work around people's oppression here to an anti-imperialist view of people's struggles in the Philippines.

This seems to be a good strategy, but i don't know how far it will be able to go, and how it will relate to the proletariat of tomorrow. For instance, it made me wince to read Cecilia Diocson saying that "In Canada, where we have an international reputation as a defender of human rights, it is inconceivable that the police would disrupt, intimidate, and harass a peaceful demonstration in favour of human rights and against authoritarianism." But this rhetorical strategy of trying to play up Canada ("defender of human rights") in order to win sympathy is a common one for organizations which have a narrow focus on rallying opposition to Regime X elsewhere in the world. Even in a press release protesting against police harassment this kind of ploy can re-appear almost as a knee jerk reaction.

It remains to be seen where all this will lead...

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Kabataang Montreal: Police brutality continues in Cote-des-Neiges; a 17 year old Filipino teenage girl experiences police brutality by Montreal police

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From the Kabataang Montreal blog:

Police brutality continues in Cote-des-Neiges; a 17 year old Filipino teenage girl experiences police brutality by Montreal police officers

September 9, 2007

Montreal, Quebec –On August 24th, the latest complaint against Montreal police harassment in the Cote-des-Neiges area is against two police officers for manhandling a 17-year old Filipino teenage girl named Tina (not her real name).

According to Tina, the officers approached her and a friend and unfairly accused them of drinking alcohol. Despite their insistence and assertion that they did not consume alcohol, the police officers accused Tina of having an "attitude" and roughly grabbed her as she stood up to leave and handcuffed her. Meanwhile, they hurt her arm, forcibly pushed her face-down to the ground, and slammed a car door on her leg while she was shoved into a police vehicle.

“I asked the officers what I did wrong that caused such brutality from them. They didn’t respond to me, they just talked about me and laughed.” says Tina when she recalls that evening on August 24th. Immediately after the incident, Tina and her mother went to Cote-st-Luc Police Station 9 to file a complaint. “We were told by Station 9 that we could try but we would need a lot of money to get a good lawyer to win,” relates Tina’s mother.

Across Canada, the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance has documented several cases of racial profiling and police brutality. Tina’s case is one of many cases in the Cote-des-Neiges area that have been reported to the Kabataang Montreal - Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (KM-UKPC/FCYA). Kabataang Montreal is a local Filipino youth organization that has been working on issues of racial profiling against Filipino youth since 2000, and part of a national alliance of Filipino youth organizations in Vancouver and Toronto who campaign against criminalization of Filipino youth, in particular newly-arrived Filipino youth who are the immigrant children of domestic workers.

KM-UKPC/FCYA and Tina’s family are demanding a public apology from the Montreal Police Department for the incident of August 24, 2007. KM-UKPC/FCYA has a long standing anti-racism campaign including an end to racial profiling and police brutality.

“One of the major factors leading to this is the oppressive immigration policies of the Canadian government, particularly the Filipino community’s experiences with the federal Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP)–a racist policy which relegates migrant workers (a majority of whom are Filipino professionals) to slave-like working conditions. Filipino youth encounter barriers within the education system such as classes d’accueil, live in the most ghettoized areas in Canada, and suffer racism on a daily basis including racial profiling. This undermines our genuine development and equality as a community in Canada.” states Neil Castro, member of Kabataang Montreal.

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A press conference will be held at the Philippine Women's Centre of Quebec,
4180 du Courtrai, room #308, on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 10am.

Media Contact: Rodney Patricio (514) 991-7973 cell or (514) 678-3901 office

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Black Family Pepper Sprayed By Montreal Police

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Julie Cox, holding her 4-year-old daughter Kheisha at a news conference
yesterday, was arrested with her son Lynwald (right) after being
violently abused by Montreal police last week

Police officer's from Montreal's Station 25 harassed, beat and pepper sprayed a Black motorist and his mother last week, on June 13th.

Here is the story from today's Montreal Gazette:

A case of 'driving while black'?
Versions differ. Mother, son arrested by city police claim harassment

IRWIN BLOCK, The Gazette
Published: Thursday, June 21, 2007

If you're black and drive a fancy car, get ready for racial profiling by Montreal police, says the father of a family that complains of being harassed last week.

Lynwald Cox, 26, and his mother, Julie Cox, say they were harassed June 13 when police stopped him for making an illegal left turn while he was driving his Nissan Maxima near the Van Horne Shopping Centre.

The Chateauguay residents went public yesterday with their complaint to the police ethics commission, but Ryan Cox, father of Lynwald and husband of Julie, says it's part of a pattern.

He's been stopped often and he feels it's because he's black.

"I drive a Lincoln Town Car, my other son drives an Infiniti, my daughter a late-model Ford - none of us has ever had so much as a parking ticket," he said.

"If a black person is driving a certain car, you have to be a pimp, drug dealer or pusher," the senior Cox, a vocational teacher at the English Montreal School Board, said bitterly.

Montreal police will not tolerate racial profiling or discriminatory behaviour, Inspector Paul Chablo stressed yesterday.

"I can tell you with the greatest confidence that we have a zero tolerance policy for any type of discrimination or racial profiling," he said.

Chablo also cautioned it would be unfair to judge the officers prematurely, as they have an entirely different version of events.

Police in their report said Lynwald Cox punched an officer in the back of the head. They also said Cox followed a police car because "he wasn't happy about getting a ticket."

The Cox family outlined their complaint at the Black Coalition of Quebec offices yesterday.

On June 13, a police officer told Lynwald Cox, an apprentice automobile technician, he had taken a wrong turn. Cox said he replied he did not see the sign.

The officer then gave him a citation ordering an inspection for allegedly having windows that were too dark. (A check later showed they were not.)

This is where the alleged harassment began, Cox said, and where the police version differs.

Cox says he told police: "Nobody has ever harassed me about my windows being too tinted."

After receiving a ticket - which police say he was reluctant to accept - for an illegal turn, Cox left. Police "clapped their hands and said, 'Have a nice day,' " he said.

Cox says he drove up Van Horne Ave. to Decarie Blvd., where a police car cut him off. According to police, it was Cox who followed police "very closely from behind."

"Why would I follow them to get another ticket?" Cox asked.

Cox said he made a left on Decarie and police followed him. A police cruiser pulled ahead, zig-zagging and not letting him pass.

Near Edouard Montpetit Blvd. "they slammed on their brakes and cut me off again and then I honked (at) them," Cox said.

Police ordered Cox out of the car and "jumped me, pepper-sprayed me. I have bruises, I had to go to emergency and my hands are still numb from the handcuffs."

His eyeglasses were broken.

Cox claimed one officer, pointing a gun, said as he was handcuffed, "You're not so big now. Who's the man now? You're going to be sucking my d--k now."

Police contend they asked Cox, "What's the deal, why are you following us?" He became aggressive and assaulted the officer.

Cox's mother, who has worked at St. Mary's Hospital for 28 years, is charged with obstructing a peace officer.

Julie Cox, who laughed at the suggestion her son was tailing the police car, said she screamed when an officer pointed a gun at her son, then at her. "When the same officer lifted his baton ... I went between my son and the police to prevent him from hitting my son.

"We were both pepper-sprayed," she added. "I was kicked, I was pushed. I had to go to St. Mary's Hospital."

Julie Cox said she asked why the cops were doing this, and one replied: "Shut up, you're under arrest. Don't ask any questions."

Note that although Julie and Lynwald Cox were pepper sprayed, and Lynwald was beaten, what happened is described as "harassment" not "brutality". Regardless of who one may choose to believe, it should be pointed out that what is at issue is violence, which is one whole degree heavier than harassment.

For those of you from out of town, Cote-des-Neiges area is one of Montreal's mainly immigrant neighbourhoods, with many people from the Caribbean and the Philippines as well as previous generations of Jewish immigrants giving the area a unique political and national composition. It is also a mixed class area, with the overwhelming majority of Black and Philippino residents belonging to the most oppressed sections of the working class, giving these communities a different class character than most white communities, including most white working class communities, in Montreal.

Police repression is an ongoing problem in the area, with most of the heat focussed on people of colour. Racial profiling by cops from Station 25 - who were most likely those involved in the beating of the Cox family - can be witnessed on a regular basis in the neighbourhood.

Indeed, police harassment of Philippino youth has been documented by the local group Kabattang Montreal. Roderick Carreon, a founding member of KM and current chairperson of SIKLAB Canada (A Philippino migrant workers' organization), gave a talk a couple of months ago describing the situation in the neighbourhood. As the media and the police work so hard to keep such voices silenced, it is worth quoting Carreon's talk on racial profiling at some length here:

One of these cases involves twenty Phillipino youth back in 1999, who were stopped harassed and put under arrest by Station 25 and Station 26 for gathering outside Plamondon metro. When we inquired about the case, it turned out that a resident called the local Station 25 police detachment to tell them that a lot of youths were outside the metro late at night – which is 10:30 at night – and they had to respond to that call. So their answer was sending seven police cars from Station 25 and six police cars from Station 26, so from 11 o'clock until 1 o'clock at night twenty Philippino youths were on the ground in Plamondon metro being interrogated and patted down and charged with illegal public assembly. At the same time they were constantly checking the streets for gang members, and they assumed that these Philippino youths were members of criminal organizations.

Another instance involved three KM members, who were leafleting in the Plamondon metro back in 2000. They were stopped by the transit police inside the Plamondon metro, and were told that only religious organizations were allowed to distribute pamphlets or any other papers in the metro or outside the metro.

So, as KM was taught, they actually answered back, and said this is a right, this is our right to distribute fliers - and this was for an activity commemorating police brutality, which is odd. The metro police’s response was again to call Station 25, and Station 25 sent two police cruisers, and started putting three of our youths in handcuffs. The reasoning for handcuffing our youths was that two of our youths, who didn't speak English or French, because they just came to Montreal, were trying to explain their situation with their hands. So Station 25 assumed that two of the youths were actually using martial arts against them!

So they put them in handcuffs and ticketed them for distributing fliers. Eventually we won the case, and Station 25 dropped those tickets.

[...]

Racial profiling has become rampant particularly in Cote-des-Neiges. And now it's gotten worst to the point that after the September 11th incidents and of course Bush and the US war on terror, the line of questioning by Station 25 and Station 26 reached the point that they do not ask about gang affiliation any more, they are now being asked if they are immigrants, when they arrived in Canada, if their parents are citizens, or if they actually belong in Canada. And most of these kids are complaining of police harassment and racial profiling every day. I myself am being victimized every week... actually just coming here tonight while picking up my kids from school and from daycare I was followed by Station 26 for three blocks. And of course i had to stop and ask them why are following me. Its just routine check up. This is the reasoning behind every police harassment that’s happening in Cote-des-Neiges.

And these are just the documented cases - we're not even sure if most of these cases are being reported. Now in Cote-des-Neiges as a community it’s hard to ignore racial profiling when you see it, because you see it every day. Now throughout the years during KM's organizing work in Cote-des-Neiges we've documented close to three dozen cases of racial profiling - some of them are worst than the others. We have complaints by some of the Philipino youth that they were actually taken to the police station, interrogated, some of them were physically abused but never charged. The reasoning behind it: because they look different. They look different because of the way they dress, and of course the colour of their skin.

As another - and particularly tragic - example of racial profiling in Cote-des-Neiges area, one which is certainly familiar to readers of this blog, remember that this is the neighbourhood where Mohamed Anas Bennis was murdered by a police officer from Station 25 on December 1st 2005. Bennis, a young Muslim man, was killed outside the prayer room he frequented on the corner of Kent and Cote-des-Neiges. The police claimed that he was mentally deranged and jumped out of some bushes stabbing one of their officers with a kitchen knife. Investigators claimed that the entire event had been filmed by a security camera. Yet eighteen months later they remain unable to produce either the knife or the security video, which they now claim shows nothing of interest.

The fact that the police were in the area raiding a fraud ring that had been told had "possible terrorist connections", and that Bennis was dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, has lead most objective observers to conclude that he was killed as a result of racial profiling.

A Matter of Perspective

As i have noted before, in isolation each case of racial profiling remains almost unprovable. We can't read minds, and so if police insist they are "just doing their job", we are left to rely on our own preconceptions and experiences to judge precisely what's what. Not surprisingly, people who have had positive interactions with the police tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, while people who are regularly harassed by police tend to believe their victims. Thus, how one responds to claims of police racism or brutality is directly related to one's own class position or relationship to privilege and oppression.

Often police accounts of what has happened are highly improbable, but a whole series of preconceptions about who "gets in trouble", and about working class people and people of colour, lead many white middle class people to swallow any tall tale.

Let's return to the case of the Cox family, whose troubles started when they left Van Horne shopping centre, taking an illegal left turn. The news report says that to go home they would eventually take Decarie south. As anyone who knows the Van Horne shopping centre will tell you, there is only one "illegal" turn out of the centre to the left if you're heading to Decarie, the one on Lemieux. As everyone in the neighbourhood knows, people turn left here constantly throughout the day. So many people, in fact, take this "illegal turn" that a couple of years ago when the police wanted to stop people from taking it they did a little publicity campaign telling people that they knew everyone turned left, but that soon they would start ticketing people for doing so. Which they did for a little while, but which they then stopped doing.

In other words, hundreds of people make the same "illegal turn" Lynwald Cox made, and the police never stop them.

What comes next in the police version of events is simply not believable, but a certain white-vision and middle class perspective will lead many people to give them the benefit of the doubt. The cops claim that Lyndwald Cox started tail-gating them, looking for a confrontation. He would have to be crazy to do that... i mean who the fuck tailgates the cops?!? But to make it more incredible: we are told that he was doing this with his mother in the car!

As in the case of Mohamed Anas Bennis - who we are told saw a group of police officers and attacked them with a kitchen knife for no reason - this story just does not make sense.

Next Lyndald Cox and his mother Julie were pulled over, pepper sprayed and beaten. A cop drew his gun. Here it is worth noting that a study by University of Toronto academic Philip Stenning has found that in responding to ‘minor offenses’ police are four times as likely to draw a gun when dealing with Black person, significantly more liklely to use force during and after an arrest when dealing with people of colour, and significantly more likely to insult people of colour than white people. (see page 69 of Crisis Conflict and Accountability).

In other words, Ryan Cox is right: it all fits a pattern...


Police Abuse and the "New" Montreal Economy

As long as there are police, there will be police abuse.

That said, such abuse and brutality is not random. It follows a certain logic, and its character changes depending on historical circumstance.

At the moment Montreal has an expanding immigrant working class, the vast majority of whom are people of colour from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. It is still unclear exactly what the long-term class trajectories of different communities within this immigrant working class will be, but at the moment at least all these people are experiencing heightened levels of economic exploitation and police repression. The former comes in the form of irregular and temporary work, discrimination and mass unemployment. The latter comes in the form of "anti-terrorist" surveillance and repression, racial profiling, and class profiling.

For those sections of this new immigrant working class which are the most oppressed, and which are being pushed into permanent economic insecurity, struggles against police harassment and violence will take on greater and greater importance.

The ability to see racist policing for what it is, and to disbelieve the lies of the police public relations departments, will determine what sections of the left have a chance of acting as allies to the immigrant working class, and what sections become the "progressive" face of white racism.

We'll be watching to see who falls where.

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Some Initial Thoughts on Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of 'A Few Bad Apples'

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Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of ‘a Few Bad Apples’
by Carol Tator and Frances Henry. Published by University of Toronto Press, 2006

In their book Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging the Myth of ‘a Few Bad Apples’, authors Carol Tator and Frances Henry – and contributors Charles C. Smith and Maureen Brown – examine four related aspects of racist policing practices. These are (1) how people talk about racist policing; (2) how people talk about “race” and crime; (3) what makes police so prone to racism; and (4) the lived experience of racist policing, both anecdotal and also as it plays out by the numbers, from the perspective of its victims.

Early on, Tator and Henry set themselves an ambitious, and important, goal. In their words, “To describe individual police as racist, or even to blame general systems of social control in society, is to evade the real question: Why does racial profiling occur in modern, industrialized nation-states such as Canada?” (p. 17)

Unfortunately, the method by which they hope to find an answer, and which really sets the tone of the whole book, is a weak one: “discursive analysis”. This involves looking at the ways in which journalists and government and police officials talk (or don’t talk) about crime and race and racism and the stories they tell about Black people and the police, and how all these “narratives” flow from different institutions throughout canadian society, holding up systems of power and privilege for the “elite”. Tator and Henry’s challenge to this power and privilege comes in the form of picking apart bits of these “narratives”, which is what i guess they would call “deconstruction”.

Discourse (what gets said) exists intertwined with ideology (what gets thought), and together these are said to constitute the wellspring of racism in canadian society. As the authors state in their introduction, “Racialization begins with ideology, which is then filtered through the everyday micro-interactions and discourses of police, security officers, judges, journalists and editors, educators, politicians, and bureaucrats, among others.” (pp.8-9)

This kind of argument has a certain appeal to people who do not want to think about political power or radical social change, as it confines the problem to the realm of speech and ideas, which are more comfortable things to challenge than class or the State.

Along with such fuzziness is an unfortunate masculine bias throughout this book, and this regardless of the fact that both Tator and Henry are women. In a quick footnote they state:

Because racial profiling is directed primarily against men, we exclude from our study discussion of racialized female body imagery. However, we recognize the importance of such imagery, especially in regard to the Black women as sexual object in history and in contemporary society. We also note that there are issues surrounding Black homosexual men, although we do not deal with this added dimension

(p. 23, Racial Profiling in Canada)

In this they are simply keeping in step with the overwhelming majority of researchers and activists who study police violence, almost all of whom describe this problem as one which almost only affects men. It is ironic that those who are so able to deconstruct statistics to show police racism and not crime is the cause of so many Black men being stopped, arrested and imprisoned, remain largely uninterested in why Black (and other) women remain “off the books”.

As has been excruciatingly detailed in the recently published book The Color of Violence (South End Press 2006 - soon available from Kersplebedeb), women of colour experience heightened police violence and State repression in a variety of ways that male-dominated movements and methodologies do not see. From being raped by police to having one’s children taken by social services to being physically attacked for defying gender norms and “looking like a man” to being ignored or criminalized when in need of help, women experience a variety of forms of State violence which men are often happy to ignore. This is all the more true for working class women. Especially so for working class women of colour...

While i will examine the problems and implications of “discursive analysis” as well as these sexist distortions in future postings, at the moment i want to focus on where Racial Profiling in Canada rises above its weaknesses and provides information useful to anti-racists in canada.


Learning from the Black Community

From an activist perspective, the two best chapters in this book were those that actually described the reality of racial profiling – and these sections were written by contributing authors Charles C. Smith and Maureen Brown.

It is worth noting that these chapters are each based heavily on studies that Smith and Brown were commissioned to write for the African Canadian Community Coalition on Racial Profiling in 2004.

You see, there were a series of revelations regarding racial profiling that appeared in the Toronto Star starting in late 2002, and these created a sense of crisis in “community-police relations”. The “best parts” of this book were written at the behest of community groups responding to this widespread community hostility to the police. Both of these original reports – In Their Own Voices by Brown and Crisis, Conflict and Accountability by Smith – are available in PDF format online, yet one is unlikely to come across them unless you actually know what to look for, whereas Tator and Henry’s book is available in stores across Canada.

(There is a lesson here. Much of what is most worthwhile in this book was in fact written separately as a result of political developments within the affected communities themselves. However these parts “enter the record”, and certainly i only encountered them, within this context of this academic post-structuralish post-modernish book... not that this is in any way Tator or Henry’s fault – in fact, it says something good about them that they chose to include these pieces – but you know: there most definitely is a lesson here...)

Brown’s In Their Own Voices contains insights and experiences which are essential to understanding the effects of constant racist harassment, documenting the experiences of Black people in Toronto. These testimonies end up giving meaning to any discussion of racial profiling - but for the purposes of this review, and of providing a statistical glimpse at the reality of racial profiling in Canada, Smith’s work is the place to start...


Racist Policing in Canada: Some Numbers

Chapter three (pages 55-91) by Charles C. Smith is entitled “Racial Profiling in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom”, and it aims to provide an overview of statistics and incidents in these three countries. As previously mentioned, it is largely drawn from a study Smith wrote for the African Canadian Community Coalition on Racial Profiling in 2004 – specifically from pages 27-75, the rest of the original report being devoted to official sounding recommendations for remedying matters. (Tator and Henry did well to cut these out.)

What emerges right away from Smith’s work is that all three countries have roughly the same thing going on: Black people getting harassed, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and killed by the police, and in numbers far greater than their actual proportion of the population.

For instance, in the united states:

• In opinion polling, 72 per cent of African Americans between eighteen and thirty-four said they had been stopped by the police because of their race; 37 per cent reported having been stopped more than once, and 15 per cent more than ten times.
• Between January 1995 and June 1996, in Maryland, 732 individuals were detained and searched by the state police. Of these, 75 per cent were African American and 5 per cent were Latino (Morris 2001, 80).
• In Philadelphia, African Americans comprise 79 per cent of those stopped and searched even though they are only 42 per cent of the population;
• In Illinois, Latinos comprise 41 per cent of those stopped and searched even though they are less than 1 per cent of the driving population. Furthermore, one in every 75 African Americans is stopped compared to one in every 163 Whites (Kearney 2001, 62-80)
• In New York City, a review of 175,000 cases indicated that African Americans were stopped six times more often than Whites. Also, even though they were only 25 per cent of the city’s population, African Americans accounted for 50 per cent of all individuals stopped (Bobb 2002, 6).

(pages 59-60, Racial Profiling in Canada)

While in the united kingdom:

The 2001-2002 West Midlands statistics comparing resident populations tell us that 5 Whites, 41 individuals of African descent, and 17 Asians were stopped/searched per 1,000 of each of their cohorts. [...] This is consistent with the national average of racial disproportionality across England and Wales: 13 Whites were stopped per 1,000 of their population, whereas people of African descent were stopped 106 times per 1,000 and Asians 35 per 1,000. Furthermore, stops/searches under CJPOA [the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act – st] indicate that per 1,000 population, 1 White is stopped/searched; 26 individuals of African descent and 7 Asians are similarly treated. In England and Wales this compares respectively as 0,5 per 1,000 for Whites, 5.5 per 1,000 for people of African descent, and 3.5 per cent per 1,000 for Asians; in other words, people of African descent are ‘28 times more likely to be searched and Asian people 18 times more likely to be searched in comparison with their White counterparts’ (Bowling 2003, 9-10)

[...]

Furthermore, people of African descent [in Britain] were subject to:

• more multiple vehicle stops – 14 per cent were stopped five or more times compared to 4 per cent for Whites, 6 per cent of Indians, and 2.7 per cent of Pakistani/Bangladeshis;
• more multiple pedestrian/foot stops – 18 per cent were stopped five or more times compared to 12 per cent of Whites, 10 per cent of Indians, and no Pakistani/Bangladeshis; and
• increased traffic stops/searches – 9 per cent of White people were searched compared to 34 per cent of people of African descent and 14 per cent of Asians (Clancy et al. 2001, 59-71)

(pages 69-70, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Even legislation crafted to target disproportionately white forms of illegal activity ends up being applied unevenly, with an anti-Black bias. So “Afro-Caribbean people are 27 times more likely than White people to be stopped and searched under a special police power designed to tackle ravers and football hooligans” (“Black People 27 Times More Likely to be Stopped,” by Vikram Dodd, Guardian Unlimited 21 April 2003 – quoted on page 68) and “Stops under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1989, which was ‘designed specifically to combat terrorism from the Provisional Irish Republican Army,’ indicate that in 1996-7, 11 per cent of the 43,700 stops in England and Wales were of individuals from subordinated racialized groups. In 1997-8, 7 per cent of those stopped were people of African descent.” (p. 69)

As Smith points out, the UK is “94.1 per cent White, 1.8 per cent people of African descent, 2.9 per cent South Asian and 1.2 per cent Chinese,” which as he says, makes the whole situation “mind boggling.” (p. 71)

By examining the “hit rates” - the number of people who, once stopped, are found to actually by committing a crime - Smith shows that the victims of racial profiling are in fact less likely than others to be committing the crimes they are investigated for. If you think about it for a moment this makes sense: if something other than actual likelihood of having broken the law is motivating police checks, then the total number of those who suffer these checks is likely to include a higher and higher proportion of people “doing nothing wrong”.

Unfortunately, Smith offers little in the way of explanation of these facts, or analysis of the societies within which such racist policing occurs – other than indicating (somewhat tautologically) that they sure are racist. Somewhat strangely, he describes canada, the united states and the united kingdom as being three countries with “vastly different historical developments”. This seems particularly odd from a canadian perspective, seeing as the history of repression and social control here since 1763 is largely a byproduct of american and british developments... but i guess once imperialism and colonialism are wiped from the blackboard, these three imperialist and colonialist countries do suddenly look quite different. This weakness is exacerbated by the rest of Tator and Henry’s book, i’m afraid, but more on that another day...

For obvious reasons i found what Smith had to say about canada to be the most interesting, and it is also certainly the most detailed and historically grounded. That said, a note of caution is in order: Smith’s original study was commissioned for an organization in Ontario, responding to a crisis in “police-community relations” in Toronto. As such it was really just about anti-Black racism in that province. When transplanted into this book on racial profiling “in Canada”, the author was obviously asked to add sections on other realities, but he did so with only mixed results. Whereas he does include some detailed – and harrowing – examples of racist treatment of Indigenous people west of Ontario, that’s about it. A failed attempt to deal with Quebec should have been rejected by the editors, as it seems solely informed by a few superficial articles in the Montreal Gazette and Montreal Mirror, failing to go beyond the threadbare and anecdotal. Nothing at all is provided about Atlantic Canada, Northern Canada, or the experiences of other oppressed communities throughout the country.


Anti-Black Racism in Ontario

Smith begins by refuting the argument that racist policing in Canada is some kind of recent phenomenon. This is of some consequence, as he is trying to argue that despite the major changes in the country’s demographic makeup over the past forty years, present day racism is largely a continuation of past practice.

In regards to Black people in Canada, he reminds us that:

People of African descent have a long history in Canada, one which has been marked by racist laws that have severely impeded African Canadians’ advancement. In early Canada, the enslavement of Blacks was legal, and even after slavery was abolished here, the law forbade Blacks to own land. This included those Blacks who had come to Canada with the British Loyalists during and after the American Revolution. Subsequently, laws were passed so that schools and residential areas were segregated.

(p. 72, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Smith draws on the work of Clayton James Mosher (Discrimination and Denial: Systemic Racism in Ontario’s Legal and Criminal Justice Systems, 1892-1961, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), providing the following evidence of racist policing throughout Ontario’s history:

• In six cities in Ontario, including Windsor, Hamilton, London, and Toronto, 12 per cent of all public order charges were against African Canadians, 11 per cent against Aboriginal people, and 2 per cent against Chinese. This was vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers in these cities. Of those charged, African Canadians and Aboriginal people were the most likely to be imprisoned.
• In their efforts to control public order offences, the police in these Ontario cities tended to focus on African Canadians. This led to the use of ‘disorderly-house and other public-morals laws ... to control Black populations.’
• African Canadians were required to appear in court more often than other groups to defend themselves against charges of property crime, and they received longer sentences when convicted.
• African Canadians found in areas where property offences had occurred ‘were often identified as suspects, and the courts often found them guilty on the basis of such limited evidence.’
• The mean sentence length for African Canadians for property offences was 10.51 months, compared to 8.33 for Aboriginal people and 6.26 for Whites.

(p. 73, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Now while i found the above to be “of interest”, i question whether this kind of statistical approach tailored towards proving discrimination is really the most appropriate way to discuss anti-Black racism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. While racism does run like a thread through Canadian history, adopting such a narrow statistical approach to “race” shorn of class or nation can only be misleading. It leaves unspoken who these Black, Chinese and Aboriginal people were, what was their relationship to the State and capitalism, what were their political and economic trajectories... instead such a statistical account simply gives evidence that racism existed in 19th and 20th century canada, not an especially earth-shaking revelation...

Really, this all begs the question as to why discrimination exists, and who profits from it. As we shall see, some very incomplete and unconvincing answers to these questions are provided elsewhere in this book, Smith’s work clearly being used to contextualize and ground Tator and Henry’s “racist discourse/ideology” argument. So perhaps it is too much that we look for explanations here – instead, let’s stick to the numbers.

Smith draws on recent studies by University of Toronto scholars Phillip Stenning and Scot Wortley, and from the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System as well as the radical grassroots Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, to show that the tradition of anti-Black discrimination carries on into the present.

Quoting Stenning’s 1994 study Police Use of Force and Violence against Members of Visible Minority Groups in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Police and Race Relations) he shows that:

• In responding to ‘minor offenses,’ police drew their weapons when arresting African Canadians more often than with other groups (25 per cent of the time, compared to 6.7 per cent for Whites and 6.7 per cent for ‘others’)
• Rates of police use of force – at the time of arrest as well as after arrest – were significantly higher for African Canadians (33.3 and 31.4 per cent respectively, compared to 25.0 and 25.0 per cent for Whites and 30.8 and 23.1 per cent for ‘others’) (ibid.m II.9-II.24)

(p.74, Racial Profiling in Canada)

i think it is worth mentioning the other finding from Stenning’s study, which made it into Smith’s report to the ACCCRP but not this book:

• [African Canadians were ] sworn at more often by police (58.8% v. 38.3% for Whites and 43.6% for Others) and subject to racial epithets more often as well with 31.4% indicating they had been subject to racially derogatory remarks from police officers v. 5% for Others

(p. 68, Crisis Conflict and Accountability)

Certainly these findings explain much.

The already predictably tragic consequences of this police violence are aggravated by the fact that Black people are more likely to find themselves stopped by police in the first place. Drawing on findings in Wortley’s 1997 paper “The Usual Suspects: Race, Police Stops and Perceptions of Criminal Injustice” (presented to the 48th Annual Conference of the American Society of Criminology in Chicago), Smith tells us that:

• 28.1 per cent of African Canadians reported having been stopped by police, compared to 18.2 per cent of Whites and 14.6 per cent of Chinese Canadians;
• 16.8 per cent of African Canadians reported having been stopped twice by police, compared to 8.0 per cent of Whites and 4.7 per cent of Chinese Canadians;
• 11.7 per cent of African Canadians reported having been stopped by police ‘unfairly’ in the past two years, compared to 2.1 per cent of Whites and 2.2 per cent of Chinese Canadians;
• 42.7 per cent of African-Canadian males reported having been stopped by the police in the past two years, compared to 22.1 per cent of Whites and Asians; and
• 28.7 per cent of African-Canadian males reported having been stopped twice in the past two years, compared to 9.9 per cent of Whites and Asians (ibid., 18-19)

(p. 75, Racial Profiling in Canada)

So Black people are twice as likely as whites to be stopped by police. Once they are stopped, they are more likely to be subjected to (often racist) insults. When these situations degenerate into an arrest, Black people are more likely to be subject to violence, and with tragic concsequences, they are four times more likely to find the cops drawing their guns on them.

Is it any wonder that so many Black people end up getting shot by police? And given all the racism leading up to the shot being fired, is the classic excuse that “It just went off by accident” really enough to say that race is not a factor in these police murders?

Even though the majority of police stops may not end in death, the sorting of people into different racial streams continues in many different ways. Drawing on findings of the 1995 Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, Smith shows that:

• The police stop African Canadians (especially African-Canadian males) twice as often as Whites.
• Whites are less likely to be detained before trial than African Canadians (23 per cent against 30 per cent), especially for drug charges (10 per cent against 31 per cent).
• Between 1986-7 and 1992-3, incarcerations of African Canadians for drug trafficking rose by 1,164 per cent, from 25 per cent of 524 admissions to 60 per cent of 2,616 admissions. This compares to a 151 per cent increase for Whites during the same period.
• With regard to drug charges, White accused were released more often than African Canadians. Also, African Canadians were denied bail more often, and the conviction rate was higher for African Canadian men: 69 per cent, compared to 57 per cent for White men.
• In the six years leading up to 1993, the African-Canadian population of Ontario increased by 36 per cent; over the same period, the number of African-Canadian prisoners admitted to Ontario correctional facilities increased by 204 per cent! The numbers of White prisoners admitted increased by only 23 per cent.

(p.75, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Finally, in regards to Black people in Ontario, Smith reminds us of the findings of the Toronto Star’s 2002 series on racial profiling:

• Although only 8.1 per cent of Toronto’s populations African Canadians accounted for 34 per cent of drivers charged with out-of-sight violations.
• African Canadians were overrepresented by 4.2 times for out-of-sight driving offences, by 3.8 times for cocaine possession and by 2.1 times for simple drug possession.
• Though Whites comprised 63.8 per cent of those charged with simple drug possession (more than ten thousand cases), Whites were released at the scene 76.5 per cent of the time, compared to 61.8 per cent for African Canadians.
• After being taken into custody, African Canadians were held for court appearance 15.5 per cent of the time, compared to 7.3 per cent for Whites;
• For cocaine possession (more than two thousand cases), 41.5 per cent of African Canadians were released at the scene, compared to 63 per cent of Whites.
• African Canadians comprised 27 per cent of all violent charges, even though they were only 8.1 per cent of the population.
• In 51 Division [in Toronto - st], 40 per cent of African Canadians charged with one count of cocaine possession were held for bail hearings, compared to 20 per cent of Whites.
• African Canadians were overrepresented at police divisions with low African-Canadian populations. For example, they were four times overrepresented in out-of-sight traffic offences at 42 Division and seven times overrepresented at 52 Division [in Toronto - st], even though these divisions do not have significant number of African-Canadian residents. These data supported the African-Canadian community’s anecdotes that they were being singled out by police (Rankin et al. 2002).

(p. 90, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Such a plethora of numbers and statistics can be alienating and discouraging to read, both because of the reality they represent and because most of us find long lists of numbers somewhat mind-numbing. Truth be told, they do a poor job at conveying any of the real life results of racist police harassment (for that, see Brown’s In Their Own Voices!). Yet i found this section to be so useful, and worth quoting at such length, because these figures clearly establish two of the characteristics of racial profiling: that it is a mass phenomenon affecting most if not all members of targeted communities, and that it is diffuse, occurring everywhere and anywhere and yet much more often on the level of (for instance) harassment and intimidation than murder. Furthermore, by establishing this context empirically Smith helps us to counter the deniability of almost any single incident of racial profiling when it is viewed in isolation.


Racist Treatment of Indigenous People in the Canadian Prairies and West Coast

The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.

- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The statistics and experiences of Indigenous people in Canada are harrowing. As i mentioned above, this section of Smith’s chapter was obviously written separately from his work for the ACCCRP, and for someone like me who is ignorant and not from “out west”, it seemed a good overview of how the Indigenous relationship to colonial police plays out, in terms of harassment, imprisonment and murder.

For instance:

According to Corrections Canada’s own statistics, Aboriginal adults are incarcerated over six times more often than anyone else. A one-day ‘snapshot’ of all offenders in this country’s correctional facilities by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics conducted in 1996 (see Hylton 2002, 140) showed that although Aboriginal people are 2 per cent of the adult population of Canada, they account for 17 per cent of federal inmates. In Saskatchewan, Aboriginal people were being incarcerated at almost ten times the overall provincial rate; they were 76 per cent of that province’s inmate population. In Manitoba, 61 per cent of inmates were Aboriginals; in Alberta, it was over 35 per cent. Another shocking statistic: in Saskatchewan, 70 per cent of sixteen-year-old Treaty Indian males can expect to be incarcerated at least once by the time they reach twenty.

(p. 81, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Understand that: in Saskatchewan seven out of ten sixteen year old Indigenous guys will be imprisoned at some point before their twentieth birthday. In a province where 25% of the youth are Indigenous, this is a particularly horrendous level of racist mass incarceration, of a kind more commonly associated with the united states than with canada...

(For more on the nature of colonial imprisonment in canada, i suggest readers check out Prison Justice dot ca’s Facts and Stats page)

Of course, this kind of mass incarceration is one result of a highly focused sort of police repression. Another result of this highly focused repression is plain old murder, as white police officers partake in the time honored canadian tradition of killing Indigenous people just for the hell of it. Smith continues:

In recent years, several Aboriginal men have been found frozen to death in Saskatoon following police interventions. In November 1990 the body of an Aboriginal teenager named Neil Stonechild was found frozen in a field just outside the city. The injuries and marks on his body were probably caused by handcuffs. A friend reported that he last saw Stonechild bleeding in the back of a police car, screaming that the police were going to kill him. [...]

In January 2000, the body of Lloyd Dusthom was found frozen to death outside his locked apartment after he had been seen in police custody. That same month, the frozen body of Rodney Naistus was found on the outskirts of Saskatoon near the Queen Elizabeth II Power Station. Five days later, Lawrence Wegner, a social work student, was last seen alive banging on the doors of relatives’ homes in Saskatoon. Later testimony would indicate that he ran away when the police were called. His frozen body was later found near the power plant. After Wegner’s body was found, another man, Darrell Night, came forward. Night reported that he had been dropped off by the police south of the city on a bitterly cold night but had managed to get to a nearby power station for help. These deadly excursions became known among Aboriginal people as ‘starlight tours.’ Two Saskatoon police officers were found guilty of unlawful confinement in the Night case and were sentenced to eight months in jail (ibid.).

(pp. 81-2, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Nor are such police murders of Indigenous people confined to Saskatchewan:

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 2005, Aboriginal leaders demanded answers after the police shot and killed two young aboriginal men within a few weeks of each other. In January in Norway House, an RCMP officer shot and killed Dennis St-Paul after trying to arrest him for parole violations. The following month, Matthew Dumas, eighteen, was fatally injured when the police fired two shots during what they referred to as a ‘scuffle’.

(p. 83, Racial Profiling in Canada)

Similarly:

In Vancouver, a public inquiry was called by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs as well as the B.C. Police Complaints Commissioner in the matter of Frank Paul, who froze to death in 1998 after police dumped him in an alley. In 2000, the Vancouver Police department suspended one of the officers involved in Paul’s death for two days; another officer received a one-day suspension. When rumours began to circulate that [Vancouver] police were dumping ‘drunks and troublemakers’ in remote areas, police chief Jamie Graham defended the provision in the Criminal Code that allows police to remove citizens to other parts of the city for breaching the peace: ‘It’s a good law. It’s a good tool for police officers to quell those disturbances that require people to be removed from certain areas’ (Carmichael 2004)

(p. 83, Racial Profiling in Canada)

All of which is horrific, and Smith provides activists with some valuable information here; and yet... the great levels of structural violence we’re talking remain unexplained. Or should i say, unconvincingly explained. A section on “Public Perception and the Media” and a gushingly naive section on the court system seem to suggest that for Black and Indigenous people, it is simply white people’s racism that it to blame for the discrimination they suffer. Not racism as in “capitalism in inherently racist” or “the State is white supremacist”, but structural racism reinterpreted in its most timid and narrow sense, namely that the courts and law enforcement agencies are staffed by prejudiced white folks, and changing this (partly through education and mainly through hiring and promoting more people from racialized communities) is the best way to end racist policing. This is Tator and Henry’s argument throughout the book.

But colonialism and white supremacy are more than just irrational grudges or malicious prejudice, they’re actual ways of building an economy and government. What i mean is: “discrimination” is an essential feature of capitalism. Which is why you can’t have an unracist capitalism, even though there are no rules as to which group might end up suffering racist subjugation. As radical intellectual J. Sakai has pointed out, “‘Class’ without race in North America is an abstraction. And vice-versa. Those who do not get this are always just led around by the nose, the manipulated without a clue - and it is true that many don't want any more from life than this.”

The quote by Frantz Fanon that began this section is not from anywhere in Smith’s chapter, or elsewhere in this book. (The two times the revolutionary theorist gets mentioned, it’s all about that “White gaze”, making him sound like a pomo academic.) For colonialism remains the elephant in the room here... clearly present, but we’re not gonna talk about it...

Perhaps this is why, unlike his discussion of anti-Black racism, Smith’s section on anti-Indigenous racism lacks any attempt to provide historical background. This makes perfect sense, for to do so would be to strain the meaning of “racism” beyond recognition, as what we are talking about is centuries of national oppression and military conflict, woven together in a unique yet unmistakable tapestry of genocide. That this resulted in, and was reinforced by, racism, certainly does not mean that it can be reduced to racism alone!

After all, it wasn’t “racial profiling” that all the children in residential schools were Indigenous, any more than it was “racial profiling” that only Indigenous people were subject to pass laws in Canada (these were the laws South Africa copied for its apartheid system). It was a national thing, a military thing... police and prisons being important weapons in the ongoing colonization of the First Nations. Not colonization as a consequence of “discourse”, but of policy. And not of policy passively reflecting ideology or “bad ideas”, but policy with a clear and conscious goal: the destruction of Indigenous sovereignty and the genocidal reduction of Indigenous peoples to a tiny minority within the Canadian mosaic.

The oppression of Black people in North America also has a national dimension, but it is true that within Canada this is far less obvious than in the united states. Certainly the neo-colonial immigration policies of the past forty years have created new (though not better) realities for the historically oppressed Black communities in this country, with a majority of Black people being first or second generation immigrants. While racist discourse and ideology – and policing! – certainly play an important part in ensuring that these immigrant communities will be oppressed, the racial segmentation of the canadian economy seems to me to be a central piece of the puzzle.

Specifically: since Canada abandoned it’s “whites first” immigration policies in 1967, there has been an increasing trend to reconfiguring the country’s class structure along new racist lines. Proletarian immigrant communities from Third World countries are being formed and forced into the areas of greatest exploitation. At times this may represent a continuation of the exploitation suffered by Canada’s historic Black communities – i don’t know this, but i’m open to believing it – but in other instances (i.e. the Filipino and Arab communities) these people are being forced into new proletarian communities with specific characteristics and trajectories of their own.

This is important, as i would argue that these colonial and class imperatives – the war on Indigenous sovereignty and the proletarianization of Third World immigrant communities – form the not-so-hidden foundations upon which the new 21st century canadian capitalism is being built. As such, they also form the backstory to canadian racism today, the missing element explaining the connection between people across this country who suffer from “targeted policing”.

So the long history of canadian racism is not insignificant, but on its own it falls short of explaining the ongoing reality of racist oppression. Rather than simply reflecting grand-dad’s bigotry, canadian racist ideology is an expression of today’s racist canadian class structure, and the ongoing canadian dependence on colonialism.

Is this nitpicking?

Well, it all depends.

Given that a central feature of racial profiling is its deniability, the mere act of documenting all this crap is certainly worthwhile. So regardless of possible political differences, i obviously find Smith’s work worth discussing – and recommending as a source of information.

In a sense am not sure how much of what i am getting at is a fair judgment. i mean Smith only wrote one chapter of this book, and not every chapter of a book has to contain both facts and explanation. So perhaps i am holding him unfairly responsibly for Tator and Henry's exclusive reliance on “discursive analysis” and the like... but whoever is to blame it must be said that by not engaging in any kind of economic or political analysis of the communities which suffer racist abuse - or the classes which profit from this violence - Smith (or perhaps just Tator and Henry) incorrectly cuts the world of speech and ideas loose from the realities of class and power.

Admittedly, the “semi-autonomous nature of ideology” is not clearcut, or easy to stuff in a box. It would be foolish to mimic certain ultraleftists and ascribe any and all racist abuses to economic imperatives. Furthermore, ideology and discourse can have real effects, including material effects. Given the petit bourgeois class origin of many immigrants – who find themselves once in Canada working in the shittiest working class jobs, often part-time, casual or under the table, hardly ever unionized – one could make the argument that discourse and ideology, combined with the racist policing practices they encourage, together push immigrant communities into a proletarian position. Perhaps.

However, even though that may be one part of what is going on, it would be a mistake to not see that Canadian immigration policies are based on the need for certain kinds of labour which most Canadians are privileged enough to be able to refuse.

Let me give one galling example.

Over the past twenty years over 100,000 women from the Philippines have come to Canada under this country’s Live-In Caregiver Program. These women, many of whom have trained professionally as nurses in the Philippines, must work for 24 months of their first three years in Canada as “live-in caregivers”, meaning that they must reside in their employers’ home during this period. The work they do can fall under many categories: childcare, healthcare, homecare and more. While they receive a wage calculated on a 40-hour workweek, given that they are always “at work” they suffer from all the joys of highly flexibilized labour. Plus all the joys of being a highly gendered and atomized workforce, with employer-employee relations marked by inconsistency and paternalism. Needless to say, sexual and other forms of abuse are prevalent.

In previous generations, the work that these women do would have mainly been done by Canadian women, either paid or unpaid, as wives, daughters, mothers, nuns or "domestics". But changes in gender relations and in the Canadian economy have created a new international “demand”, just as capitalist development of the Philippines countryside pushes people off the land and creates a convenient "supply".

Once these women have worked all of their required (indentured) months, most of them join the Filipino working class communities that are growing in major cities across Canada.

So certain processes are maintaining Third World women, even those with university degrees, in a subservient relationship to First World citizens. How is this “proletarization” being accomplished? are Filipinos being proletarianized as a result of “discourse”? or “ideology”? or the Philippines’ Labour Export Program combined with Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program? or a bit of all the above?

To return to the point at hand: across Canada the past years have seen a number of cases of anti-Filipino violence, including racial profiling. In one particularly horrific incident, on May 24th 2004 Toronto undercover police shot and killed Jeffrey Reodica, a Filipino teenager who at the time was running away from them.

Chances are Reodica was killed because he was Filipino - but my point is that the reason why being Filipino might be enough to get you shot by the police is because the Filipino community is at this point working class – and one role of the police is to discipline, control and intimidate working class people, especially working class youth. That some people get killed as a result of this process is one of those things that the white middle class can live with.

So once and again: am i nitpicking?

How we understand the relationship between racism and capitalism will have important long-term consequences as to what kind of political work we engage in, who we work with and what we work for. This is true whether we are organizing around police brutality or so-called hate groups or gentrification... or anything else for that matter!

In regards to racial profiling, concentrating on the interplay between racist policing, colonialism and Canada’s racialized class structure provides us with an entirely different set of solutions, and alliances, than a view which confines racism to the personal realm of malice, speech and ideas.

Firstly, it lays the basis for an alliance with other people who are victimized by the police, as class runs like a thread (or chain) connecting and revealing the various different groups who are targeted for such abuse. Without forgetting the fact that racism and national oppression are important factors in many cases of police abuse, there are sections of the white working class which also suffer targeted police violence. Not only semi-criminalized groups like prostitutes and street people, but also those sections which for whatever reason have reaped scant benefit from the general imperialist bonanza. These sections are likely the least committed to the pro-capitalist politics which infect most white society - including most white workers - and as such constitute a potential base of support for our politics. (A base that those of us who are white should pay particular attention to...)

Secondly, while warding off the lure of easy (and doomed) solutions like electing social-democrats or hiring Black cops, integrating class into our analysis can lead us to the most reliable avenue of social change, namely mobilization of the oppressed in their own interests and on their own behalf. Rhetoric aside, the ability to relate one’s work around a particular issue (i.e. racist treatment by police) to other parts of your life (i.e. economic discrimination and super-exploitation) is a skill that strengthens one’s position on all fronts. Middle class people might object that adding class to the mix makes things too complicated, or constitutes too big a challenge – but for working class people, for the vast majority of people who suffer at the hands of the police, class already is part of the mix. Acknowledging this can only help us actually take up the work that needs be done.

Finally, and conversely, anti-police work will sharpen our class analysis, as the reality of police oppression can help bring people’s actual position (and their communities’ position) within capitalism into greater focus than simple income analysis. It also deepens our ability to understand colonialism, as the police remain the frontline occupation troops on Indigenous land across this continent.

**********

This has been a very long review – and of just one chapter! My thoughts on this matter are not crystal clear, but i’m working on it – i'm hoping some of you will help me out and let me know where you think i’ve gone wrong...

i have obviously taken the liberty to use Smith’s work to broach several subjects well beyond the scope of Tator and Henry’s book. If i have been somewhat critical, it is because this question is one which is important, and prone to easy confusion, but i should point out that “on its own merits” as a “progressive” study included in a fairly liberal anti-racist book, Smith’s work remains an ok contribution.

Though remember – you can read much of it online for free!

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What Is Racial Profiling?

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For the past month or more i have been putting off reviewing this book about racial profiling. i've spent today hammering out some thoughts, but am not there yet - but it did occur to me that it would be useful to have some sketched out description of what the term means before i get going.

So that's what this is.

Racial profiling can be used the same way as "racial discrimination", though normally when people use the term we are talking about racial discrimination by police disguised as a scientific method of policing.

Some observations of my own, which have problems of their own, but which i'll put down as a first step:

Normally racial profiling involves low-level harassment of the kind that, on an incident-by-incident basis, is deniable and may strike middle class white people as trivial. Things like being pulled over while driving, or asked for ID when walking down the street, or singled out by police for doing something that other (white) people are doing without anybody bothering them.

As a white guy living in Montreal i’ve seen this many times.

Being in Dorchester Square having a late-night veggie burger with my partner – the police driving their car through the park, passing us, but stopping at each of the benches where Black people were sitting, and informing them that “the park is closed”.

Being at the local supermarket with a backpack on my shoulders (just like many of the other customers) watching the manager go through a Black man’s bag, telling him afterwards that it was his own fault as the sign said not to bring bags in from outside.

Following some Black kids down an escalator into the food court at the Eaton Centre after it had closed and having metro security guards run past me to tell the kids that it was closed, and that they weren’t allowed to be down there.

Of course those are just a few incidents – when it happens often, but it doesn’t happen to you, they fade from memory.

And then there are the countless times where i have certainly benefited from racial profiling even though there were only white folks around.

Like in high school when the police would catch us drinking in the park – or even smoking up – and simply pour out our booze, or even make jokes (i remember one who tried to ingratiate himself with us saying he didn’t want to be more of a pig than he had to be)... like other forms of racial profiling, this is deniable, not provable... they could have been going light on us because we were white, or because most of us were middle class or bourgeois in a ruling class neighbourhood, or whatever... but logic tells me that of those times a cop acted “nice”, chances are sometimes if i wasn’t so pasty skinned they would have been “mean”.

The point is that “racial profiling” has a few characteristics:

1. It is a mass phenomenon. We are talking about something which is likely to effect every single member of targeted communities at one point or another, and to effect some of these people regularly and in a systematic way.
   
   
2. It is diffuse. By which i mean that it goes on all the time all over the place, is normally not spectacular, and generally leaves no physical trace or paper trail. Indeed, one demand of various groups campaigning against racial profiling is to have police officers required to note the “race” of people they question, ticket, or charge with a crime, and in this way leave some trace of who gets treated how.
   
   
3. On a case by case basis it remains deniable. If a cop or security guard denies that race was a factor, one can either believe them or disbelieve them, but in most cases one can’t prove it. In the case of low-level harassment, police are often legally said to have discretionary power, meaning that they don’t have to justify their decisions. In more heavy cases, for instance a police beating or murder, there are often alternate explanations other than simple racism, and these are what the entire police establishment insist must be the case.
   
   
4. White people can benefit from racial profiling without having any reason to suspect it is even a factor. This is a possibility every time you may think “Gee, he was a nice cop”, “He could have been a bastard, we’re lucky he just gave us a warning”, etc.

We’re talking about things like police murder, but more often we’re talking about police asking you for ID, or what you’re doing in a neighbourhood or in a store. Of course, if you’re fed up and ask them why they’re not demanding ID from the white kids, it could end up in a case of police violence or murder – this is not hyperbole, it is documented tragedy – but in general we are talking about a random mass level of deniable State harassment.

There are problems with this concept as i have spelled it out here, but it does identify some important issues, and so it should be pushed further, not thrown out. i’ll touch on some of these limitations (amongst other things) in the following book review.

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[Montreal] Thursday March 29th Speak-Out on Racial Profiling & Police Brutality

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Racial Profiling and Police Brutality: Standing up and Speaking Out

THURSDAY, March 29th
6:00pm to 9:00pm
3480 McTavish St. (Shatner Building)
Room 302

A Keynote Panel with:

Participants:

• Khadija Bennis, twin sister of Anas Bennis and spokesperson for the Justice for Anas Coalition
• Jade, speaking on racial profiling of Natives in Montreal
• Rodney Patricio, chairperson for UKPC and Kaabataang Montreal - a Filipino youth organisation based in Cote-des-Neiges

Hosted by author and journalist, Fimo R. Mitchell
Presentation by Collective Opposed to Police Brutality

Sponsored by QPIRG McGill, CKUT, SSMU's Equity Commissioner and the Black Students' Network.

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[Montreal] Justice For Anas Coalition Holds Public Assembly March 21st

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The justice For Anas coalition - struggling for justice and answers regarding the 2005 police killing of Mohamed Anas Bennis in Montreal - has organized a Public Assembly for next week, bringing together speakers who will share their knowledge and experiences with racist and violent police in this city.

If you can, be there! as this certainly seems to be an important event:

PUBLIC ASSEMBLY!
organized by the JUSTICE FOR ANAS COALITION

we demand access to all information regarding Mohamed Anas Bennis' death, a Public Inquiry into the events of December 1st 2005, and an end to police brutality and impunity.

Wednesday March 21st 2007, 6:30pm
6767 Côte-Des-Neiges
(metro CDN, bus #165 north)

Voluntary contribution
refreshments will be served

wheelchair accessible
whisper translation (English/French)
on-site childcare available - please call 24 hours in advance (514-342-2111)

• Khadija Bennis, the sister of Anas Bennis who was killed by Montreal police officer Bernier of Station 25 on December 1st 2005, on the corner of Kent and Côte-Des-Neiges.
• Huguette Milberg, from Mothers United Against Racism, a group of women struggling against the racial profiling of their children by the Montreal police.
• Hind Charkaoui, the sister of Adil Charkaoui who was incarcerated for two years based on a Security Certificate, and who is still struggling against the system of Security Certificates and deportation to torture.
• May Chiu, one of the commissioners from the People’s Commission on Immigration Security Measures.
• a member of Kabataang, a Philippino youth organization.
• a documentary film about the case of Anas Bennis

A Killing and a Cover-Up:
The Case of Mohamed Anas Bennis

On December 1st 2005, on the corner of Kent and Côte-des-Neiges, Montreal police officer Bernier from Station 25 shot and killed Mohamed Anas Bennis, a 25-year old Canadian of Moroccan heritage, while in the presence of three other police officers from the same Station.

More than one year later, the events of that morning remain shrouded in mystery. Both the police and the Quebec government have refused to hand over evidence and information related to Anas’ death. “We feel like we are being lied to, that they are hiding things from us,” says Khadija Bennis, Anas’ twin sister and a member of the Justice For Anas Coalition.

This veil of secrecy, the government’s callous disregard for Anas’s mourning family and their quest for justice, the incredible police impunity... all this should be familiar by now. Just think: the Security Certificates; the secret trials; the deportations to torture; the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) harassment of refugees and immigrants; the long list of racialized people, both citizens and non-citizens alike, who have been brutalized and even killed by the police without the Canadian State so much as batting an eye, the five hundred Indigenous women who have disappeared without any real investigation ever being carried out... the list just goes on and on.

In a context of criminalization and marginalization of racialized communities across Canada, in a climate of ongoing systematic attacks against the oppressed, and in an era when the rhetoric of a “war on terror” serves as an excuse to give more and more power to the police and other repressive institutions, this Public Assembly is a forum to discuss the impact of racial profiling and police brutality and to explore the different ways that we can resist against police abuse.

WE DEMAND

• the immediate release of all reports, evidence and information concerning the death of Anas Bennis to the Bennis family and to the public;
• a full, public and independent inquiry into the death of Anas Bennis;
• an end to police brutality and impunity.

Justice For Anas Coalition
tel: 514-342-2111
email: justicepouranas@gmail.com

web: http://www.justicepouranas.ca

The flier for this event is available for download

* bilingual version, 2 pages (you can do a two-sided photocopy, cut it down the middle and then have both French and English fliers) - 6.2 M in uncompressed pdf format or in a zipfile 1.6 M
* French version - 3.2 M in uncompressed pdf format or in a zipfile 802 K
* English version - 3 M in uncompressed pdf format or in a zipfile 726 K

One can also download all three pdfs in one zipfile.

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Racist Violence From Toronto Cops: Beaten for Being Muslim and Wanting to Use the Elevator!!!

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In a photo provided by Afzal Badin, he displays some of the injuries inflicted by Toronto police officers

This is a story of racism and police abuse, horrible in its own right. While what happened to Afzal Badin and his family shouldn't happen to anyone, all indications are that it is happening to more and more people, and not all of them are surviving the ordeal. Just think of another your Muslim - Mohamed Anas Bennis - whose run-in with Montreal police in December 2005 left him dead, in circumstances which one can easily imagine were similar to those described below (cops on an unrelated investigation bump into a visibly Muslim young man and decide, for reasons one can only imagine, to take him down).

From today's Toronto Star:

Police hit with $2.6M lawsuit
Young Muslim alleges racial stereotyping, says plainclothes officers didn't identify themselves when quarrel escalated to an armed invasion of his home and a beating

Mar 12, 2007 04:30 AM
Jim Rankin
Staff Reporter

Afzal Badin, late for evening prayer, assessed that the kitchen knife in his hand was no match for the men in the hallway with handguns. He abandoned his plan to confront them, ran back into his family's apartment, locked the door and dialed 911.

This was a matter, he decided, for the police.

It was after 8 p.m., and moments earlier, the 24-year-old devout Muslim, who prays five times a day, had attempted to take an elevator from his family's 10th-floor Toronto apartment to the lobby, where a friend with a car was waiting outside to take him to a mosque.

Three men he had never seen before – all white and dressed in T-shirts and jeans, he says – were in the elevator when the doors opened and prevented him from entering. One, says Badin, gave him a push. He says he told them he was in a hurry and on his way to the mosque and one of the men blocked his way. Words were said and things quickly escalated.

Now they were pounding on the apartment door.

What Badin didn't know at the time was that the men outside the apartment Feb. 26, 2006, were three undercover Toronto police drug squad officers.

One had been slammed by a judge in a recent landmark racial profiling ruling and, years earlier, had been chastised for his conduct during an encounter with a black man.

While Badin was on the phone with the 911 operator, they burst through the door, guns drawn on his parents and other relatives, ranging from his 73-year-old father to a 6-month-old baby, gathered for a typical Indian dinner, the claim says.

Badin, who says he has never had problems with police before, ended up bloodied from a violent takedown and charged with threatening death, assault with a weapon, assault with intent to resist arrest, and disarming an officer.

Later that evening in hospital, eight staples were needed to close a gash on his top right scalp, four for a cut on the top right part of his head, and two more for another scalp wound. A cut on his cheek took three stitches to close and pieces of two front teeth were lost.

Eight months later, an assistant Crown attorney, having reviewed the case and the 911 call, and consulted colleagues including Toronto's Crown attorney Paul Culver, withdrew all charges against Badin.

In a statement of claim filed last week, Badin alleges police instigated a confrontation, initially failed to identify themselves, used excessive force, breached his right to be free from discrimination of race, ethnic origin, and religion, and negligently "by reason of racial stereotype" considered him to be a "lesser person."

Badin and family members are seeking $2.6 million in damages. Four police officers, the police chief, and the Toronto Police Services Board are named as defendants.

Police have not yet filed a statement of defence and the allegations have yet to be proved in court. A police spokesperson said the service intends to defend itself.

The claim that race and religion may have played a role in the incident comes at a trying time for a police service committed to improving relations with various communities – and for a drug squad trying to carry on business in the wake of a series of internal scandals, lawsuits, and criminal charges.

Glenn Asselin, one of the four named officers, was found by a judge in 2004 to have, along with a partner, "fabricated significant aspects" of their evidence and given "untrue" testimony in a case involving a 2001 traffic stop of Kevin Khan, a black motorist wrongly accused of possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking.

The judge determined Khan, then 26, a teacher and real estate agent, had been stopped by Asselin (and an officer no longer on the force) because of his black skin and the expensive car he was driving. Justice Anne Molloy, in acquitting Khan, also found that he did not know there was cocaine in the car.

One month after that ruling, charges against another black man charged by Asselin and the same former officer were stayed and withdrawn without explanation. The man's lawyer, John Struthers, pointed to the earlier ruling as the reason, and called on the Department of Justice to review cases involving Asselin. It's unclear what became of that request but there was an "extremely comprehensive" internal probe of Asselin's work on the Khan case, said a police spokesperson.

"The (judge's) comments were investigated by a member of the homicide squad, who looked into the entire matter," said Mark Pugash. "The officer's investigation was reviewed by a group of senior people in the organization and their recommendation was there was no evidence to support allegations of misconduct against Asselin."

Khan, too, is suing. Police are challenging his allegations. The case is before the courts, and therefore police won't say any more about the internal probe into the judge's comments.

Asselin had also been cited in another questionable traffic stop of a black man in 1993. A judge found that Asselin and then-partner Richard Shank had "no reasonable basis to stop and demand identification" from the man, who was stopped on a "hunch" in a "drug-infested" area while walking to his car.

Police found no drugs but charged Paul Reece with failing to give proper I.D., driving while under suspension, and assaulting police. Acquitted, he launched a lawsuit of his own – alleging he'd been beaten en route to the police station – that was settled out of court for "tens of thousands" of dollars, Reece's lawyer told the Toronto Star in 2004.

Asselin is not facing – nor has he ever faced – any criminal charges.

Asselin and two other officers named in the suit, Daryl Bell and Douglas Barnard, did not respond to requests for comment. Another officer, Robert Ouellette, declined to comment.

The suit alleges in part that Police Chief Bill Blair was negligent in failing to instruct officers in the need to maintain an "even hand in policing a culturally and ethnically diverse population," and for allowing the named officers to remain members when they "lacked suitable temperaments for such employment."

The officers were in the building conducting an unrelated investigation.

Badin's civil lawyer, Barry Swadron, said in an interview "certain portions of the Crown disclosure cause me a great deal of concern from a profiling point of view. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to provide details at this time."

Swadron said this case is an example of a civilian being confronted by "old clothes" – or undercover – officers and the confusion over identification and tragedy that can result.

"After reviewing the disclosure and the 911 tape in this matter," the assistant Crown attorney told court last Sept. 12 in the matter of Regina v. Afzal Badin, "and seeing that there is no reasonable prospect of conviction, we are going to ask that all charges ... be marked withdrawn at this time."

Badin came to Canada from India at age 12. He chose several years ago to grow his beard, he wears a traditional Muslim hat and spends hours each day in prayer at the Masjid Darus Salaam mosque on Thorncliffe Park Dr.

The news from court brought great relief. "That was so good," Badin said in a recent interview.

Far better than the night he had the elevator encounter with the three undercovers – identified in the statement of claim as Asselin, Ouellette and fellow drug squad officer Daryl Bell.

When the elevator doors opened around 8:20 p.m., one officer inside, according to Badin's statement of claim, told him to take the stairs. It was the 10th floor, Badin replied, and he tried to board. One officer, according to the claim, grabbed his hand in an attempt to push him from the elevator. All the while, the men "kept uttering profanities." The officers, Badin told the Star, also mistook his religious hat for a "do-rag" – a head covering favoured by some hip-hop artists.

His claim states the three men tried to escalate the situation, so he offered to take the next elevator. He alleges the men "pushed him" away from the button. He then ran to the apartment and announced to about eight family members inside that some men were giving him trouble.

"In a panic," the claim states, he grabbed a kitchen knife and rushed back out hoping to "frighten" the men. His pregnant sister and her husband, went out as well, unarmed. Once outside, they saw that two of the men had guns drawn, turned to get back inside and, in the confusion, Badin's brother-in-law was locked outside with the armed men, who in short order he discovered were police.

Inside, there were "thunderous sounds of attempts to kick in," the door, accompanied by demands that the door be opened or "we will shoot." Inside, Badin at some point dropped the knife and made the 911 call.

The lock gave and the three men rushed inside. A fourth man, identified in the claim as officer Douglas Barnard, also entered.

Family members attempted to shield Badin from the men, and according to the claim, his father was twice shoved and his pregnant sister "pushed ... out of the way." His brother was "grabbed ... by the throat" and shoved. One of the men, according to the claim, pointed a gun at Badin's half-brother, who was holding an infant. Police, according to the claim, eventually got to Badin, who had run "terrified" toward the balcony. "Two of the men pointed their guns at him and threatened to shoot him," states the claim. One officer struck Badin "with the butt of his gun and Afzal fell down," where he was kicked and punched in the face, head and body, the claim says.

Around 8:30 p.m., he was driven to 53 Division station and then to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre to be stapled and stitched up. Nearly five hours later, he was returned to the station, where, according to the claim, he was strip-searched. He was released on bail later that day.

Badin says he now fears police, and when he has contact with them, he looks away. He also says his parents were left shocked. "Every time I step out of the house," he said in an interview, "they tell me to be careful."

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