Toronto's Chief of Police, Mark Saunders speaks during a press conference in Toronto, March 6, 2020.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
As the Toronto Police Services Board begins a search for a new police chief, its members face the difficult task of finding a leader who can guide the service through potentially massive budget cuts while also repairing the relationship with the city’s marginalized communities.
In a phone interview Tuesday, one day after the surprise retirement announcement by Chief Mark Saunders, board chair Jim Hart said he expects it will take many months before a candidate is selected, and that an acting chief will be appointed in the meantime. (Chief Saunders’s last day will be July 31.)
“I can tell you for sure that it’ll be a wide-ranging search," Mr. Hart said. “I’m not saying that it won’t be an internal candidate at the end of the day, but given the significance of the position … we’re going to do a wide search, as they did when our existing chief was hired into the position.”
Toronto is losing Chief Saunders’s leadership at a moment of reckoning for police forces across North America. Mass protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism have now entered their third week, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, and cities are facing growing calls to defund police.
Just hours before the chief announced his retirement on Monday, two city councillors filed a motion to cut the police budget – which this year is $1.076-billion – by 10 per cent and reallocate those funds to other social services.
With that backdrop, Alok Mukherjee, who sat on the Toronto police board for a decade until 2015, says the chief’s departure presents an extraordinary challenge for the current board.
“Whoever comes in as the new chief will have to bring a high level of sophistication, political sensitivity and a deep understanding of the things that are alienating the community from the police service,” he said.
Mayor John Tory said the city’s police services board, which he sits on, hired a search firm about a month ago to begin the process of finding the next chief, whom Mr. Tory said must be someone sensitive to the complexities of policing in such a diverse city, and to the issues of anti-Black racism and mental illness.
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, has dismissed the city councillors’ proposed 10-per-cent cut as “grandstanding” and questioned where they think the money would come from. He said it would be inappropriate for him to weigh in on who should replace the chief, but stressed the need for the candidate to have both relationships with the community as well as with the front-line officers.
“I think there’s some serious challenges on all fronts,” he said.
The difficulty of balancing relationships was put in stark relief this weekend when Chief Saunders was photographed taking a knee with protesters at an anti-police march Saturday – a gesture Mr. Hart commended as “magnificent” but which many Black Torontonians saw as an empty photo op.
Desmond Cole, the author of The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power and one of Chief Saunders’s most outspoken critics, said it wasn’t lost on him that the chief chose to take a knee in the same spot where, in 2016, a group of Black Lives Matter Toronto activists brought the Toronto Pride parade to a standstill to protest against, among other things, police participation in Pride.
He said the news media’s focus on this change in leadership is misguided.
“Do we now go automatically into a conversation about who will replace Mark Saunders? Or do we step back, as I think we should, and examine what his role is and why we need it? Because I suggest the police can survive without a big dog at the top, leading them really mostly by doing press hits, and being a figurehead," he said.
According to the 2019 “sunshine list” of public-sector salaries, Chief Saunders’s pay was $414,954.32.
The service’s relationship with the city’s LGBTQ population also suffered during Chief Saunders’s tenure, in large part because of how his force handled Project Houston, a two-year investigation into the disappearance of three men – Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan – who had ties to Toronto’s Gay Village.
Ultimately, police discovered they were victims of serial killer Bruce McArthur (who pleaded guilty to killing eight men, all but one of whom was of South Asian or Middle Eastern background), and community members accused police of not taking them seriously when they pushed for more rigorous investigation.
In 2018, after Mr. McArthur’s arrest, Chief Saunders said, “We knew that people were missing and we knew we didn’t have the right answers. But nobody was coming to us with anything.” Community members read the statement as victim-blaming.
“We felt strongly that there was racism and homophobia that played into how police investigated those cases,” said Haran Vijayanathan, the executive director of the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention and a member of an advisory panel to the investigation into how Toronto police handle missing persons cases.
The board, he said, must ensure "the person they’re putting into that position has experience working in a community that has struggled and have some successes in working with that community.”
Nigel Barriffe, the president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, said the strained relations between the Toronto Police Service and marginalized populations predate Chief Saunders, so the focus should be less on who becomes the new chief and more on city council chambers, where the conversation about the police budget will play out.
“The mayor and 22 city councillors represent us and they’re the ones who have the jurisdiction over the police, not the other way around,” he said. “The city has a human-rights discrimination policy, it has an anti-Black racism policy. If the major recipient of our budget isn’t following those policies, then we’ve got to hold them accountable.”
With a report from Jeff Gray in Toronto
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