Toronto Police at a peaceful anti-racism march on June 5, 2020.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Toronto police officers will begin wearing body-worn cameras this month, after the police board unanimously approved a $34-million five-year contract with Axon Canada Tuesday.
Front-line officers in the “northwest area of the city” will begin using the technology during interactions with the public by the end of August, the police service said. By fall of next year, 2,350 cameras will be rolled out across the city.
The technology has been criticized by anti-police advocates who argue the force should be scaling back its budget, not spending tens of millions more – particularly given that studies have shown the effectiveness of body-worn cameras is inconclusive.
“This is not a good way to spend money,” John Sewell, former Toronto mayor and co-ordinator of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, said during a phone-in deputation to the Toronto Police Services Board meeting Tuesday.
But board chair Jim Hart said he believes the cameras will ultimately save the force money through efficiencies.
In addition to the cameras, the board also unanimously approved a list of 81 recommendations drafted in response to four days of public deputations earlier this summer, amid global protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism.
But even though the board hailed the report as a significant step toward addressing systemic racism, its “road map” was criticized by human-rights advocates and members of the public Tuesday as little more than lip service.
The recommendations cover a wide range of issues, ranging from increasing the force’s financial transparency and accountability to strengthening anti-racism training and revamping the service’s response to mental-health calls.
While some recommendations called for immediate action, such as publishing a line-by-line breakdown of the 2020 budget and inviting the city’s auditor-general to audit police finances, the majority focus on long-term efforts.
In a deputation to the board Tuesday, Ena Chadha, interim chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), said it was “confounding” that this report was done without any consultation by the OHRC; particularly given that the report came one day after the OHRC published a report into systemic anti-Black racism by the Toronto Police Service, which the commission had provided to the police board in advance of its own report.
“While the language of collaboration sounds nice, it has not been reciprocated here,” Ms. Chadha said. “The commission has provided you [hours of labour, for free]. And yet you did not provide us with the courtesy of a call.”
Had the OHRC been consulted, Ms. Chadha said it would have stressed the need for “timelines and measurable outcomes, [as] essential to achieve true institutional change.”
Ms. Chadha questioned why the OHRC was not invited to review the recommendations – and why the commission’s report, titled A Disparate Impact – was not on the agenda for discussion at Tuesday’s police board meeting.
“Why weren’t Black communities and organizations given sufficient time and acceptable need and full opportunity to provide input on the recommendations that are meant to change their lives?” she asked.
In an accompanying written deputation, the OHRC expressed concern that the service’s plan “will amount to mere lip service – another report on the shelf that fails to result in substantive change.”
But Mr. Hart said Tuesday that he feels the recommendations are “inaugural steps of a larger process toward the development of new systems, interventions and a culture that will confront systemic racism and the other challenges that result in disparate outcomes for racialized communities in their interactions with the service.”
Vice-chair Marie Moliner, who has been on the police board for more than eight years, said Tuesday that “this is, from my perspective, one of the first times I have felt that we truly have a map and now we need to build community trust so that we can execute this.”
But Notisha Massaquoi, co-chair of the board’s Anti-Racism Advisory Panel, stressed Tuesday that there have been many reports before this one outlining what is wrong in Toronto policing.
“Systemic anti-Black racism can only be addressed when the Toronto Police Service is made accountable to Black communities, and commits to the well-being and survival of Black people,” she said. “Until the Toronto Police Service looks at what is wrong, corrupt and unsatisfactory in their engagement with Black communities in the city, all reports and subsequent recommendations become useless.”
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