Interview 7 Minimal Use of Force

Uh uh today we have uh kelly uh donovan with us uh i really appreciate you joining us i know it's a busy time and uh we're just talking about how you have a book coming up so i'm sure it's very busy for you on that and but uh kelly has was a police officer uh for five years uh and i'm not gonna give too much details because i want you to kind of give that story yourself But through a series of unfortunate events kelly went from being a police officer to being an advocate for policing

the police and right now kelly runs an organization called fit for duty uh she also has two books out i'll post links to the books uh on the description of our interview uh but one is uh police misfeasant And the systematic uh the coordinated uh suppression of whistleblowers and another one that's just coming out uh police line do not cross uh thank you so much for joining us i really appreciate it for sure i appreciate the opportunity and you you have this gorgeous background there just talking about i think uh very relaxing it gives a

good vibe to the interview It's good so i kind of wanted to start off with what made you want to get into police well um i had never ever considered a career in policing because i graduated university and i used to think that policing was you know it was a job for those that that chose not to go the academic route so it was you know definitely a blue collar Type job where you just go in the police car and you go around and write tickets but my experience initially was that my partner at the

time who's the father of my children he was a police officer so i was working at the bank but i got to see the experiences that he was having and it opened my eyes to how you know it's such a wide range of options available to you in the profession it's not just Patrol so i was interested initially in that aspect of it but what pushed me into it was that he and i had a couple of domestic incidents in our home and this was you know obviously towards the end of our relationship but when

the first one happened um it was it was physical and you know to me he had crossed a line in the sand and i knew as if this relationship ever turned Physical that would be it because i don't want to expose my children to that but because he was a police officer and in the city where he worked i didn't report it initially to the police but they did find out and i was asked to fill out a statement and i went through you know the in the quote-unquote investigative process but i i wasn't happy

with how that ended and then four months later we had Another incident and for that incident i was a bit more you know i pressured them to let me go to the station and do a video statement but still at the end of that i wasn't happy with the outcome so not really knowing what to do i obtained all the officers notes and the reports through freedom of information and looking at the inconsistency between notes you know some officers saying one thing Other officers saying something else i couldn't believe that there could be such subjective

results in a domestic investigation because this was right around the time that canada developed the mandatory charge policy in domestics so i was thinking why why is he not being arrested you know despite the fact that i have three children with him young children at the time that i Knew i would rely on his child support you know i still saw it as the right thing to do but in the end he wasn't charged like i said the notes were terribly inconsistent and it opened my eyes to how you know how corrupt the profession can

be when it involves one of their own they can say whatever they want they can do whatever they want um but but i struggled with what to do About it because i thought i can complain about this one particular police service or i can look at it as a systemic problem and try to be one of the good cops that gets into the profession and makes a difference from the inside so that's what got me into the profession and you know in all my interviews the police services i applied to knew that i wasn't hiding

it so when when waterloo hired me in December of 2010 they knew all that and they could have easily pulled up those incidences on the computer and seen what had happened so i started my career knowing that this sort of thing can happen within policing but i was going to be one of those people that set a good example and then it wasn't until about four years into my career that i started Seeing that the same thing was happening in waterloo so it was you know in my experience i i had seen two officers be

arrested criminally for domestic related charges but then i had also learned about two others that were not even investigated but similar or worse allegations had been made against them so it got to the point where i knew about these four cases I was very uncomfortable with how my own police service was handling the allegations i was watching the the two go through the court system and seeing how they ended you know one of them the officer was emphatically acquitted and the judge even said in her ruling like if this was a member of the public

this charge would never have made it to court And and then after an eight day criminal trial the officers acquitted so what a you know what a waste of money a waste of resources so all these things running through my mind now that i can look back on my experience i was experiencing a moral injury because this institution of policing that i had trusted you know that i thought stood for what most people think it stands for i was learning that it didn't so my Internal you know foundation of morals was starting to crumble i

was starting to hate putting on my uniform in the morning you know i used to hate when i would encounter children that would look up to me it ate away at my soul because i kept thinking like i don't represent what you think i do like i'm not this you know epitome of integrity and Honesty there's a lot behind me that i don't i don't trust or i don't support so i i was struggling with like how do i address this because obviously it happens everywhere it's not just in that in that one particular police

service so 2016 was when i first chose to address the issue and that's when i went to my police service board and i sat you know members of the public can come in and present delegations to board members I did that i booked a day off work and came in so i spoke for my 10 minutes and in the 10 minutes i explained to the board i i outlined those four separate incidents incidents i said you know there's two where the officers were charged but the investigation seemed incredibly weak but then you have two other

officers with these egregious allegations against them but we choose To not even investigate them so obviously it comes down to who you are whether you're a liked officer or an unliked officer whether there's a political benefit to having these headlines and having the chief suspend an officer you know it obviously depended on so much more other than what the law says is right and wrong and at the end of my delegation i legitimately thought that i would be somewhat praised for Having the courage to come forward you know i thought the board members were going

to give me some level of protection by having brought this to their attention but instead a week later i was called into the professional standards branch and i was told that i was now under investigation they were going to charge me with misconduct and they put me on a non-contact order with the board members So i was prohibited from telling them anything else so it was very clear you know like i said it was a week or two after my delegation it was very clear that the chief wanted to shut me up from ever being

able to tell the board anything else i mean they were taking the angle that i was trying to expose these things to the public but my intent because you know The way our system works and i don't know how well you study police legislation in the program but you know all of the information that gets released to the board and then in turn to the public it's all filtered through the chief so everything that gets presented to the board has to be on the chief's approval so if you think about it you know the chief

gets appointed and his contract gets Renewed by board members they have to be satisfied with his performance so if something comes up internally that the chief doesn't necessarily want the board to know because it might affect his performance then he just won't have it disclosed you know there's ways of presenting the information without truly being honest and transparent so this was my opportunity to go right to the board with the information i had and Not let it be filtered by the chief so there's a lot of people that criticize me and say well why wouldn't

you just go to your chief you know in my instance one of the four cases i presented was an allegation i made so i took it to my supervisor it went up the chain of command but then that was one where they didn't investigate the officer so i knew that they have the ability to suppress a complaint so if i do come forward to the Chief the board will never know these these problems exist they'll just suppress my complaint and then i'll be my career will be over you know my reputation at work will be

garbage and i'll be stuck on a desk somewhere for the rest of my career so i went to the board just to make sure that they knew what was happening so over the course of about 14 months i was working administrative duties Because they took me out of my job they didn't suspend me but they just wouldn't let me do the job i was hired to do um so i was working on a desk and i was you know still trying to do really good work and trying to keep my head down you know nobody

wanted to talk to me because now i was the one walking around work like i had the plague right everybody knew she's the one that crossed the line We can't be seen associating with her or we're gonna be next so when you talk about like culture i was on the i was pushed to the outer edge i was no longer part of that culture they didn't want me around so i didn't really know how long that was gonna last but you know six months had come and gone they hadn't filed their discipline notice of hearing

against me so You know as far as i was concerned they weren't proceeding with the charges but they still had me under investigation it was just another form of oppression it was just a way for them to keep me oppressed and ostracized and alienated so i ended up resigning because after those 14 months i didn't know when i was ever going to get the opportunity to speak again and i wanted to i wanted to regain my Freedom of speech i wanted to be able to share with more than just board members what what i knew

and in the time that i was on the desk i was doing administer i was doing research at home and i was seeing how many other times this has happened to a police officer where they're the ones that get persecuted you know the allegations they bring forward are never objectively Investigated it's just the whistleblower who gets vilified so i started collecting a series of cases and that's what that's what my first book ended up being was i just started grabbing all these cases from all over canada putting them into one resource and i i couldn't

believe the volume of cases and the severity of them you know there's one case where the Officer the officer's investigation basically uncovered a very widespread pedophile ring in cornwall and he was uncomfortable you know witnesses were coming forward to this officer and disclosing that members of the city mayor's office and members of the clergy had committed sexual assault against children and this one particular officer took it upon himself to do what he could To expose the problem and then he ended up being the one that was chased out of town you know his family received

death threats he ended up having to quit his job and move to the west coast just to get away from the harassment but that's the level of you know vilification we put on these police whistleblowers instead of saying well let's listen to what they have to say and let's look into their allegation to See if what they're telling us is true you know because there's been so much kept out of the public eye because of this ability to to keep things secret the ability to suppress complaints uh to be honest uh i have about a

zillion questions to ask uh and as a quality of researcher i feel like now i need about six hours which right under one hour uh so i kind of Want to start from the very beginning because i'm trying to first of all like get over the i knew the story but when you hear this story from your mouth uh i bet you i'm in that position that i'm like i want to ask you a lot of questions but at the same time i want to recognize how horrific of an experience that must have been how

Sort of helpless of an experience that must have been and that's something i want to get get to uh in those questions but i kind of want to start a little bit earlier on you said something very interesting you talked about not feeling that the uniform was representing what you wanted it to represent that you almost kind of felt like it's a sham to put this song that when kids Were looking at you you were going i'm not the superhero that you think i am the i am but the uniform i have on is not

the cape you think it right so i want to talk about that a little bit what did the uniform mean to you first when you started putting it on and then how did that meaning change why is that important why is that important to you as a police officer but Interesting enough you got into it policing not to be a police officer but rather to be a good citizen to be a good civilian so to say i hate using the word civilian because it makes it seem like police is a military you know right yeah

so i want to get to that what did the uniform mean to you at the beginning well to me it was you know it was 100 percent like You know no holes barred honesty truth integrity it's it's doing the right thing even if it's difficult it's doing the right thing even if it's unpopular doing the right thing even if it means risking your career so all these things that you know that i stayed true to to me represent a good cop not a bad cop but i was painted as a bad cop because i did

those things Because you learn you know i learned very early on when i started having cases where you know i i would investigate something and it would be my determination that there were grounds for a criminal charge but i'd have a supervisor that would say no there's no grounds here and then i'd say well you know i'm the investigator i believe there are but you know and in my mind it was it was a matter of it's either right or It's wrong it's either black or it's white and and i used to be told things

aren't black and white you can't think that way you know there's a whole spectrum of gray and you're thinking too rigid too black and white but in my mind i was always very clear on no but i understand what is right and what is wrong there's a difference between saying you committed an offense but i'll use Discretion and choose not to charge you but there's no such thing as almost committing an offense or sort of committing an offense but it's really not a bad effect you know and that's where they start police that are indoctrinated

into the culture they might come into the profession thinking things are right and wrong but they're exposed to so much and and they're shown What's acceptable and it became you know eventually they start seeing that okay these things i thought used to be pretty egregious are actually not that bad because everybody's doing them you know so when you look at like sexual harassment there's a lot of men that would be considered bystanders that they might see something or hear something initially and think oh you know that that's pretty bad that he just said that To

her but eventually when they see the prevalence of it and they see that it's everywhere and not only is it you know all over it's almost encouraged you have supervisors making jokes and expecting you to laugh along with them then these men start lowering their standard of well maybe it's not so bad right maybe maybe it's all right to joke about it i'm not the one saying it i'm just Laughing along to the joke so everybody's standards start to get pushed this line in the sand starts to get pushed and for me you know i

came into the profession later in life i was 31 when i was hired i already had another profession i had children at home so i had that life experience and i knew i knew where my line in the sand was i wasn't willing to move it i Wasn't willing to say well it's okay that we're police officers and we're being afforded the right to enforce the law but but sometimes if if we want we can just turn a blind eye because it might not be the right time to arrest that person or they might not

be the right person i want to arrest you know i didn't i didn't believe that we had that choice wearing the uniform we're not given a choice to to have Preference and you talk about culture of policing and that's very key right uh you said something very interesting uh sort of on the concept of age that uh you know if i'm 30 years old from 35 years old i've already adopted an attitude but a lot of police officers enter into policing at a very young age 19 20 21 to their mid-20s the average Age of

a police officer in canada i think is about a 32-33 so you walked into police saying 15 years 10 years after most people walk into police i kind of want you to comment on that culture because for example you mentioned you know you have a we have a lot of male police officers who stand around when sexist jokes are baby but when we do research we find out that Female police officers do the same thing that we said okay great let's hire some female police officers because then if someone says something sexist they'll pipe up

and say what are you talking about but we know they don't we know that the same female police officer who talks about sexism in policing also makes sexist comments when she's on the job also laughs as sexist How do you define culture of policing and what are some of the sort of uh uh i guess uh hallmarks of the cultures of policing like what are some of the what are some of the good things and what are some of the bad things that you saw in the culture and they could be two sides of the

same coin right yeah i'm i've never been asked the question about the good things Um i i would say the good things would be the camaraderie because you know you do when you think of the number of hours you spend at work versus at home like with any profession you're you're at work with your colleagues more than you are with your family um and i think in a job like that it is important that there's trust that you know that you can depend on your colleagues because when you're in Trouble they're the only ones that

are going to come to your rescue but when you talk about you know the negative aspects to the profession is that to the culture i should say is at any stage through your throughout your career your ability to move forward your ability to to be offered advancement and promotion is all based on the Agreeableness of your supervisors because you're always being promoted by you know peers among your you know the next level up so to speak so at any stage you're always trying to make the people ahead of you satisfied with your performance so every

time even the chief has to make the board satisfied and the you know deputies need to satisfy the chief and everybody So at any point if you do something that would upset somebody at that level above then you risk never getting a promotion being constable for life you know staying where you are so because of that they're they're encouraging you to take anything that could look bad on your career anything that happens that might have been a mistake that you could have Learned from but they're they're teaching you early on to take that information and

just make sure that it never gets known you know so the culture of suppression is it's teaching you that your rep your reputation the reputation of the profession your ability to be advanced through this institution is all based on the information Having like you controlling the information and making sure that that negative information you know a mistake you made something you did that's that's you know gonna look poor on your reputation just keep it from anyone ever knowing so that's when you start building up this you know some officers have dirt against other officers and

it's kind of that well i won't tell of anybody if you don't Tell anybody and i'll make sure that if i get up to that level i'll bring you with me and so then you start you know when you watch shows like survivor it's the same thing you've got these alliances that are made and then it comes down to you've got these different cliques within the police service you've got certain people that have dirt on certain people that are gonna They're gonna make sure that their backs are covered and and they're going to watch out

for them so you so it really starts to starts to go that way as things advance and then as you know when you look at the people right now in positions of senior leadership they're all people that were hired at the age of 18 or 19. you know that's that's the population at the leadership level right now It's going to get better because we're starting now to require that they have a second post-secondary education coming into policing so right away you're going to push that age from 1819 up to 22 23 maybe 24 which will

help but that's not going to make you know we're not going to see that change at the leadership level for another 20 to 30 years so that's way down the road and i think I think the public doesn't quite understand the culture that our current police leaders are promoting and have promoted their entire careers it's still the culture of suppression it's the culture of silence it's you know having control over all of the information like freedom of information legislation has been the greatest thing to happen to canadians because we're learning things That we've never learned

before about policing things that have been kept silent that now we can finally expose that's sort of part of the that's why i kind of said you know the good and the bad are part of the two sides of the same cone because the same commodarity and the same kind of feeling of belonging is the same thing that leads to that blue coat of silence that wall That keeps police away from us and that's something that i think is very important for us to talk about how do we sort of police the police but before

getting to that uh in class we talk about sort of legitimization of police and that's sort of is my bridge into this discussion of how do we solve this to me it seems as though this is not just because one could say well You see we see these things everywhere everywhere we see people who are co-workers with each other they watch each other's back to a certain extent that's true but to a certain extent police is very special in that sort of fraternity that's built for lack of a better porn what do you think that

does to legitimization of police and society and why is it so Important for us to make sure that police remains legitimate because everything that you tell me the problem with it is not only it makes police it makes me want to do something but at the same time makes me not want to call police it makes me feel like well maybe i should deal with my problems myself i shouldn't call the police and i come from iranian background so my parents come from A totalitarian we grow up in a totalitarian and my parents to this

day don't call the police they say we just don't call anything that happens you deal with it yourself don't call the police because police is never on your side as a kid growing up in canada i kept saying no this police is different the police is on our side this is democracy we're talking But then as i started becoming a sociologist i went back the other way that i went i'm not sure you know i'm not sure if i'm should call the police when my neighbor is having a domestic dispute because i don't know if

it's actually going to help or it's going to make things worse should i go knock on their door before i call them i want to kind of talk a little bit about that as both As as private citizen and as a police officer what do you what do you see as a problem with an illegitimate police in society but as someone who wore the uniform as someone who was on the other side of the table from uniform well i think i mean having been i was a use of force trainer before i left policing that

was my job that i'd been promoted to and then i was taken out of It after my delegation um i i got to see a lot of um how things are done behind the scenes when it comes to training so what i always struggled with was that you know there are a lot of people that are learning now that if you're in a mental health crisis police aren't the option you should not call police because of their response to an individual in crisis you know how many people call the police Themselves and then end up

getting shot because of something that happens so knowing the training behind it and knowing the you know there's a huge reluctance to accept criticism and look at all of the studies that have been done and actually apply those results to those studies in our training you know there's just this massive reluctance You know police leaders saying that you don't know policing like we know it you know we know better than you you're just an academic what do you know you know so it gets to the point where there's so much ignorance that when you see

that on the inside you realize why there is so much dissent against police in situations like that because they're not doing their job in my opinion they're not reading the studies they're not You know learning from past experiences every time there's an individual shot and killed by police there should be a massive learning experience that happens but that doesn't happen so when you talk about you know should we have them should we not have them it's like we absolutely should but what they've become are these robots that just say tell us what to do and

we'll do it and the training is so robotic and There's no critical thought you know the training is just that the police officer goes home at the end of the day so as a trainer i used to run officers through scenarios and there would be an individual in crisis and if the officer had to pull their gun and shoot they still saw the scenario as a success because they went home at the end of the day and i used to try to educate the officers to say but someone still Died you know you started off

with two people breathing and now there's only one that's not a success and it doesn't mean you know some officers think that means we have to throw ourselves in front of the bullet all the time and take take a bullet for anyone and everyone but that is the the job is to protect people so pulling your gun and shooting someone you haven't done your job Right if it's just the two of you and you've put yourself in harm's way you haven't done your job by you know using lethal force and and creating a deceased body

on the scene that is not a success so when you talk that's something i was talking to a police officer about starting to interrupt you about sort of putting yourself in a position as a trainer i want you to maybe talk a little bit about that Because what he was saying he was saying listen i can put myself in many positions for example he was saying i know that if i touch a drunk person who is passed out somewhere the first thing they're gonna do is push my hand away that gives me a good reason

to push them down to the ground and use force there you go i i had legitimate reason to use force but He said but at the same time i know that i can do something that i'm not in a position that they push me back maybe i can approach them from the front and say hey buddy you're okay and if they push my hand away i don't take it as an offense it's a drunk person pushing me right it's not it's not a resist arrest exactly like it's just a drunk person Yeah but so i

kind of want to talk a little bit about that how do we go about training police officers to think through these problems do we have do we spend a significant amount of time on that i mean what i do like is that we are slowly moving in the right direction you know we had the samia team murder on the streetcar and that officer was held accountable that was the first time You know there's still police officers who think he was justified and as a training officer i used to tell you know my my students like

if he was charged um arrested and charged and went to prison and convicted he was not justified like get it through your head that there are situations where your force won't be justified it doesn't matter because because we are taught that if you can articulate your justification Then it's justified so we spend so much time articulating practicing our articulation i perceived a deadly threat you know i i feared for my life therefore i use lethal force where it's all about articulation but that was a good case of he articulated it the same way anyone else

would but a judge said i don't agree with you you were not you know there was no reason to fear for your life and and You're guilty and you're going to prison so i slowly the police culture is realizing that there will be times when something is not just what you perceive because perception also is dependent on the officer i might perceive something worse than someone else and it might authorize me to use force when someone else might not you know if there's an assaultive man i might taser him someone else might use their baton

Or or fists but you know all those things considered there has to be more from a training perspective there has to be more focus on the fact that just because you can articulate something doesn't mean it's lawful just because you can use all the right terms on the use of force model there has to be you know a baseline public perception of what's reasonable Because public the public know if we're getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to go and police the streets it's not so that we can cower behind our cars and shoot

our guns whenever we're scared that's not what we're getting paid to do we're getting paid to be smart to use resources available to us you know we're supposed to be highly trained in some cases we're not but that's what they expect and it's About time that people start saying like we expect you not to take a bullet but to be smart you know a lot of times in our training we're not taught to to look for weapons of opportunity to create time and distance you know put objects between us and and the subject you know

most of our training is we we pull our cars right up and we get out and we engage the subject get out and engage and you know as a Trainer you start saying but do you have to engage that person because like you said sometimes our presence is gonna just escalate the situation so maybe if we read it that way then we don't engage maybe we we talk to them from behind a wall or you know whatever the case is sometimes getting a family member to engage the subject or calling a telephone you know we

don't necessarily have to rush right Up and go hands-on and sometimes the training doesn't focus enough on you know the tactics before engagement it's all about there's your subject engage your subject it's very black and white i mean i don't really think the training has changed a whole lot in 20 to 30 years and when you think of all the things that have changed in society why hasn't it Kept up and even in the samia team trial i mean we had trainers from our police college testifying to the fact that our training is very basic

that that the officer did what he was trained to do to a certain extent well if our training is training people to shoot and kill people then why can't someone publicly say then your training is wrong you know it's like the politicians are scared to Say it you know the families of the um of the affected individuals that have been murdered by police they'll gladly they'll gladly say it but people don't necessarily listen because they're seen as you know well they you know they have a side to stand up for and they're biased but not

all the time sometimes they're bang on and what are some of this this is a very Good segue into sort of where i want to go what are some of the changes that you would like to see kind of more theoretically maybe at the beginning and then like if you can give us some concrete changes for example uh i really want to talk about the independent independent investigation unit that we have for police And sort of the concept of how do you go about policing the police itself how do you go is it a matter

of putting more body cameras on or is it something much more complex how do you for example how do you police a police's use of force well the way it is i mean it the way it is now when you look at the oversight bodies so if you had a complaint that a police Officer used excessive force you would report it to the oversight body you know we have these oversight bodies in place we have the special investigations unit the police commission and the police review director for complaints but they're all government bodies that operate

under our ministry so right now we have this ministry that oversees policing and you have elected Officials that you know are plucked out of their municipalities where they're elected and they're put into queen's park at ontario government and they may know nothing about policing but they're put in charge of the policing portfolio you know that's just the way our governments work so when they when they want to start building their staff they want to hire their deputy minister their assistant Deputy minister they're looking to former police leaders retired police leaders our former minister brought into

a retired chief and a retired deputy from waterloo regional police brought them in and made them deputy and assistant deputy police so again you have two people perpetuating the police and culture but now at the government level which is overseeing everything else so Our independent police review director who does police complaints reports to this individual you know reports to our government ministry so when we talk about well these bodies are independent they're not independent because their mere existence depends on keeping the ministry happy giving the ministry what they want so the ministry wants stats they

want to see that this Body is doing their jobs but when you have people that make a complaint and their complaint gets sent back to the same police service they just complained about and then you tell them this is our independent body you can't blame these people for saying that's not independent you're giving my complaint back to the police service i'm complaining about to let them investigate it themselves So when they say well we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing now there's nowhere for that person to go you know that and that's our system that

we call independent so you have to have something that is separate from government that doesn't depend on who it you know who's elected and who sits in queens park it's not dependent on you know reporting Stats to the right body or government funding you know we have to satisfy the government because if we don't they're not going to fund us and we won't exist anymore it has to be completely independent and you have to make sure that everyone in there that you appoint to these roles as these head investigators they have to be the elite

they have to be the best of the best you may you have to make sure you have People that will not be corrupted that cannot be you know that there's always a price for everything so if these people are motivated by money motivated by status or power then your the whole system is going to be corrupted so you have you know when you look at people historically what i love about stories about police whistleblowers is these are people who Against everything spoke out and they weren't speaking out against something that affected them right most of

these people were speaking out about a general problem they witnessed and they wanted to do the right thing in the interest of the public and these people come forward they have the courage the integrity and then they are ousted from the profession i look at these people and think well these are the people you need you know You need people like this in these positions because no matter what they come across no matter who the allegation is about they're going to do the right thing but historically when we know that within police services there have

been officers that have worked up the ranks that have come across something and decided it's probably not going to work well for me in my career if i do something about This so i'm just not going to do anything about this these are the people now that get up to those high levels that then move on to government jobs so the whole system the way it is has to change you have to start looking at you know and i know toronto has toyed with the idea of bringing in a civilian as police chief someone who

doesn't have the experience in the culture or it has not been indoctrinated in the Culture for 20 to 30 years i think that's phenomenal and i think people need to start opening their eyes to that idea because maybe that's what is necessary to stop the per the um culture from perpetuating even further because this this independent body has to be given the power the resources you know with no political influence at all and that's the only way that you're going to have Like i believe in the states that's really how their inspector generals work they're

not appointed by government they operate independently their funding stream is separate and it's not affected by current government because every time our government changes you know i mentioned that the two guys were waterloo that were appointed by the former minister well once our government changed and we had a progressive conservative Minister those two guys were gone and now you've got two former leaders from toronto police in those exact same two roles so it's always going to be a different cycle a different group of people but it's the same culture and it is i mean police

wants us to believe that they are the exact same people because they tell us anyone who puts on the uniform is one of Us and it sort of brings us back to use i kind of want to little talk a little bit about use of force because to me that's an interesting aspect of this discussion because that's what's so unique about police right they can actually use force on us rather than anyone else in canada my understanding is that we have a one plus one model of use of course that police Can escalate how do

you see use of force and policing do you even see for example police's use of force should be an important part of policing it should be sort of the only the tool the main tool that because the main tool that we give to the police is a gun right and then we spend a lot of time how do you envision a different approach To use of force i suppose i see it from a perspective of you know if if i was a civilian i would want police to do everything in their power to avoid using

force so as opposed to you know oh that the behavior is exhibited now i'm authorized it should be the behaviors exhibited what can i do to to get rid of their behavior right to de-escalate them So that i don't have to use force so they're almost you know and i know there's a lot of people that will criticize that and say you don't have time in that moment to try other things but in the times when you do you know the actual statistically speaking the incidents where police are not given time to react they're very

very very few when you look at the overall incidence of use of force the times Where you know the suspect is rushing you with a knife and you have no other option but to pull your pistol i'm not criticizing those incidents i'm talking about the time where like you said you go to grab a subject you're under arrest they pull away well do i really need to throw their face into the concrete or can i slow the whole thing down and say listen you're under arrest you are going to come with me So i i

would rather you cooperate and we do this quietly you know i don't want to hurt you like there can be so many things that get said in that moment versus just thinking of it as i'm authorized now to do this i'm going to do it you know to me there's a difference between an authorization and permission right you're not given permission to do it you might be Authorized but you still can't do it unless it's something you need to do in that moment and if it's just a drunk guy you could sit there talking with

him for an hour if that's what it took to cooperatively get him in your cruiser we're really not that busy that we can't take the time to talk to someone like that and you know i always look at these situations like if that person was my Father my son my brother you know someone that i cared about would i would i respect the officer more that took an hour to talk to him and get him in a place where he's willing to turn himself in put his hands behind his back cooper cooperatively go in the

car or would i respect the officer that just says well i don't have the time to waste with you i'm going to throw your face into the Ground get my knee on your back so i can handcuff you and take you to the station you know so when we start treating human beings the way we want to be treated or the way we want a family member to be treated we can do the same job but we would do it much differently so it's almost like we just need to talk about priorities and then approach

everything with those same priorities whether it's use of force or an investigation It's just do we really need to do it this way and the way we've been taught do we really have to do that or could we just slow things down it might take things a little longer but what's what's the ultimate goal preservation of life you know treating people with respect earning their respect because we've gone so far from that we've just gone to you know if if i'm authorized i'm gonna Do it that like that video recently about the rcmp officer dragging

that woman and putting like it's i mean it's horrendous but you can tell she's the kind of officer that probably just didn't have the patience for that woman that day that night and just wanted to be done with her wanted to finish the call however she had to do that and and there are officers that do that regularly maybe not to that degree but it's you Know pick up the drunk person carry them to your car and throw them in the back of your car they might break their nose when they get in the back

but that's not my fault you know it's not my problem and i don't i don't understand that we start treating people like they're not humans right we treat them like they're less than human and it's just a returning to basics Why do you think that is because we don't do that to everyone right uh for example i was talking to uh someone with this interview his name is john clark he used to run ontario coalition against poverty which is a big sort of advocacy group and he was telling a very interesting story of a man

walking into his office and saying Police just took my bicycle a homeless man welcome to thompson now this happened on dundas street in toronto the same police force that police says that square is the same police force that pleases bridal path which is possibly the most expensive place to live in canada i have to believe that that police officer is not going to take the bike Away from some guy who's riding his bike on bridal path but he's taking it away from a homeless guy downtown so i have to think it's more than just this

police officer is kind of going i'm having a rough day it has to depend on the person as well the person that they're interacting with why do you think that sometimes in Police we have this culture of us versus them that we are in a war and we treat them like combatants in a war i well if i if i want to speak to why it would probably just be because what has happened there have been so many incidents that have been public that have made people you know lose trust in police and and people

do start to lose respect and they look at you know they probably Generalize i'm sure when i had the uniform on i had a lot of people generalize about me that i was just like the rest of them and to a certain extent you can't blame them because it starts to proportionally get a lot higher than what it used to be it used to be the odd incident that you'd see on tv and now every single day i mean for my mental health i try to not go on my Social media because every time i

do i see that there's been another police officer arrested criminally you know another officer involved in an organized crime ring it's every day and it gets to the point where i'm like enough i mean this is why people start to generalize because it's happening so prevalently you know so i so i understand why there is that generalization on the other hand When you wear the uniform and every day you're dealing with the same few people because you really do when you're wearing the uniform you deal with a very small portion of the population all the

time and there's people you never never have any contact with before i was a police officer i had no contact with them up until this the domestic incident you know i could just make it through my whole life without having any Interactions that could also be because i'm i'm a privileged individual that doesn't get suspected when i'm walking at night right there's a lot of reasons but police will typically get this idea it and it's it's tunnel vision which people know happens to police but you're it again it's something that's indoctrinated into you very early

on in your career when you start You know it'll be your coach officers that drive you through the downtown core and say here are all your regulars you know check them out that's there's that guy there's that guy and in the briefing room you have mug shots up on the wall and they tell you you know these are going to be your repeat offenders these are the guys to look for these guys will be breaching we'll go downtown and we'll find them breaching Their terms and we can arrest them again so you're looking for the

same people all the time you're not just on the street looking for people committing offenses you're told these are your targets go out there and find these guys so you start you start in your own mind you start prejudicing individuals you start saying well that guy has a neck tattoo and there were about 10 guys in the briefing room that had neck tattoos I wonder if any of them are him or you say you know that's a young black man well there was a whole wall of young black men that we're looking for right now

maybe he's one of them i'm going to stop them you know i'm just generalizing but what i'm saying is you know you get these images like imprinted on your mind early on that this is what a bad person looks like so you start stereotyping and You start saying well they kind of look like the bad people that i'm supposed to be looking for so i should be going to check that person out you know and you don't when you look at all you know the actual spectrum of people who have criminal records you know we

could make a wall that was every color of the rainbow but sometimes the detectives will lean a certain way and there will be a wall of People that fit a certain description you know and i used to ask well you have this wall of you know our most wanted but what's the criteria that you've put in when you did that search did you were you looking just for people that have a warrant outstanding because if that was the case there should be a wide variety of people you know it should be a good cross section

it shouldn't just all be young Black men so you start thinking well maybe that detective has their own internal bias maybe they were looking for young black men with warrants and and putting putting those pictures i i don't know right and i'm not accusing them of having done that but when you don't have parameters on it then you start thinking well this is not this is not objective so from the very beginning we're starting on a subjective Belief of what a criminal looks like and who we should be policing and i mean on that note

i'll just share a quick little story with you but it was something i'm loving your story so go for it this was something when i worked as a banker this is something that really opened my eyes because when you work in banking it's all about sales right you want to do Well you want your sales numbers to be high and there was one day that you know we're working at the branch and every once in a while we get a walk-in that comes in just somebody that says they want to speak to a banker and

between the three of us we all looked out to the lobby because you know we got the messages on our computer there's a walk-in who wants it and the guy was wearing you know Disheveled clothing he looked like his hair was all messy and his skin was dirty he looked like he was homeless he looked like he hadn't showered or slept in a while and my other two colleagues said i don't want it you can have it because they thought it was going to be you know a waste of my hour and i i had

no problem taking the client the client came in and when he gave me his debit card and i pulled up his accounts The guy was loaded the guy had you know he had tons of money he was sitting on a fortune he just was somebody who maybe doesn't you know maybe he doesn't take hygiene is as you know important as the rest of the world but you know but they they prejudged him and thought he's going to be a waste of their time he's not going to be able to do anything for them so why

would they want to sit With him and to me you know i don't think you know i i'm an angel but i in that moment i just thought but this is my job i'm a banker and i see clients so why wouldn't i see this guy he he came in and then surprisingly had all this money wanted to invest some you know i i made a really good sale out of the deal and i got to know him and when he came back he asked for me So it was one of those times where i

just thought if we're in we're not in a job to pick and choose we're in a job to do a job so we look at policing we're not in a job to decide who we want to help and who we don't want to help you know we're in a job to help everybody and on that note just a quick little story again i know of a case because i met the the the man's wife in at an event in toronto but there was A man who i can't even say elderly i think he was in

his 50s late 50s but had a heart attack on the steps of toronto police headquarters he had actually sat on the bench he'd been walking home from a garden show downtown and he was pulling his wagon with some things in it his little cart and he sat on the bench to catch his breath he wasn't feeling well and he went into cardiac arrest on the Bench in front of headquarters you know fell over i don't know if they saw him on their video or what have you but a couple of officers came out from the

front desk found him unresponsive would not do cpr they said he was a homeless person you know and this was all i've heard the 911 tape like it's you know because the wife she had a really hard time after it happened she wanted answers and she never got Them but she obtained the 911 tape and it clearly is the person at the front desk saying we have a deceased homeless person out front and i think ambulance even says have you tried cpr and they said no he's obviously dead he would have just passed away you

know he it would have been minutes before it was brought to his to their attention that there was this man outside So that's a perfect example and i have had no problems calling you know toronto police leadership out on twitter about that incident saying you know you do profile homeless people because that that perfect example of this man wasn't even homeless but i guess because the way he was dressed or the fact that he was pulling a cart your officers believed he was and wouldn't help him They didn't offer him assistance but we we don't

have a choice right we're not given the ability to choose who we help who we don't against whom we enforce the laws and against whom we don't that we lost that choice when we took this profession you know that's my that's my opinion uh we had a very similar incident happen by my place i live on the east end of Toronto two days ago there was a a man who was a black man but his wife was white and they were walking and they got into an altercation with another couple over a dog being off

leash and the other couple not only beat up this man's wife and gave her a concussion they called him the n-word a few times and then when the police came he talked about how three police officers came one white Two other sort of one east asian the other one a police officer of color the white police officer went and talked to the white couple a daughter who came and talked to him and they took minimal notes they didn't charge anyone although his wife had a concussion although people witnesses were coming up to the police saying

i saw what happened and police wasn't was saying go home Will come and find you and it had gone to a point that this man was saying witnesses were going but don't you want my address don't you want my phone number like how are you going to find me shouldn't i just give you a you know as something right now uh we and this is right across the street from the police station that this incident happened uh so no and you know this man was saying like You know i can't help but to believe that

race had something to do with it that they walked up they said oh here's a black guy who's just an angry black man yeah and that's why i know there's police services trying to get away from collecting race-based data but the only thing you know that sets alarms off in my mind because i think if you have nothing to hide then why are you trying to hide it You know let them let the numbers speak for themselves because if you are disproportionately stopping or or arresting or charging you know people of color over whites then

you haven't you have a bias and you have to accept it and if they're not letting us collect the data we could never report those numbers i should put you in touch with ruth because she was she's a person of color she's black And she's the head of the black legal action committee and she said she sat in a room with five white men that she said we should collect race-based data and they all said don't you think it's insensitive to racialize minority and she's going i'm black i'm telling you it's okay do it and

they kept saying well i don't know we think it might piss off people in racialized communities i know it Won't like it'll be fun just ask me yeah i'll tell you exactly uh so sort of the last thing i wanted to ask you is um i have uh i asked this from every person who i do this interview with i have about 10 of my students who want to become police officers i have about 50 60 percent who want to do something in public life that will eventually get them Put them in a run-in with

the police i wanted to and obviously everyone who's taken this course at least as far as i'm concerned is extremely interested in policing what suggestions do you have for those who want to become a police officer what comments do you have for them and what comments do you have for the rest of us who we are eventually going to be in a position that either be interact with Police or some my students will eventually be in position that they actually get to make decisions about policing what are some big philosophical things we want people to

remember um i'll try to address it a couple different ways someone wanting to get into policing what i would say is that anyone considering the profession has to be Very confident in who they are and their own set of morals and integrity and and it has to be something you have to be willing to sacrifice everything to do what's right you have to feel that way because if you if you're wavering at all if you're thinking well it took me this long to get this career i wouldn't want to do something that would ruin it

it's a slippery slope Because you're going to keep being faced with situations it's going to be something small initially you're going to say well i'm not comfortable with it but it's just something minor i'm just going to you know i'm going to pretend i never saw that whatever the case is but it's it's going to be something worse and it's going to be worse and it's just going to keep your eventually you're going to get to the point where you're Going to start questioning where is my line in the sand you know what is it

that i'm actually going to speak up about because you will see horrible things it's going to start with something small and it's going to be something worse and then worse and worse so you have to know what your definition of right and wrong is you have to know when it is going to be that you're going to speak up and you Have to make sure that you don't ever sacrifice that because that's going to send you you know that's when it is a moral injury i think there's a lot of police officers living with ptsd

that don't know it simply because at some point they have had to sacrifice their internal morals and they may have done it to keep their jobs but regardless it's affecting them internally so you have to be very confident in Yourself if you're thinking of getting into the profession um what was the other part of your question it was about those of us who don't want to get into policing how should we think about i would say those you can never because there's a lot of rationalization happening right every time there's a bad headline there's a

police chief rationalizing it well Like it's the he's just a bad apple and it's you know this and it's that there's all these rationalizations but we have to we have to come to the conclusion that it's not acceptable we cannot keep rationalizing conduct we know is wrong it's a matter of not accepting status quo i don't know how many times i've been told but that's just the way it is it's always going to be that way you know all these statements that are just An excuse because people don't want to be the one to say

it has to change so if you're going to if you want to get into any kind of police governance or oversight you know whether it's government or otherwise you have to be confident you have to be willing to say it has to change and let's talk about how it has to change we're not going to Accept status quo anymore because we know what status quo has gotten us and it's not you know we deserve better than what we have right now so it it you you just can't keep accepting these rationalizations if a police chief

gets on the news and rationalizes one more thing you know it's gonna make my head explode because i'm i'm so sick of them saying It well it's it's happening but it's it's just this it's just that it's happening under their control and if they're not ready to say we're gonna do something about it then they shouldn't be in that job they're making far too much money to just keep saying it's not a problem it's just this one person it's interesting to say that because i had a professor in undergrad first year undergrad i remember uh

dr Cyril levitt he asked us in class he said how many of you guys would have been against slavery if you lived in southern united and obviously every person and said okay how many of you guys have ever sacrificed everything for an idea sacrifice your friends your family your status and none of us put up our hand and he said the point of life Is that when you go when you're about to die and if i ask you the same question you'll be able to put up your hand and he said that's the point of

living a courageous life and that has always stuck with me so when you say these things i go you're absolutely right and what a what a moment to have right that you go here is a moment that I'm able from this moment on say i stood up for what was right although i knew i'm going to lose everything and you did right you lost a career you lost a profession you lost friends you lost a community and those are really big things you know even on a small scale because a lot of people when i

say that and when you say that they think of of you know having to blow the whistle like i did but it could be something as Simple as you know when you're standing in line at a store and you hear someone make a racist comment to someone else it's as simple as going up to them and saying that was absolutely inappropriate and you should apologize to that person you know it's calling them out and saying that was wrong and that doesn't this kind of language doesn't belong in My canada you know it's having the courage

to to approach these people and to to do something a lot of people don't have the courage to do that you know so when you when when i talk to younger people i say like it's those little incidents that you can identify in life where you can come forward and say i'm not okay with this you know even if it's not something Happening to you standing up for somebody else but if you start taking these little moments in life you know because that's when i look back at my upbringing and things that happened to me

it was me starting to see those opportunities and taking them which caused a lot of anxiety right they're not easy to do but it's it's you know it's feeling your heart racing knowing you should do Something not sure if you should but then doing it and the feeling of empowerment you get after that knowing that you stayed true to yourself you didn't let that woman belittle that you know young boy whatever the case was you did something about it and then from that point on you just start instilling more and more confidence in yourself that

when i'm faced with something i know i can do the Right thing because it's not going to happen overnight you don't just wake up one day and say i'm going to have all the courage in the world it's those little moments we find in our lives that we start to speak up and if more people started to do that we wouldn't just keep turning our blind eye when you know something happens that we're embarrassed about We hope we wish someone else would do something because we don't have the courage to do it you know we'd

all be better people awesome thank you so much if you have a minute i'm just gonna sort of end the recording i kind of wanted to thank you properly i just but thank you this was i really enjoyed