Community members denounce Toronto police apology for increased use of force as meaningless

After a Toronto police report showing Black, Indigenous and other racialized groups are disproportionately affected by use of force and strip searches landed with a damning thud in those communities Wednesday, advocates are dismissing an apology from the chief of police and demanding immediate change in policing.

"This is not an aspirational goal. This is something that we are demanding as members of the Black community in Toronto," said Notisha Massaquoi, an assistant professor with the department of health and society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who spent three years leading the process to develop the force's race-based data collection policy.

"The data tells us exactly what we already knew as Black people … that a) we are over-policed [and] b) that we are disproportionately experiencing harm when engaging with the police," Massaquoi said on CBC Radio's Metro Morning Thursday.

Beverly Bain took a similar message straight to Toronto police Wednesday morning, when she made it abundantly clear that interim Chief James Ramer's apology carried no weight for her. Bain is a University of Toronto Mississauga professor and a member of the No Pride in Policing Coalition, which describes itself as a multi-racial, anti-racist queer and trans group fighting for the defunding and abolition of police and prisons.

"This is insulting to Black people. This is insulting to Indigenous people," Bain said, speaking passionately during a police press conference happening just as the data was released.

WATCH | Beverly Bain says the Black community never asked police for an apology:

Bain summed up a feeling shared both on social media and in interviews this week — that for many racialized people, the data only reinforces what has already been known for decades, and that without concrete change, an apology is meaningless.

After Ramer's apology, author and activist Desmond Cole told reporters that while the police chief said the force won't tolerate overt acts of racism, that still leaves room for "the implicit, quiet, subtle, hard-to-prove kind that takes years of data and reporting and study to even acknowledge.

"We're way ahead of them. The Black community have left these folks behind while they're talking about things from ten and 20 years ago," Cole said.

Speaking on CBC Radio's Metro Morning Wednesday before the data's release, Neil Price, the executive director of the non-profit consultancy Logical Outcomes, said it's unsurprising that a police apology wouldn't be met with open arms from members of affected communities.

"The reason why you're hearing this caution, this frustration, and this lack of interest quite frankly … is because the history is so dreadful, and we know that while we are looking at data and talking about apologies, people are dying," said Price, who authored a report on carding practices commissioned by the Toronto Police Board back in 2014.

The never-before-seen statistics released Wednesday were drawn from records of 949 use of force incidents and 7,114 strip searches over the course of 2020. The granular analysis, compiled by the force's Equity, Inclusion and Human Rights Unit alongside outside data experts in concert with a 12-member community panel, examines a wide range of questions.

Among its findings: that Black, Indigenous and Middle Eastern people were all overrepresented in the number of "enforcement actions'' taken against them relative to their total population in Toronto. For Black residents, it was by a factor of 2.2 times.

WATCH | Chief Ramer aplogizes for systemic racism with the Toronto Police Service: