
You give them an inch and they will take Nathan Phillips Square.
Mayor John Tory was not available for comment in locked city hall during this COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, a mysterious, organized group has been occupying the space out front with more than 40 tents and dozens of people.
If you dare step foot on the public space at Toronto City Hall, you will be escorted off by a collection of lawless, humourless thugs who have been large and in charge there for a week. As social media posters have found out, documenting their new town in a prime location featuring a food tent and portable toilets, will have you run off. The squatters use tarps to surround visitors, and, in swarming style, force them to retreat until they are off the square.
In our case, out of respect for their privacy, to not violate their social distance boundaries or provoke, we covered their tent city uprising from the perimeter.
It didn’t matter. They came to us.
In fact, as these bullies came toward myself and my photographer colleague, I was concerned that one was going to strike me with an umbrella. Instead, he opened it up in my face — while four men got well within my two-metre space. There was no point in calling on the police for any intervention or support. A bicycle unit had been there for a while but they left 45 minutes before the incident.
Apparently, this random group is the law in Nathan Phillips Square now.
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
(1) New Normal: Summer camps without swimming or singing
(4) Theriault verdict further erodes community relationship with police: Saunders
A former LEO colleague of mine shared this with me. Based on the included sources of statistics I have no reason to dispute any of them. But the protestors from BLM on down the sorry list including the lazy media certainly do. Based on the stats provided and explained here in detail they are all liars. Counted amongst them are the equally agenda driven deceitful cowardly politicians cowering under their desks before the mob. Well worth the read…
FOR ANYONE INTERESTED: A police officer did the legwork and, complete
with references, wrote this educational piece.
I’m a Canadian Police Officer. I have been stunned and concerned with
the very constant media coverage which has labelled policing in Canada
as a racist and broken system. I’ve also struggled to understand the
public backlash at Police Officers in Canada. This has made me step back
and ask some tough questions of myself. Am I a threat to the people I am
supposed to protect?
One of the narratives that has struck me most is the claim that
minorities in Canada are being murdered by Police. It’s alarming and
serious and is being pushed heavily by the media and is enraging people.
“We are here because police continue to murder Black and Indigenous
people. We are here because state-sanctioned anti-Blackness continues
to be a threat. Because Black and Indigenous people are not safe in
cities, including the city of Hamilton.” – Black Lives Matter Activists Canada. –
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/black-lives-matter-1.5595584
Is this true? Do police in Canada murder black and indigenous people?
Are our Canadian Minorities safe? Are Canadian Police Officers a threat
to public safety? Committing or witnessing racial violence or murder by
police officers has never been my lived experience as a police officer
in Canada. That being said, racism, brutality and bad behaviour exists
in my agency and probably every other police agency in Canada. To deny
that would be statistically improbable. But what is the risk level? What
are the actual facts and numbers when it comes to this serious claim of
police murdering Black and Indigenous people in Canada? I turned to a
media outlet I knew would not be soft or easy on the police and found a
database created by CBC to assist in my understanding of murders
committed by police in Canada.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform-custom/deadly-force
According to this database, from 2000-2017 Canadian Police Officers had
fatal encounters with 461 people. Once I started reading through the
database it became clear that some of the deaths included in this
database are those who died as a result of natural causes, medical
complications, overdoses etc. while having an encounter with police. In a
few of these cases no force was actually used during the encounter at
all. Either way, let’s stick to the numbers and be objective when
exploring the allegations that police are murdering Canadians. I began
digging deeper and reading the case summaries, and this is what I have
found so far.
Out of the 461 people who died during those police interactions, 43 were
Black people. Out of those 43 Black people who died during a police
encounter, 33 were armed with a weapon and 10 were unarmed.
A look at the 10 unarmed deaths should provide insight into the
allegations of police murdering people for no reason. There are
instances where armed people have been murdered by police (ex. Sammy
Yatim in Toronto) but to truly investigate the claim that police are
continuously murdering Canadians and to justify the rage and anger and
fear that is directed at police, I looked into the unarmed encounters first.
Out of the 10 unarmed Black people that were killed;
3 were a result of a struggle with police in which tasers were used
and the person later died (I noted that in each case the deceased had
cocaine in their system) Police were cleared of wrongdoing in those
cases and the taser (which is not meant to kill a subject) may have
been a cause of the deaths in addition to complications from cocaine
etc…
4 were the result of natural causes, cardiac arrest and cocaine
ingestion after being arrested by police (No force or violence was cited
in the summaries and police were not deemed responsible).
2 were a result of a physical struggle in which the officer
punched/beat the person while subduing them. (1 of those cases
resulted in the officer being charged with manslaughter, aggravated
assault and that case is still in court)
1 was a result of a gunshot wound which was ruled accidental while a
police officer struggled to arrest a male who had broken into a
pharmacy. In this case I noted CBC says the male subject was shot in the
back. Further searches show the SIU investigation into the police
officer’s action which say the subject was shot in the chest after
grabbing the officer’s wrist which was holding the gun. The Officer was
cleared of wrongdoing.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/siu-directors-report-case-08-tfd-036
Indigenous People Killed by Police in Canada Out of the 461 people who
died in a police encounter during 2000-2017 in Canada, 69 were indigenous.
Out of the 69 people, 12 were unarmed at the time of their death. Of the
12 unarmed people that died:
4 died as a result of an overdose and no force was used in the encounters.
5 died after a taser, beating or pepper spray was used during a
forceful arrest. (Some of these summaries are troubling and I don’t
see if the officers were charged or cleared)
3 died after being shot. (1 was shot after ramming a police vehicle with
a vehicle. 1 after placing an officer in a headlock during a physical
struggle in which a baton and pepper spray had no effect, 1 after
several suspects ‘fanned out’ around a lone officer at a traffic stop.)
The officers were cleared of wrongdoing in these cases.
After reviewing this data I went to Statistics Canada website to see if
this could shed some light on how at risk Canadians are of dying during
a police encounter whether justified, accidental or murdered.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00015-eng.htm
According to Statistics Canada, Canadian Police received 12.8 million
calls for service during the 2017/2018 fiscal year. These are calls from
the public to the police and does not include, proactive interactions
with the public such as traffic stops, check stops, security at events,
random patrols, school visits and street checks etc… Let’s say the
average call load per year is lower than 12.8 million, let’s say it’s 10
million calls for service. Let’s say for every call for service there
could be one proactive encounter with the public. In my experience there
would be far more of these but for arguments sake let’s say there are
also 10 million proactive police encounters each year in Canada. That
would mean there are 20 million police interactions with the public in
Canada per year. Once again I would estimate that there are far more and
each interaction may be with multiple people at a time for example a
traffic-stop with multiple people in the car, a noise complaint for a
house party, a call for domestic or such with multiple people in the
home. Police are likely encountering more than 20 million people per
year in Canada.
If you take an average of 20 million interactions per year for 17 years
you would have 340 MILLION police encounters with the public over that
time period. Out of those 340 million encounters, 461 people died. That’s a 0.00013%
death rate.
If you go further and look at the rate of unarmed Black people who died
during a police encounter over that time frame it’s 0.000002% and around
the same for Indigenous people.
461 deaths total. Including incidents which were not a police officer’s
fault and no force was used. 461 deaths in 17 years. That’s an average
of 27 deaths a year. That means out of the 37 Million People in Canada,
0.00007% OF ALL RACES die during a police encounter each year.
To give perspective:
About 10 people are killed by lightning each year in Canada, and the
lighting season up here is rather short. If it lasted the full year, a
Canadian of any race would have about the same chance of being killed
by a Police Officer as being killed by lightning. –
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/lightning/safety/fatalities-injury-statistics.html
Since March of this year, 8,175 Canadian have died of Covid 19. In
just a four-month period, a Canadian is 315 times more likely to die
from Covid 19 than during an entire year of encounters with a Canadian
Police Officer.
https://www.covid-19canada.com/
On a more human/systemic level, a Canadian is about 1,544 times more
likely to die after encountering errors, mistakes, etc. in our Health
Care System than by encountering our Law Enforcement system. “In
Canada, medical errors and hospital-acquired infections claim between
30,000 and 60,000 lives annually. Thousands more are injured.” –
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/kathleen-finlay/medical-error-deaths_b_8350324.html
After an objective look at the numbers, it is clear they do not support
the claim that police “continue to murder” Black, Indigenous, or any
people in Canada. The numbers do not support the claim that any Canadian
citizen is at any real risk of dying in an encounter with a police
officer, let alone being murdered in cold blood by one. The narrative
being pushed by the media is not supported by the actual statistics in
their own study.
Despite the hatred I see online, the misinformation I see spread by
the media and the lack of support I feel from our leaders, I make this
commitment to the people of Canada. As a Canadian Police Officer, I
will continue to strive to ensure that I am in the 99.99987% of police
encounters that do not result in the death of a Canadian; and I will
strive to protect my life and the lives of other’s and exhaust every
possible option before I am in the 0.00007%.