Early in April, police officers in Brampton, Ontario, west of Toronto, were dispatched to a “domestic situation.”
They arrived at the home of 26-year-old D’Andre Campbell, who had called 911, asking to be taken to the hospital.
D’Andre had been struggling with mental health issues for years; the police were aware of his condition, having been to his home several times.
On previous occasions, officers had even taken him to the hospital. But on April 6, that didn’t happen.
Instead, D’Andre was struck by a stun gun and then by at least two bullets, as family members looked on in horror.
“They murdered my son in his house, his own house, right in front of his mother,” his distressed mother, Yvonne, told Global’s Farah Nasser.
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, which investigates police actions resulting in serious injury, sexual assault or death, has been called in.
The death of another young Black man, after an encounter with police, reflects a growing problem in North America, as officers become the responders of last resort in the absence of appropriate mental health, youth or other social support.
The lack of such support only makes the problem of systemic racism all the more dangerous, say D’Andre’s family, and critics of existing policing models.
“We will stop using this force as a way of controlling people’s bodies, and we will use them to actually answer crises with de-escalation training, with the ability to connect to social supports, with the ability to be referred to a hospital if that’s what people need,” said author and journalist Desmond Cole, who has documented police violence against racialized communities.
And yet, many police forces deny or downplay systemic racism in the ranks.
Earlier this week, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki said she was not clear on the definition of systemic racism, before adding that she thought it wasn’t a problem in the RCMP. The Prime Minister later challenged the Commissioner on those comments.
Lucki subsequently released a statement acknowledging the existence of systemic racism in the RCMP.
Other prominent leaders have also questioned the severity of the problem. Last week, both Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Quebec Premier François Legault said they agreed there is racism in Canada, but downplayed the severity of it, saying that it was nothing like what is happening in the United States.
“We’re different than the United States, and we don’t have the systemic deep roots they have had for years,” Ford said.
Rethinking the role of police
The head of the police department in Peel Region, whose officers responded to the call from D’Andre Campbell, agrees that systemic racism exists. But Chief Nishan Duraiappah insists systemic racism goes beyond the police department.
“We’d be foolish to think there’s no racial bias in any police agency,” Chief Duraiappah said.
Campbell’s family is upset that no one from the Peel force, including the Chief, called to offer condolences after D’Andre’s death.
Peel Regional Police instead issued a news release, offering condolences. “We acknowledge the impact this tragedy has had on the lives of all those involved as well as the community as a whole,” the Chief wrote.
D’Andre’s father, Claudius Campbell, says racism played a role in his son’s death.
“The Chief should train his troops properly. Whatever he is telling his troops, he’s not telling them the right thing, because they’re not doing the right thing.”
Chief Duraiappah, who issued a statement following the death, acknowledges what happened was a tragedy, but stopped short of pinning the blame on the police.
Instead, the Chief says police are part of a larger social system, one in which people of colour are consistently over-targeted and stripped of health and other supports.
“We’re not mental health professionals, we’re not youth professionals, we’re not addictions professionals,” he says.
Calls for defunding the police — the Toronto Police Service has a budget of over $1 billion, the single biggest expenditure in the municipal budget — are, in part, geared at diverting resources from police departments to individuals and organizations that are better placed to working with youth, people with mental illness, and others for whom the police should not be the first line of defence.
“There’s no need to be spending over a billion dollars on the Toronto Police budget, and it doesn’t work, it’s not been successful,” says Toronto human rights lawyer Saron Gebresellassi.
Outgoing Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders has argued more money was needed for additional officers.
Community model for police
Community policing is a model that is often described as an alternate form of policing as a form of crime control.
The idea behind community policing is to use police officers as problem solvers and community-builders, instead of simply deploying them into the community to crack down on crime.
Adopting a model for community policing implicitly takes stock of the nuance and ambiguity required for dealing with sensitive matters like race, mental health and addiction. It’s also a tacit acknowledgement the police department is not the most appropriate resource for dealing with complex social problems, a point that Peel’s Chief agrees with as well.
The adoption of a community policing model, however, has been sporadic in Canada.
There are community policing centres and neighbourhood initiatives in cities like Vancouver and Toronto. However, full implementation of the community model requires a philosophical change, “in all elements of organizational structure and process,” according to a federal description of community policing.
“I’ve said for too long policing has operated a little bit like an island unto itself, telling the community ‘this is how we are going to police the community,’” says Devon Clunis, the head of the police department in Winnipeg from 2012 to 2016, and Canada’s first Black police chief.
“I think we need to have greater engagement with the community and devise a police service that is reflective of the needs and the expectations of the community,” he said, in an interview with Farah Nasser, for Global’s Living in Colour: Being Black in Canada.
The model has been tried, with success, elsewhere. Eight years ago, the city of Camden, New Jersey, had one of the highest crime rates in the United States. The police department was plagued by corruption.
The force was eventually disbanded and re-built from the ground up, with a community focus in mind. Today, crime is down sharply from 2012, though systemic racism has not been entirely eradicated, according to Jacob Rodriguez, a residential counsellor in Camden.
“There’s definitely profiling that continues to this day,” he told CBC Radio in an interview recently.
Last week, Minneapolis city council expressed support for disbanding the police department there. Police budgets in major cities in Canada are under the spotlight, too, though most local leaders here are shying away from stripping the police of its resources.
What has happened, though, is a conversation about the need to rethink policing in order to prevent more tragedies involving young, Black men like D’Andre Campbell, and many others like him.
“They need to make a lot of changes; they shouldn’t be sending police with guns for a mental (health) issue,” says D’Andre’s father, Claudius.
“They should be sending properly trained people, with an ambulance.”
–With files from Alley Wilson, Farah Nasser