“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” – Assata Shakur

On Saturday March 26th, over a thousand people gathered for #BlackOut Against Police Brutality to demand justice for Andrew Loku and Alex Wettlaufer who were murdered by the pigs. On Monday April 4th, hundreds marched to Queen’s Park, demanded and were granted an audience with Kathleen Wynne, who admitted “I believe that we still have systemic racism in our society”.

Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) forces onlookers to recognize that police brutality exists and that black people in this city are specifically targeted by the police. It also gives voice to the ways that black people and people of colour experience racism in Canada today. Occupying a space like Police HQ shows that people can come together to build inclusive spaces that rely on the contributions, support and commitment of people across the city.

The Black Lives Matters Toronto movement has made concrete their solidarity with Indigenous organizers. BLMTO stood side by side with occupiers of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) office in Toronto, just as indigenous allies had stood with the people occupying TPS headquarters when they were attacked by the pigs in the middle of the night.

As a result of Tent City and other actions, Toronto City Council voted to restore Afro-Fest to a full two-day event and unanimously voted to review the province’s Special Investigations Unit through an ‘anti-black racism lens’. Kathleen Wynne committed to meet again with BLMTO organizers and the Ontario Coroner opened an inquest into the death of Andrew Loku. And Michael Coteau, the Minister Responsible for Anti-Racism has promised there will be public meetings to talk about anti-blackness in policing.

But now that Tent City has come to an end, how will the community prevent police from harassing and killing our people? How will we prevent more state-sponsored murders, such as those of Jermaine Carby, Sammy Yatim, and Andrew Loku? Demanding inquests into the murders of people at the hands of police is not something new and has never changed the way police brutalize and murder the people in our communities.

The state has a long history of maneuvering around the demands of protest movements. In the 1990’s, the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) agitated against the Toronto Police to stop the police’s investigation of police, which led to the formation of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). However, provincial and municipal governments have always found ways to protect the police because the police are accountable to the state, not the people. Today, the SIU is filled with people who are ex-cops and apologists who do nothing but uphold the current system of exploitation that allow these murders to happen in the first place.

We have to ask ourselves: what is it going to take to build strong and independent communities, to disrupt police brutality, and to challenge state power?

Basics Community News Service members have been working with the families of the victims of police brutality for almost a decade now from Alwy al-Nadhir to Junior Manon to Sammy Yatim to Jermaine Carby. In spite of increasing public awareness, the law continues to drag its feet year after year in the case of Jermaine Carby, who was murdered in December 2014. In the case of Sammy Yatim, the law was used to justify the clearance of murder charges against Officer James Forcillo.

“We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults at it” – Amilcar Cabral

Despite vocal protests against state violence, the demands formed during Tent City will not provide the people with any way of protecting themselves from being brutalized, because the demands are not focused on building up our own power and capacity – they rely on the state agreeing to change for the better. BLMTO organizers frequently chant “the system isn’t broken, it was built this way”. But if the system is working the way that it is supposed to, why do we insist on asking this very system–directly responsible for the oppression we face–for small and incremental changes that don’t address the root of the problem?

The law will never go after the cops who killed Andrew Loku last July, even if they are identified, because that’s the way the system works.

We cannot ask to participate in the colonizer’s power. ‘Freedom’ does not look like black consultation with the SIU or a new body that will replicate the same incompetence. A number of public meetings that were held throughout the province last year had a resounding message: eliminate the practice of carding immediately. But even with all of these public meetings and promises that were made by Yasir Naqvi, the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, carding has merely been ‘regulated’ and in some cases temporarily suspended while under review.

But the practice of racial profiling and police targeting black people and people of colour still continues. What will these new meetings on anti-blackness in policing reveal that we didn’t know already? What can they change if the enforcement completely relies on the state and police to follow through on their empty promises?

Do we want to be on their investigation committees after they shoot our families and friends, or should we make sure that another pig does not dare kill another one of our own? Our power and freedom will come from protecting each other, and from creating our own autonomous communities that maintain the livelihood of the people within them.

“Whether it’s in America or the rest of the African world, black lives will never matter until we attain BLACK POWER; which is power in our hands to determine our future for subsequent generations to come.” – Black is Back Coalition

The people who are incarcerated by police know that they are human and deserve justice. What they don’t have is an organized community that has their back. We cannot ask the state to recognize the value of our lives; we cannot ask them for power. Black lives have never mattered to the Canadian state, and they will never matter, regardless of how much we plead for recognition.

For police violence to end in our communities, we must work towards building genuine people power that can be organized to prevent or respond to state violence. Building genuine people power means that we create alternative structures that directly challenge the repressive power of the state.

We don’t ask to be accommodated in the system or try to hold it accountable to the people. You don’t ask your enemy to solve your problems for you — especially when they are the ones who created the problem in the first place.

These tactics have proven successful in communities throughout the city including in the Esplanade, Dufferin and Eglinton and in Jamestown. Community members have made significant interventions the moment cops attempt violence on the streets.

In the Esplanade, when the TPS attempted to falsely arrest a young black man, accusing him of committing a murder that he had no involvement in, the Esplanade Community Group (ECG) intervened and prevented his arrest. When the community faced ongoing harassment and brutalization by constant police patrols, ECG members organized a cop watch and systematically intervened by gathering people around the police and recording video of police interactions. When a member of the ECG was targeted by police who attempted to throw him down a set of stairs, once again the community was there to protest police violence. Actions cannot just invite community members to attend, support and then leave, but must actively integrate them into the organizing.

In the neighbourhood of Dufferin and Eglinton, the police of 13 Division had targeted and terrorized the community to the point where black youth could not move freely in the community. If youth were in groups larger than two people, police would stop them and subject them to pat down searches and other forms of harassment. Youth who were most impacted by this police terrorism decided that they had to organize to change these conditions.

They began meeting regularly in the basement of a local bookstore to discuss the issues of police harassment and engaged in political education including knowing their rights when dealing with the police. This organizing work led to the creation of the Black Fist Defence Brigade in the community, and after a period of six months of organizing, youth would be able to walk the streets in their neighbourhood in groups of five, ten, or more without fear of police harassment. The police could no longer stop and harass these youth, because they had an organization to back them up and the support of elders their community.

In Jamestown, the TCHC regularly collaborates with the police at 23 Division, permits police to conduct searches of tenants’ homes, and uses the police to enforce evictions. When families came under attack by these two state institutions, local organizers in the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) mobilized their members and community supporters to defend them from being kicked out of their homes and put out on the street. InPDUM engaged community members directly with the understanding that the police are an institution of the state, which was built and maintained through the theft and destruction of Indigenous, African and other exploited peoples. With this understanding, InPDUM members did not ask the police to reform their tactics or improve their interactions with the community. Instead, the people recognized that in order to make change, they needed to be organized to contend with the power of the state and police.

These interactions with the police were successfully challenged because there was already a clearly outlined protocol in place for community members to follow. The efforts of InPDUM and the residents of Jamestown reflect how organizing – specifically, having meetings with the most affected, working class members of the community, establishing goals collectively, and demanding responsibility from each other rather than the state – all play a crucial role in developing our capacity to be leaders and protectors of our own communities. This is why organizing tactics must focus on creating trust and reliability of members within the community – our only strength is in our unity and organization. We must recognize this in order to combat a state that exists to eliminate indigenous people, brutalize people of colour and exploit the working class.

Organizing to resist and combat the violence inflicted on our communities by the police is not a simple task. But there are more of us than there are of them.

“We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.” – Fred Hampton

The opening of the 2016 Grammy Awards shows Kendrick Lamar stepping to the stage to receive his award for Rap Album of the Year. While up there, he states his win was a win for real hip-hop. This year Kendrick Lamar received 11 Grammy nominations, just short of Michael Jackson’s historic 12 nominations in a single year for his album Thriller in 1983.

With a total of 20 Grammy nominations since releasing his album good kid, m.A.A.d City, Kendrick is breaking new ground in the hip-hop world. In this year’s Grammy Awards, he led all other artists in nominations, with Taylor Swift and The Weeknd coming closest at only 7 nominations each.

By the end of the night, Lamar racked up 5 Grammy Awards out of his 11 nominations, an impressive total. His nominations were diverse, in that his name appeared almost twice in just about every category. However, Kendrick only ended up winning in the “rap” categories. For example, Kendrick won awards like Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song, Best Rap/ Sung Collaboration, and Best Rap Album. Yet he lost in the other more important general categories he was nominated in like Song of the Year and Album of the Year.

This demonstrates the existence of a “stay in your lane” mentality against hip-hop artists in the Grammys, consistently being snubbed and overlooked even though their genre has been the most popular in music for decades. After heavy criticism from the 2014 and 2015 Grammy’s awarding and nominating blonde pop stars Macklemore and Iggy Azalea in the Best Rap Album category, should we consider Kendrick’s success a victory?

Even when it came to the Best Music Video award, Kendrick Lamar won for his collaboration with Taylor Swift on Bad Blood and not for his own music video for Alright. Along with Kendrick’s achievements comes rightful skepticism of the Grammys true intentions in nominating him for the number of awards they did this year.

In a time where North American society is becoming increasingly aware and critical of the racial climate, with the Black Lives Matter movement gaining ground and expanding its membership, it has become easier for us to call out white dominated institutions and award shows like the Oscars. But whether or not this actually makes any difference for oppressed and exploited peoples in North America is a different question that we must consider.

This year, the Oscars were heavily criticized by the public for the lack of people of colour in their awards categories, and it could be said that the Grammys have taken notice of the backlash and put forth their best attempt at distancing themselves from any similar criticisms. As a result, the Grammy Awards outdid themselves to fill the gap in diversity, musically and racially, by throwing Kendrick Lamar into every category they could. But as we have seen time and time again, that does not mean they will allow the black hip-hop act to win the most prestigious prizes the night has to offer.

Yet the content of Kendrick’s album To Pimp a Butterfly is significant as it comes at a time where police brutality and racism towards blacks in America has become extremely visible. He addresses these issues as well as the systemic challenges of being black in America, black dysfunction, “hood politics”, spiritual yearning and many other topics in his lyrics. It is a concept album filled with jazz, blues and soul samples and honest, uncomfortable content.

During the Grammys, Kendrick stepped to the stage and delivered one of the most powerful Grammy performances in recent memory. Chained and suited in a blue jail uniform, Kendrick aligns himself with several other black men positioned in prison cells and raps a medley of his aggressive album cut “The Blacker the Berry” and hit single “Alright” and another never before heard song.

Kendrick’s performance for the 2016 Grammys

He screamed lyrics like “I know you’re evil, you want to terminate my culture” and “I want you to know I’m a proud monkey…you vandalize my perception but can’t take style from me” in front of a clapping crowd that has undoubtedly participated in appropriating black culture.

Kendrick’s conscious way of framing black identity is refreshing in today’s hip-hop realm and speaks to American racial issues as well as is a major reference point for the #blacklivesmatter movement. Kendrick not only became a strong voice for oppressed black communities in music but has done so in the largest ways possible; selling platinum albums, topping billboard charts and most recently and impressively, racking up an unprecedented number of Grammy nominations this year. His commercial success represents huge wins for the genre of hip-hop, but it’s going to take a lot more than going platinum to make the change that Kendrick raps about in his music.

On the afternoon of July 16th protesters from the Black Lives Matter Toronto Coalition disrupted the Toronto Police Service’s monthly board meeting, demanding answers directly from the Mayor as well as the Chief of Police in the aftermath of the death of Andrew Loku at the hands of a Toronto Police Officer a week earlier.

“Every day, black bodies face violence in this city. Every single day,” said Rodney Diverlus, a BLM organiser. “Mayor Tory and Chief Saunders, what is the response to the community for the slaying of Andrew Loku and the continued violence against Black people in this city?”

Loku was a 45-year-old refugee from South Sudan and father of five. On Saturday July 4th, police officers responded to a call from the tenants living a floor above Loku. They found him remonstrating with his noisy neighbours, and instead of de-escalating the situation, officers shot him three times.

Diverlus’ questions were initially met with silence from Tory, Saunders, and TPS Board Chair Alok Mukherjee. But after being faced with pressure from the protestors, Tory and Mukherjee attempted meager responses, stating that “investigations take some time,” and that measures to be taken are “in the process of being implemented fully.”

Mukherjee also explained that “de-escalation tactics are very much on list of priorities for us,” to which a female protester replied: “A list of priorities is not good enough! Somebody has been murdered.”

Mukherjee’s claims that the TPS is “fully committed” to the implementations of recommendations that help combat the issue of police violence are baseless. The murder of another young black man on the early morning of July 25th in Toronto’s Entertainment District is clear evidence of what this “commitment” actually looks like in practice.

Tory and Mukherjee’s vagueness, ambiguity, and a lack of concrete solutions in response to the continued violence committed against Black people and those with mental health issues are deliberate. They claim to be committed to eliminating racism and violence within the TPS, pretending that the TPS itself cannot exist without being racist and violent. Too many people have lost their lives at the hands of police, and the city has done and will do nothing to stop it.

On June 24th, the Toronto Baha’i Centre hosted a public forum called “Conversation on Carding”,  where community members came together to discuss the Toronto Police Service’s’ policy on carding, lately a hot topic in Toronto media.

Conversation focused on recent appearances by new TPS Chief Mark Saunders, who has defended carding as a harmless, “intelligence-led practice”.

Idil Burale, a former candidate for City Council who spoke at the event, pointed out that the claims TPS makes about its policy are inconsistent with reality. For example, when cops question people, the information they collect is supposed to be put into a ‘secure’ central database, which only police officers can access.

However, “there have been instances where information gathered from carding encounters is brought up when people have job interviews,” said Burale. “The top brass refuses to release any facts or statistics that supports their claim that the method of information-gathering has been useful in deterring crime.”

Anthony Morgan, the research and policy lawyer for the African Canadian Legal Clinic, detailed some of the information which can be recorded during an encounter: “they’ll take down anything: your address, information about the people were with, your skin colour, height, and weight, your disposition toward police…even the status of your parents’ marriage.”

“Black people are highly overrepresented in carding data,” he said. “Over 1.2 million contacts obtained through carding can never be justified.”

He added that Chief Saunders has referred to the tens of thousands of Black Torontonians caught up in the TPS dragnet as “collateral damage.”

Burale continued by pointing out that in spite of tall claims from police spokespeople, “the top brass refuses to release any facts or statistics that supports their claim that the method of information-gathering has been useful in deterring crime.”

“Crime rates have been decreasing since the 1970s, but the policing budget has not. Who can justify a billion-dollar budget right now?” This, despite an $850 million backlog of repairs just for the existing TCHC housing stock .

When Mayor John Tory recently announced that he wanted to put an end to carding practices, many Torontonians breathed a sigh of relief. But recent flip-flopping on his part, plus Chief Saunders’ support of the policy, have brought confusion to the issue.

Burale explained that “a lack of clear procedure from the police chief in the implementation of these practices means that nothing will change; but this ambiguity is deliberate and not something that is new.”

Many of us have noticed that the mayor and the police chief have been saying very different things about carding; but this confusion is intentional. It’s never been quite clear whether or not it’s legal for police officers in Toronto to profile Black and racialised youth. Carding isn’t explicitly legal, so the city can’t easily be called out on it, but it’s so widely accepted that in practice, cops can harass, intimidate, and assault whoever they want. While Tory flip-flops, Chief Saunders calls the shots; if his words are anything to go by, carding is here to stay.

(Photo Credit: Kevin van Paassen/Globe and Mail)

When Mark Saunders and Peter Sloly were shortlisted as candidates for Chief Bill Blair’s job, it struck up a city-wide dialogue around diversity and the role of a Black police chief in tackling issues of anti-Black racism within the Toronto Police Service. Communities were proud to watch, for the first time, as men of colour rose through the ranks of the TPS, and when Mark Saunders was sworn-in, excited to begin unpacking issues of racial profiling and police violence in our city.

Mark Saunders is a Black face in a traditionally white space, but the celebration is cut short when his approach to policing upholds many of the same campaigns that disproportionately target and oppress communities of colour. Saunders has been part (and too often in charge) of divisions within the police service that, historically and currently, target and harass young men and women of colour, and instil in us a sense of fear when we think about policing.

What we are now learning is that putting a Black man in charge is not enough to meaningfully combat anti-Black racism.  Saunders’ Blackness is a symbolic victory for diversity, but it doesn’t translate into tangible gains for communities of colour across the city; his swearing-in was not followed by meaningful policy change, nor even an acknowledgement of anti-Black racism in carding policies that, to date, have logged more encounters with young Black men than the actual population of young Black men in Toronto.  For this reason, the conversation isn’t and cannot be about diversity within the TPS. We need a larger discussion around racism, classism and the adversarial relationship between the TPS and working-class communities in Toronto.

Carding—a practice that parallels the stop-and-frisk mandate of the NYPD—is a pre-emptive policing strategy that looks to tackle crime before it occurs in communities through indiscriminate, unwarranted contact with residents. The practice is loaded with issues of race- and class-based profiling. We now know that certain kinds of people in the city of Toronto are systematically stopped under these policies. Young men and women of colour are stopped and interrogated, with intimate details about our lives documented and logged in an expansive database. These encounters are deceptive, intimidating, and often degrading—creating a feeling that you can’t say “no”, because the police have guns and are largely unaccountable to anyone for the injuries they inflict.

When you’re carded, officers rarely inform you of your right to leave and demand intimate details about you, your intentions, and your background. When you hesitate, or refuse to give this information, officers bend the law to obtain it, threatening charges of trespassing, loitering, or officer baiting. Too often they resort to physical violence to get it, understanding that the complaint process is an inaccessible one, and that even when civilians do file complaints related to officer misconduct, rarely is the officer disciplined for this kind of violence.*

Carding is a very real example of how public encounters with the Toronto Police Service create a culture of fear around policing which runs so deep that many of our community partners refuse to call the police even when they are in serious danger. From an early age many Torontonians learn that the police are not their friends, and that officers are not stationed in schools, at community centres, and on their streets to serve and protect them.

Instead, many young people growing up in Toronto’s priority neighborhoods learn to actively avoid officers because of widespread harassment.  Youth with precarious status learn that their in-school resource officers work closely with Canadian Border Services to police families without status. Because of the  relationships that the Toronto Police Service has with agencies like the CBSA, the Toronto District School Board and Toronto Community Housing, negative interactions with police can have severe consequences – deportation, expulsion and eviction. For these reasons, we see people in this city, right now—entire communities—establishing their own systems of policing to avoid this one.

TPS has moved beyond policing as a tool for crime prevention and instead uses it as a regulatory tool that isolates, targets, and oppresses Toronto’s most marginalized communities.  The trajectory of policing in our city has much more to do with the social and economic makeup of Toronto and in our city we criminalize poverty—we fine poverty and toss it in holding cells for sleeping on park benches (trespassing, loitering) and begging for money (harassment). The Toronto Police Service cites crime reduction as justification enough for these policing strategies, but we see too often that these mandates are used as a guise to control “problem areas” and “problem people”.

We’re operating on a punitive model of justice that looks to punish deviance and criminalize things like poverty, mental health, addictions, and homelessness. Our police reflect a larger correctional system that looks to solve issues of crime through punishment, without thinking about rehabilitative alternatives. This kind of correctional orientation translates into the kind of brutal “community policing” initiatives that alienate a certain subset of our city—young men and women of colour, poor and marginally housed Torontonians, those with mental health and addictions related issues, sex workers, and people with precarious status.

We don’t need police half as badly as we need affordable housing, shelter, basic income, access to proper care, and opportunity. We have the capacity to build safe and healthy communities by breaking down the TPS’ billion-dollar budget and pouring these resources into development and restorative justice at the grassroots level. A lot of this discussion comes down to what we believe justice is. If our legal framework is built on punishment, it is built to oppress—to isolate the wrongdoer and punish them.

So is justice punishment? Or is justice a transformative experience, something that looks to heal communities? When we concentrate on restorative justice, we look to transform communities and transform people. This is something that’s already happening at the community level in Toronto as a response to particularly punitive policing strategies in Rexdale and Jane & Finch. Under its current framework, the Toronto Police Service operates as a billion-dollar gang and Chief Saunders as a face-lift that brings no real change.

The most powerful and effective alternatives to policing—community patrols in the downtown eastside, sex workers coordinating and organizing safe business models, and restorative justice networks across the GTA—have all grown out of a need for marginalized communities to protect themselves from violence, from harm, and from those who claim to serve and protect the rest of Toronto.

*The ultimate guarantor of violent police misconduct is the Special Investigations Unit. The SIU is a civilian oversight body that employs both civilians and former officers to conduct independent investigations in cases where a civilian has been seriously injured by an officer. Between 1990 and 2010, the SIU conducted 3,400 independent investigations, filing criminal charges in 95 of these cases. Of that, 16 officers have been convicted of a crime and 3 spent time in prison.

(Photo Credit: Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)

Concerned residents and community members gathered at a vigil on Christmas eve for Jermaine Carby, a Brampton man who was shot and killed by Peel Regional Police three months earlier.  The gathering rallied about 50 members at the location of Carby’s murder, near Queen and Kennedy, where members of the Justice for Jermaine Carby Campaign along with friends, family, activists, and community members participated in an hour long blockade of the busy Brampton intersection.

Carby’s cousin La Tanya Grant, a lead member of the Justice for Jermaine campaign, stated that the vigil was held, “to bring awareness, to let [police] know that we are not going to stop, that we are going to keep coming in the media eye to demand answers for Jermaine.”

Carby was shot on September 24, shortly after being stopped by police for undisclosed reasons. Witnesses have stated that he had his hands up or was slowly approaching the officer who shot him, claims consistent with the gunshot wound to his inner left forearm which his autopsy indicated.

Grant spoke about his death as a personal tragedy, but also emphasised that it was only one moment in the red record of the Peel Police.

“A young man died and nothing is happening,” said Brampton resident Amuna, who went to highschool with Michael Wade Lawson, the 17-year-old who was also shot and killed by Peel Region Police officers in 1988 in the back of the head by an illegal 38-calibre slug known as a “hot bullet” which expands on contact, banned in Ontario by the Ontario Police Act.  Lawson’s murder, and the mass protests it set off, contributed to the creation of the S.I.U. a couple years later.

But nearly a quarter century later, organizers with the Justice for Jermaine campaign see little use for the S.I.U. except to “cover up” police actions, and put families on ice while community anger dissipates. Among the demands of the campaign included, disbanding the S.I.U., which organizers brought up “clears officers of wrongdoing at a rate of 98%.” The campaign is also demanding:

• That the name of the officer who shot Carby be released.
• That the name of the person in whose vehicle Carby was a passenger be released.
• Immediate public disclosure of whether a knife was recovered at the scene.

Police cruisers quickly showed up. They attempted to isolate the vigil by blocking off the roads around the intersection, but met with limited success for some time. While two or three drivers expressed anger at the vigil participants, uttering death threats to organizers right in front of Peel police, many others joined in, and some passersby shouted encouragement.

An inconvenienced driver threatens to the cops that he “run ’em over” if protestors are not removed by the police, while flailing his arms in the cops’ faces. How many people of colour could get away with uttering death threats and aggressively approaching the police? As one protestor mockingly hollered at this perturbed little man, “Hang on buddy, you’ll get to have that eggnog soon enough!” #white privilege #white terror 

One protester, who saw Jermaine like a big brother told BASICS, “I was homeless and he gave me a home. This was the kind of person he was… He helped me find a place… Why did they take him from me? He was my older brother and I love him so much, and I will not forget him.”

“Sabey” – being interviewd by BASICS correspondent Steve da Silva.

After almost an hour, the intersection was clear in all four directions but for the police roadblocks. The campaign organizers, buoyed by the strong impression they had made and the solidarity the participants had shown, thanked everyone in attendance. Shortly before the end of the vigil, a CityTV team showed up, but did not speak to any of the participants, and quickly left when it became clear that things were winding down. No other major media outlet was present.

For a video essay of the rally, see the following video