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The Current Transcript for July 14, 2016

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

We are not to move. You are killing us every single day. We are not moving, we are staying. This is about defending our lives, this is a peaceful protest to defend our lives.

MIKE FINNERTY: A protest by Black Lives Matter in Canada, that one in Toronto. There was another this week in Montreal. When black men are shot and killed by police south of the border, when police are shot for being white and wearing the uniform, those events shake relations between the police and Canada's black communities, and with Aboriginal Canadians, who have a long history of mistrust toward them.

SOUNDCLIP

Because of the fear of the police, she said she would rather be killed by her partner than file a complaint.

MF: Today, a man who turned in his police badge just last week sits down at the same table with an African-Canadian and an indigenous legislator for a frank conversation on how to bridge the divide. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

Toronto police constable quits, says tension with community contributes to decision

Guests: Marc Rainford, Sam Tecle, Nahanni Fontaine

SOUNDCLIP

We have a history of not just police violence and police brutality, but also of police shootings of African-Canadian men in particular. Throughout the '70s, the '80s, and '90s, the fatal shootings of African-Canadian men in Canada, in particular places like Toronto and Montreal, were higher than they were in the United States per capita. So the black community has been raising these issues and these concerns in Canada for decades.

MIKE FINNERTY: That's Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic. The issue of race relations between police and black communities has been front and centre in the United States, and it's a story we've been following closely here on The Current, from the recent police shooting deaths of African-American men in Minnesota and Louisiana to the attack on police officers in Dallas. Today, we're bringing the discussion home to Canada. At the legal clinic Margaret Parsons runs, she says she gets calls from black men across the country complaining about police actions. And in a few minutes, we'll hear directly from members of Canadian communities who feel most affected by strained relationships with the police. Our first guest is a recently retired police officer who says it was the increasing polarization between the police and the policed that led, in part, to him retiring his badge after a 14-year-career with the Toronto Police Service. Former constable Marc Rainford is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

MARC RAINFORD: Hello, thanks for having me.

MF: It's a pleasure to have you. It's all pretty recent, you having left the police.

MARC RAINFORD: Yeah, yeah. Happened a week ago. It's a profession I love, will continue to love, but my reasons for leaving were predominantly personal health stuff, and then the added tension in policing sort of was the tipping point where I didn't think I'd be able to continue.

MF: Which we're going to come to in more detail. Are you feeling different this week?

MARC RAINFORD: I feel a little different. It's hard-- it's an interesting thing, because I no longer have my uniform, my badge. But the passion hasn't changed at all.

MF: Can we start at the beginning and talk about that passion, because that dates back to when you were a child, no? When you first realized that you wanted to be a police officer, can you tell us the story?

MARC RAINFORD: Yeah. When we moved, my family moved from Jamaica in 1979…

MF: We should say you're mixed race, is that fair to say?

MARC RAINFORD: Mixed race, yes. Moved here when I was seven, and my first actual interaction with a Toronto police officer was when we were trying to get to the grocery store, and we flagged down what we thought was a taxi, because it looked like a taxi. Yeah, because back then, police cars were yellow. When we did that and we asked can we go to the nearest supermarket, the officer actually chuckled and laughed, and thought it was funny. And we were like, new immigrants. But after he chuckled, he'd loaded us up and took us to supermarket. And I remember vividly to this day I just thought, here's a profession where, he didn't need to do that. You can choose to help people at any point in time. And it just, it stuck with me for many, many years.

MF: There was another experience with the police, a formative experience with the police that came out a little bit later, before you became an officer. And that one didn't go quite so well. I wonder if you could tell us about that.

MARC RAINFORD: Yeah, that one-- so I was 29, I was working as a sales rep for a clothing company. And I went to the old Don Mills Mall, and I remember seeing two young men with a handgun, and they're showing each other the handgun. And at the time, I was still quite naive and I thought, I'm 29, these guys are kids. I should go talk to them and say, like, what are you doing, what kind of life choices are you making? And luckily, the person I was with was a little bit smarter than me and said, not a good idea, I don't think he can give life lessons to two people holding a handgun. So we left. We're driving down the street and we're talking about it and I said, you know, where are the cops when you need them? You know, that classic where are they when you need them? And sure enough, we come over a hill, there's a police car. So I get out, I knock on the window. I'm in a suit, business suit. I knock on the window and look that I was given was intimidating to me. So I told him what I saw, I had my hands up and I'm trying to point to the mall saying hey, there's a guy with a gun. And to my surprise, I started getting interrogated. I'm trying to tell police what I see, and I feel like they're turning their back on me. It left me with a really, really bad taste in my mouth. I thought, if this is how citizens are treated when they want to help, this is not good. That actually led me to apply. When I then joined and got my training, I saw that same interaction from a different lens. Once I became a police officer, I understood the legal requirements for a future case. When speaking to a person, I'd have to know who they are, know what the purpose was for where they were, I would have to rule out a lot of things that they might be challenged on in a court of law. As a civilian, I didn't know that. Having said all that, what I did learn was that I could still do all those investigative things, but I could still walk a person through it. There's a way of doing it. There's a way to assist a citizen in being part of this without alienating them.

MF: Mark, what role did race play in your decision to become a police officer?

MARC RAINFORD: Didn't play much of a role for me. I think more there was a cultural value, being an immigrant. I looked at it more as I want to represent a community mindset within a profession that sometimes forget that we, as officers, also are part of communities. We're community people first, and then we're police officers second.

MF: There's a case here in the Toronto area that dates back a couple of years. Peel police shot and killed a man named Jermaine Carby, it was at a traffic stop in Brampton. And as a result of the inquest which reported back in May, it was deemed a homicide. There was a recommendation for police to explore ways to overcome "unconscious bias." When you were an officer, how much unconscious bias did you see?

MARC RAINFORD: I don't know how much I can speak to of what I saw, I can speak to what I felt. And there were moments even within myself where the experience of policing, of policing in the same neighborhood. I policed in Malvern for most of my career.

MF: What kind of a neighborhood is that?

MARC RAINFORD: Early in my career, it was predominantly African-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean. The interesting thing is, there's a there's a theory called the contact theory. So when you increase contact with people, you become familiar. It sometimes kind of works against you too, right, and when you end up investigating calls of suspects, and the descriptions are common or familiar, it seeps into your brain and it becomes very difficult. And that was the thing that, for me, I really started to see that. Where the suspect descriptions were so repetitive, I started to realize, gee, you know what, I'm so used to hearing this that now I'm looking around all the time trying to solve the past 30 incidents. These are the descriptions. Now, that's all I'm looking at, and that's the challenge, right? That was a challenge for me.

MF: And does that constitute unconscious bias?

MARC RAINFORD: I would say yes because where it becomes an unconscious bias, I think, is that when I narrow my lens to just solving previous incidents, then I narrow my focus on the suspect descriptions that I remember. It ends up causing you to feel that you're operating on unconscious bias. Policing is a lot of different things. It's not just solving a radio call, there are proactive elements. Getting to know your community, getting to interact with people, preventing things. When you widen the scope of the job, preventing crime, maintaining peace, then that subconscious bias starts to diminish. Because now you're talking to everybody, right?

MF: I understand you used to do that, I understand that when you were a police officer, you used to go into the community without your uniform on.

MARC RAINFORD: It was right after the Danzig shootings. I went into the Danzig neighborhood. I wasn't wearing my uniform, so I was able to hear people talk very freely. What I anticipated was to hear the neighborhood up in arms over the shooting. So you know, how could this be, 27 people hit with gunfire, and two people have died? And instead what I heard were a lot of things to do with how the police interacted. We didn't talk as partners. You know, when we did interact, we stopped and investigated people. Eventually, I introduced myself and I apologized for the fact that I was there not in uniform, and you know, it's not to surveil you.

MF: You're not spying on them.

MARC RAINFORD: Yeah. It is to really hear you speak truthfully about something that, had I been in uniform, you would not have been comfortable to do.

MF: And so what did you hear?

MARC RAINFORD: What I kept on hearing is people genuinely want partnerships with the police, but there's such a disconnect in understanding our purpose, why we're there to do what we do, and people wanted more, a deeper relationship. They didn't want to be purely just investigated. They wanted officers to be able to help them empower themselves in their own community. We shouldn't always have to call the police for every issue, and then the role of police could shift. And what I found was the more we were in discussions to educate people, the more comfortable they felt.

MF: Were the Toronto police profiling ever?

MARC RAINFORD: Institutionally, the Toronto Police Service, no.

MF: Do you have, within the police culture, so the men and women of policing, do you have individuals that believe, in a given area, based on all the reports that we receive, do we have "better odds" of finding a suspect when we target an age group, a race, a location?

MARC RAINFORD: I would say yea, we have officers that have done that in the past.

MF: Well, we spoke yesterday to a sergeant from San Diego, who told us he believes that there's racism in police forces, but he also believes that there is a role for profiling in policing.

MARC RAINFORD: There is never a role for profiling, and where the profiling thing piece in policing has become part of that process for some, is when they don't take the time to learn the people in their community. That is a shortcut. Once you start to be part of the fabric of a neighborhood, you don't need that shortcut. But the culture has always had people that say, you know what, I'm going to sit in this neighborhood and I'm going to stop as many people as I can until I find a gun. And some people will justify that in their minds, because if they speak to 10 people and they finally catch one person with a gun, they only focus on the one for getting they've damaged nine.

MF: Mark I want to ask you a question about what happened in the United States last week. The two videos that came out, one out of Louisiana, one out of Minnesota; and then in Dallas, five police officers shot and killed, several others wounded. And I wonder what you've been thinking, how you've been living that, as someone who just hung up the uniform?

MARC RAINFORD: All three incidents have the same, they have exactly the same level of tragedy for me. I don't know what was in the minds of the officers but without knowing what's in their mind, it's never a good day in policing when you take somebody's life. Like, when I saw that, I was actually relieved that I had made the decision to leave. What's happening is that a lot of the stuff, it's coming to our city because lived experiences are shared. Like the black community here has already had its own historical victimization with police here. Things that happen outside of Toronto that are similar to things that have historically happened here, they intensify the victimization here. And so what it does is it erodes some of the great work that's already been done, it sets it back.

MF: And you felt that?

MARC RAINFORD: I just felt like, with the personal health stuff that I'm dealing with, the passion I have for this job. It just got a lot harder. It has become very difficult, because there are a lot of people that will lose hope in the ability for police and community to bridge that gap anywhere. It's just one of those things where you feel hope being sacked, and that's a hard thing for me, because I feel like I've worked with great love for the city and for policing to improve that, and then I see incidents outside the city that are going to negatively impact those relationships, and that's a hard thing. People feel what they feel, they're entitled to that. However, the officers here are not the same as the officers in any of the American cities, right? The level of training that officers get here, especially to things like implicit bias. The officers in Toronto are very sensitive to do the things that are going on. They understand that there's a lived experience that black people here feel, they get that.

MF: But there's still a problem here.

MARC RAINFORD: There's a problem.

MF: You're just saying it's less acute, what are you saying, exactly?

MARC RAINFORD: I wouldn't be able to say whether it's less acute or not, because that's not for the police to decide. That is the lived experience of the community, they're going to be the ones that say to the police where they think that relationship is.

MF: But you feel the police here are different than the police in the United States.

MARC RAINFORD: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, speaking personally, I don't know, when I was a police officer, I would not know how to help somebody feel safe with me as a police officer, when they're seeing black people around North America getting shot. They're going to put that on me, and the best I can do is to try to reassure them. How you move forward to build that relationship is still tricky, because the lived experience really has to be acknowledged.

MF: We're speaking with Marc Rainford, a former constable with the Toronto Police Service. He retired last week after 14 years in the service. And now I'd like to bring two more people into the conversation. Sam Tecle is a PhD student in Sociology at York University, he's African-Canadian, and he works with Success Beyond Limits, a community organization at Jane and Finch in Toronto. And we're going to expand this discussion as well to bring in Indigenous Canadians. Just this week, the Assembly of First Nations signed an agreement with the RCMP to work on improving relations between Indigenous Canadians and the national police force. Nahanni Fontaine has researched Indigenous police relations, and has advocated for her community about policing. She is now an NDP MLA in Manitoba, and she joins us from Winnipeg. Hello to you both.

NAHANNI FONTAINE: Miigwech, Miigwech for having me.

MF: And Nahanni, can I start with you and ask you for a reaction to what Mark was saying. How did you hear that?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: You know, first off I want to congratulate and honour Mark for the work that he's done as a police officer, and acknowledge his truth. In all the years that I've been working within my community, the Indigenous community and policing, what I often share to police is that Indigenous people understand first and foremost everybody as equal, and that in that equality, there is intrinsic respect to be shown to everyone. And so when Indigenous people come into contact with police-- and again, not all police, but you know, many police officers that intrinsically don't show that respect for them, it creates just more distrust. And one of the things that I think is really important to understand is that if we look at policing historically within Canada, in 1873, Sir John A. Macdonald established the Northwest Mounted Police, which is today the R.C.M.P., to protect and secure western settlement. And who are they securing western settlement against? Indigenous people. You know, we know as well that the R.C.M.P. were implicit in taking children in respect of the residential school system. So for Indigenous people, the policing relationship goes back to the beginning of our history here together.

MF: Sam, what was it like for you listening to Mark speak?

SAM TECLE: I do honor his work, and at times bridging these communities. But I mean, I think if we're talking about the context within which I work and the black communities, I mean this mistrust is deep. It's generational, it's rational, and it's completely well-founded, right? These are based in experiences of difficult interactions with police. So while I respect the individual police officers you've met, I want to think about policing and the mistrust at the level of structure, at the level of this institution. It has been this way from the beginning.

MF: For the black community?

SAM TECLE: Yeah, we had Margaret Parsons at the top, right, talking about how these have been prevalent issues since the '70s. So I mean of course, we've had increased diversity training, we've had multiculturalism; yet, racial profiling is still a pertinent issue in black communities at the level of policing. So I mean arguably, we could say that the police officers in the '70s are not the ones that are still on the force now, yet racial profiling we can say is still prevalent. And I think just with respect to what Mark was mentioning, there was something around the added tension or the increased tension. That tension is not added or increased or new for black communities, just the attention now is. And that's because of young black youth across London and the U.K., U.S., and Canada, who have brought attention, saying, you know what, black lives matter. And that's both a claim within policing to policing, and also to society.

MF: It's interesting, because I'm not sure that there isn't in the wider population a sense that things are much better, actually, in Canada, and we look at how things are going in United States, and oh, that looks awful. Or for instance just yesterday, the Minister of Public Security in Quebec was asked to comment on a Black Lives Matter protest in Montreal, and he said fortunately, the situation here in Quebec is not the same as in the United States, and we want to be sure that it remains different. And of course, we want to preserve our model here: peaceful coexistence.

SAM TECLE: Yeah and I think that's a very popular-- it's a Canadian myth, right? One that we hold onto that the racism or the oppression or the difficulty of black life south of the border is different than here. Yet if we think about 1992, there was a rebellion in the 1970s here in Toronto, there was lots of movement and action against literally still saying that black lives matter in Canada, and that that statement is as necessary here, if we look at our history, right? So there have been black youth who have been shot in this city.

MF: As recently as this year, for instance, in Montreal, there was a 40-year-old black man who was shot dead by the police. There was a riot that occurred afterward in Montreal North. But I just want-- why is it that you see that and Nahanni talks about it, and it is so clear to you. And yet to the wider population, I'm not sure they see it.

SAM TECLE: Yes, and I think part of that is on the work o-- to be honest, I think media attention reflects much of what's happening in the U.S. In the U.S., also, that media conglomerate is a machine. And it's almost spectacularized, and it's on repeat, it's on a loop. And very much often the case for black communities in Canada, it's we must try to pull and bring that attention. We had Black Lives Matter on the lawn in the front of our police headquarters in the city, and still were not able to secure a meeting with the police chief, right? So I think these types of issues and the way in which these young black activists are trying to do that is to try to bring attention to what is a normal state of affairs.

MF: Okay, we're going to pause right there for the news and then we'll continue the discussion. We're speaking with Sam Tecle, who works with Success Beyond Limits, a community organization at Jane and Finch in Toronto. And Nahanni Fontaine, who is an NDP MLA in Manitoba who has done a lot of work with Indigenous communities and the police. And Marc Rainford is here as well, he retired last week as a constable with the Toronto Police Service. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: Sting]

'This mistrust is deep': how to improve relations between racialized communities and Canadian police

Guests: Marc Rainford, Sam Tecle, Nahanni Fontaine

MIKE FINNERTY: Hello I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. We're going to pick up now on the discussion we started in the last half hour. It's a discussion that's taking place right across the United States but one that we're bringing into a Canadian context. We've been talking about the often strained relations between police and certain communities across the country and if you missed the first part of this conversation you can find it always on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent or on the CBC radio app. Now let me reintroduce our guests. Marc Rainford is a newly retired constable with the Toronto Police Service. He says it was in part the challenges of policing in an increasingly polarized society that led him to leave the force. Sam Tecle is a Ph D. student in sociology at York University. He's an African-Canadian works with Success Beyond Limits, a community organization at Jane and Finch in Toronto. They're both here in the Toronto studio and with us from Winnipeg is Nahanni Fontaine an NDP MLA who has researched indigenous police relations as well as advocated for her community about policing and I want to pick up on what we were talking about before the news. Nahanni, let me ask you has the wider non-Indigenous community in Canada, do you think, truly come to terms with reality as you and other Indigenous people see it? I am talking about the fraught relationship with police.

NAHANNI FONTAINE: You know, even just yesterday, CBC out here in Manitoba had interviewed the president for the Winnipeg Police Association and he had indicated that he didn't see racism within the police force and he even went so far as to say you know, that it was not responsible for Indigenous leadership to publicly say that there is racism. I mean really it's just a denial narrative, right? It's denying these situations exist and this systemic racism and biased policing do exist.

MF: That part, categorically--

NAHANNI FONTAINE: I say that it's denial and why I say it's denial is that for a good majority of Canadians they don't see that. They don't see those interactions daily. They're not carded and they're not stopped while they're driving and so they don't know it. So, of course they're not going to say, yeah that these are issues that are going on across Canada. For Indigenous peoples in Canada, that's a lived experience every single day and when we continue to deny that we have an issue, it's really problematic for me and it's problematic for the people in the community that are affected with this day and day out.

MF: Let's come back to Marc who was just wearing the uniform last week and if you're just tuning in a reminder that Marc himself comes from a mixed race; a racialized community can we say, and Marc listening to both Nahanni and to Sam, do you share their analysis?

MARC RAINFORD: I do. It's an interesting thing for me because of where I'm coming from. So it's really critical I think in all discussions to do with this stuff to separate institution and culture. I've been around the institution. I've seen decision makers and what they attempt to do and how they attempt to heal with communities. The management structure in policing is very genuine in what it wants to do. It wants to be fair and unbiased. The individual police officer has so much autonomy because they go out in a police car, they have the freedom to interact with the public how they choose, so the institution is encouraging diversity through hiring, community partnerships, training, all these different components to bridge these gaps and yet where were the challenges is, is the individual person gets to decide how they interact with a person, why they interact—

MF: And that’s where it falls—

SAM TECLE: That’s where the problem is.

MARC RAINFORD: Sam, that would result in a few bad apples, right? But if we think about racial profiling as occurring since the seventies and it's in the institutions, it’s in the culture, these institutional cultures are made by people. They are not just in the ether. They get bred then they get so there's something that I think the police management needs to acknowledge at the level of institution that is being re-inscribed and is just repeating itself. We can say there are many good people in policing, but it's producing this result.

MF: Okay, so I would ask this question. In fairness of all this, is a fair statement to say from a lived experience point of view that policing from the seventies, if people were to think of police officers and the level of racism by police in the seventies, was it higher than it is now?

SAM TECLE: I would say let's ask the Black community members where they feel like policing, it’s like an occupying force in their community. I say let's ask them that because these types of feelings are generational. These families have talks with their kids about how to deal and it's called The Talk to tell how do you interact with police when we know that death could be the result?

MARC RAINFORD: And I appreciate all of this. The thing with The Talk I find fascinating as we pass down The Talk—

SAM TECLE: And stories of violence—

MARC RAINFORD: The parents hand down to their children in interacting with the police, if that talk is also not evolving to the current climate with new officers and how those officers are approaching this—

SAM TECLE: And also Black Lives Matter and all of the things that they're seeing on videos.

[crosstalk]

MARC RAINFORD: The talk is evolving—

SAM TECLE: But there's also new ways of Black people are dying at the hands of--

MARC RAINFORD: My point is this, that the talk my parents had with me went like this: If the police stop you, you tell them the truth. If you do something wrong and they can prove it, we back what they do. That was a very simple talk for me. As a mixed race police officer who goes into communities and I hear kids say I'm taught to run from the police, as a police officer that worries me because I understand where that conversation comes from. There is legitimate fear, but teaching somebody to run does not increase safety, can we agree on that?

SAM TECLE: But he also mentioned that you go into communities without your uniform. Now think about that symbolic nature of that uniform does in communities where people are told you need to be afraid of the police because such and such happened to this person, right? I work in a community where there's a Black boy thinking about what way do I take to school so I don't get searched by police. We’ve done focus groups with youth from Jane and Finch who ask girls or young women to walk with them across the street because they know intrinsically that they're less likely to be stopped by police if they're walking with somebody. So these are the strategies of resistance and protection that they have to learn.

MF: Nahanni, does The Talk exist in Indigenous culture in Winnipeg?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: I know people that will advise their children, including my own boys, I have two boys who say if you have a moment of contact with police to be respectful. Indigenous people are very, very hesitant. If they have any information on anything and particularly let's use cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, they may have vital information that could bring someone home, could lead to charges against an individual but they are so hesitant to go to the police and I know so many people that have information that will not go to the police and so some of the work that I've been trying to do is trying to help bridge that divide.

MF: Marc Rainford, when you hear that, this is fundamental respect just feeling like the police are treating them as an equal, as another human being and that is a feeling that many feel is just not there.

MARC RAINFORD: It's not as an equal, we are all equal.

MF: But when you're a police officer, do you go into thinking you're an equal? You have the badge, the uniform, you have the gun.

MARC RAINFORD: I go into it knowing that, how I how I used to go into it, is that the protect part in the cliché serve and protect, the protect part is everybody. The part that I am I want to focus on initially is the service part and herein lies the struggle for me is I hear what my now new friend has said, what Sam has said about the mistrust and all that stuff with policing, I hear that. People in my profession have made you feel that way. I'm here to try and help. You have one ally, and if we can do that, I can bring in another ally, another ally. I can't worry about what the past 30, 40, 50 years of policing have done because I can't do anything about that.

SAM TECLE: You can’t ignore it.

MARC RAINFORD: I don't ignore it at all. The lived experience is very real and what I'm here to do is help create a new lived experience that begins with empowerment.

MF: Sam, have you had your own experiences where you felt targeted unfairly by police?

SAM TECLE: Oh, constantly. I mean being young and a Black man in Toronto, I mean I've been at York University, I think a student since 2002, and I've been profiled on my campus asking what I'm doing. Oh, I’m getting a Ph D. in sociology, it’s so crazy. I've been stopped in areas, but I'm able to articulate myself in a way where how I communicate, you probably don't want to trample on my human rights. But there's many in these communities where it just translates into anger and rage and then there are very real consequences that can happen to young Black men and women, right? So I understand completely what your comment, Marc, like that you are a human being but sometimes watching these videos and you see Black communities who feel this way, they must wonder are we human to the institution of policing because they can literally be shot down dead. These are the videos that we're seeing. This is not light stuff, right?

MF: Nahanni, listening there, I mean there's a whole context as well with what we're now going to see in the news, especially in the months to come with the inquest into missing, murdered Indigenous women, but you also are looking on Black Lives Matter and I wonder what the change has been that you felt in the way Indigenous people interact with police?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: My perspective in the last 20 years has changed in respect to policing. I am in a long term relationship with an R.C.M.P. officer. He has 33 years, he's an Indigenous police officer, and you know one of the things that I've learned is policing is a sacred responsibility. Police do have so much power and they really do have the opportunity and the privilege to create change on a multitude of levels.

MF: Nahanni, can I ask you to tell us about the experience of a woman that you know.

NAHANNI FONTAINE: So for many, many years I, of course I work with families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Back in 2009, her sister was murdered, her 17-year old sister was murdered and so I've been working with her and her family for that long and in the last six months, Indigenous people have multiple generational traumas, right. So you know her sister was murdered and then years later there was another death in the family and in the last six months she's in a very unhealthy relationship where she was almost killed. I went to go pick her up and she was so traumatized and I won't share the details of what had happened but I called the police immediately and then was trying to convince her to be able to file a complaint and she refused to file a complaint and she said that because of the fear of the police, she said she would rather be killed by her partner than file a complaint and why? It was predicated upon when she was pregnant with her first child, she came into contact with the police and they threw her on the ground on her stomach and they kneed her in her back, and she kept screaming to them, I'm pregnant, I'm pregnant. That one incident which was you know about nine years ago, has had such a direct impact that in the last six months she would rather be killed than file a complaint with the police. There are very direct consequences to our relationships and our negative relationships with police.

SAM TECLE: Yeah and I think you know members of the Black community who had negative experiences, I mean I think I wonder if they would call policing sacred, right? And also if we're thinking about police tactics, we're thinking about raids in these communities, this blunt police who Scott Wharley, criminologist at UFT has said have yielded very little results but what do they do for trust?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: You know, I’ll share this this one story of this youth. For many years back his mom had contacted me and I think he was about 17-years old and he had been at a bus stop just waiting for a bus and this youth had a physical disability and so when he walked, he didn't walk straight and it would look like he was intoxicated or whatever, but he actually had a physical disability. He was stopped by the police and they started right away with their questions, well what are you doing in this area and da da da, and they threw him up against the hood of the police car and he said, you can't do this and I haven't done anything and he said my uncle is Justice Murray Sinclair and immediately the police stopped. They gave him back his stuff and he waited at the bus stop. There are a myriad of stories like this that people are just waiting or walking and for Indigenous women there's a myriad of stories of women just walking to the store and the police will roll up and say, well what are you doing in this area? Are you working in this area? So, immediately Indigenous women are constructed as being sex trade workers or prostitutes. But can you imagine though that if the police could see themselves in this kind of sacred responsibility that they have to us, I believe that we wouldn't have those interactions. I really do believe we would have change across this country.

MF: Marc, what do you thinking there when you're listening to these anecdotes.

MARC RAINFORD: It's very disappointing and disgusting to hear that type of behaviour on another human being and I don't think it's naive to want or hope for people to join a profession that requires you to potentially put your life on the line for strangers. That's an honourable, honourable thing to do. To diminish that profession, to taint it at the same time to taint it with dehumanizing people is [pause] those two things can’t exist. In my 14 years, the one thing I would say and I feel Sam, I feel you so much with this, is that I have had so many experiences of sitting in rooms imploring community members to give me a chance to work with them. I had one in Malvern where I introduced myself to the gentleman and his lived history with policing started back in Dominica. He went to Boston College, he was there doing some race stuff to do with police, got beaten up, when I met him he was so disgusted with me sitting in his office and he said I hate police, I don't want anything to do with you. I told him then I said I’ll come back every day, you can kick me out, but this feeling that you have, we need to work together because community members that really have the pulse like you do, Sam, you're the gateway. If I was still in policing and you and I found a way to introduce policing in a healthy way, that's the gateway for change.

MF: Would you be ready to open a door like that, Sam? Are you ready to go, in Marc's words, to give police a chance?

SAM TECLE: Yes, fundamentally transforming policing as it exists now, yeah, because I think we need to acknowledge the lived experiences of communities.

MF: You’re saying you need some things first.

SAM TECLE: Yes, many things. Many, many things starting with even like a public apology.

MARC RAINFORD: Let me address this because I think that the historically what we always want to do is start from the top. When people go into a store to complain, they want to start with the manager. They don't want to deal with a brilliant sales rep who could resolve something—

SAM TECLE: People can work together, that’s no problem, but I mean if we’re about transforming the experience across the city for Black people, that's not going to happen one on one.

MARC RAINFORD: Okay, I'm going to disagree because I've lived it. I've lived it. I’ve lived it with--

SAM TECLE: [chortles] And you left.

MARC RAINFORD: Not because of the institution, because of the frustration of the difficulty of the work. I am not the only one. I'm not a special child. I'm one of many—

SM TECLE: You hear all these stories that I'm telling you about, these are communities filled with families so they're not the only ones either, I’m just saying.

MARC RAINFORD: I agree, but what I'm trying to say is that if you want to change a culture quickly, the quickest way to change a culture such as the police culture, is to identify--I know one in 31 for sure, that would die to get together with you. When that gateway is opened up and an officer like myself is committed to that community, those community members now own me. I am their officer. I'm not saying we don't need things to change on all levels. What I'm saying is that the people that have the greatest impact on community isn't the hierarchy, it's the day-to-day guy, male or female officer, day-to-day that gets out of the car, goes into a neighbourhood, they have the single biggest impact on change. There is change.

MF: Sam, are you saying that as well intentioned as that is—

SAM TECLE: It won’t produce the change that we need, that the Black communities in this city have been protesting and fighting for over decades, that is well and all, but again, my issue is not with you personally, but with the institution, the histories, and the legacies of what policing has done to Black communities.

MARC RAINFORD: I agree.

SAM TECLE: SO I think that is what we are talking about.

MARC RAINFORD: This again, for me is the divide, right. So an offer is like a wall.

SAM TECLE: You having a very good relationship with me does nothing if I get stopped by one of your colleagues and I get treated like a piece of crap.

MF: Nahanni, can I ask you the same question that Marc asked here in the studio to Sam, and that is are you ready, are people in the Indigenous community ready to give the police a chance?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: I don't think it's just a Black and white question and I get what both Marc and Sam are saying, and for me personally I think that it's a mixture of all of that. Change doesn't come kind of in these silos, but it's really in these moments. I know that here in Manitoba, there's been a lot of movement towards working with the police and trying to be at the same table both at that high management level and on the ground with policing members, and I've seen both produce some positive results and then of course you have moments where there isn't that partnership, or there isn't that mood or that need to work together on that individual level or at that high management. For me personally, I really do believe in the power of sitting at the table, sharing our different narratives, sharing our different perspectives. We may not agree or wholly understand one another but I really do believe that the place to start is at these tables or in these moments of interaction.

MF: But that’s not what you’re saying, Sam, or at least that's not my impression of it. You're saying that you're not ready.

SAM TECLE: I think sitting at the table is important. Recently I gave a deputation at the police services board around imagine what this table would look like if we had Indigenous youth representation, or young Black people who have been on the brunt side of policing, and the things they could say and the counsellors and chief and the mayor that would hear that. So yes, being at the table is important but I think I'm too much a student of history of this city and broadly of the Black radical tradition of Black activism, that's just not enough. Institutions need to own this history and legacy and then demand that there will be improved treatment of these communities and that needs to trickle down while yes, having people do the work and that conversation is only being pushed by young Black and Indigenous activists.

MF: Nahanni?

NAHANNI FONTAINE: I’m an optimistic person and I really do believe that if we, even in this younger generation, police officers like Marc I think are reflective of this kind of new analysis and this new knowledge on where we're currently situated within Canada and policing on a myriad of different communities; that we can create change and so I hope that we're not talking about this in the next ten years, I really, really do.

MF: Sam, you get the last word.

SAM TECLE: I think it's a difficult time to be Black in this moment where we need to say Black lives matter, and for me there's a quote that comes out of the civil rights movement that freedom is an endless meeting and I value this conversation, but there's also a responsibility I feel to the stories I've heard in the communities that I come from that have produced me to let that suffering speak. I need to keep hearing, you need to keep listening to it, thinking about it, and writing it. So it's sometimes difficult to be optimistic but to date I've never sat down and spoken to a police officer or former cop this long, so I mean I think I get my energy, my optimism, and my life from young Black activists who find ways to survive. I think that's where I locate optimism and hope, and humanity really.

MF: Thanks to all of you.

GUESTS: Thank you.

MF: Marc Rainford, retired from the Toronto police service last week after 14 years as a constable. Sam Tecle is a Ph D. student in sociology at York University. He works with Success Beyond Limits, a community organization at Jane and Finch. They were in Toronto. And Nahanni Fontaine is a Manitoba MLA who has worked on police relations with the Indigenous community and she was in Winnipeg. We asked Winnipeg police to comment on some of what we talked about here today, we've not heard back. If you would like to add your voice to this conversation, tweet us. We're @thecurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, just search for cbcthecurrent. That's our program for today. I’m Mike Finnerty.

[Music: Kendrick Lamar song]

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July 14, 2016 full episode transcript

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