The undeclared war by the police against vulnerable individuals continues.
This time it was a quiet evening stroll and a simple quest for a slice of pizza that to their eyes merited a death sentence.
46-year old Charles McGillivary collapsed and died on Monday, August 1 shortly after being tackled and arrested by Toronto Police for no apparent reason near Christie Pits park as his horrified mother Ann looked on. Her frantic attempts to explain her son’s circumstances to the arresting officers were met with overt rudeness and a barked command to ‘back away’.
Charles McGillivary was severely disabled by a childhood accident that left him developmentally challenged and largely unable to communicate. Naturally the cops only saw this very large man who was not responding to their commands... and they responded as cops so often do.
As is increasingly becoming the norm, the police and the SIU alike are saying little about what took place, no longer even resorting to what was their standard litany of excuses. Clearly their mutual hope is if they stay off the radar this will quietly fade from the public consciousness and the media before any civil outrage has the opportunity to take root.
This strategy appears to be working. The kind of police violence and assumed impunity that in the past has resulted in large public protests (and even riots) seems to be creating hardly a stir among the populace these days.
Some heartless types are even lauding this kind of conduct by law enforcement. And Stephen Harper’s ‘law and order’ agenda will only amount to further escalation as police forces across the country pounce on what amounts to an opportunity to write their own ticket without the encumbrance of any kind of civilian oversight. Equally likely is that the draconian municipal cutbacks planned by the Ford administration in Toronto will leave the police budget untouched.
Last year there were at least half a dozen fatal shootings by Toronto police. Most of these resulted from Mental Health Act-related calls. The only instance in which charges were actually laid was the result of a botched ‘gang-related’ raid in which the man who was shot and killed wasn’t even the suspect the cops were looking for.
Most dramatic of these was the death of 25-year old Reyal Jensen Jardine-Douglas as he attempted to evade his parents’ efforts to have him involuntarily committed to a psych. ward. When the police (summoned by the parents themselves) boxed in the TTC bus he was riding in, Jardine-Douglas attempted once more to flee and was subsequently shot in the back. The cops are claiming he had a knife but this was never publicly confirmed.
There seems to be an increasing inevitability about the outcome of situations where the the police and vulnerable people/persons with any kind of disability encounter one another. In the case of Charles McGillivary simply taking the time to listen to what his mom was saying would have probably saved his life. But obviously this was impossible for individuals drunk on their own power and blinkered by prejudice to comprehend as a logical course to follow.
Racialized and poor communities have long been the targets of prejudicial and often exceeding violent interactions with the cops. So have more diffuse groups of individuals such as psychiatric survivors and (increasingly) other people with disabilities both real and perceived.
This reality was glaringly brought to the fore by a number of incidents of gross able-ism during last year’s G-20 summit, during which a deaf and mute arrestee was denied independent ASL interpretation by the cops, another man had his prosthetic lag confiscated after his arrest at Queen’s Park (a ‘weapon of opportunity’ was how the cops referred to it, if you can believe it!) and still another man (who actually had no involvement in the protests) was left to lie in his own excrement on a holding cage floor for hours after the police took his wheelchair and refused him assistance to use the toilet.
Subsequent to that, 9 people were arrested at an anti-poverty demonstration and two others were issued trespassing tickets. One of those ticketed was a woman with cerebral palsy who in fact had been in the middle of delivering a statement through a window at Liberal Party of Ontario HQ with the aid of her communication assistant when the cops barged in.
In a particularly asinine display of ignorance, the cops suggested this smart, highly capable woman be ‘taken to a hospital’ rather than arrested simply on the basis of her physical disability.
Many people (including some members of the psychiatric survivor community) have lauded the introduction of ‘community crisis teams’ that pair a uniformed cop with a ‘mental health professional’ (most often a psychiatric nurse) on patrols. First launched as a pilot project in the late 1990’s in Toronto’s east downtown area, the scheme was quietly granted permanent funding in short order and now there are a dozen of these teams operating in the Toronto area. (Advocates of the scheme are now lamenting that these teams aren’t operating in all 17 Toronto Police divisions on every shift, as if what we already have weren’t bad enough).
The drawback to this kind of project that at the end of the day it still amounts to vulnerable, scared, hurting human beings being forced into encounters with armed, uniformed cops, plus it grants extra powers to psychiatric personnel, who previously had no more legal right of entry to someone else’s personal living space than any other private citizen. Accompaniment by a police officer (with their power to enter private accommodations under ‘emergency circumstances’) means all the ‘mental health’ person needs to do is claim there is a ‘medical crisis’ within the premises in question to legally justify forced entry.
It is long past time to altogether stop involving the police in situations where innocent people are in emotional or mental crisis. We need to have trained volunteers from the psychiatric survivor community who can respond non-violently by offering reassurance to frightened or distressed individuals as opposed to the standard cop response of physical and verbal aggression, shackles, incarceration and (increasingly often) deadly force.
Where persons who may have other kinds of disabilities are involved, volunteers from the specific affected community also could become a part of similar initiatives, but this would also rely on the police developing a knowledge of when it is best to back off and call on others to respond, which given the size of the egos involved is no sure thing.
So-called ‘sensitivity training’ has proved largely useless when it comes to police officers so it is clear that other resources are indicated under these circumstances, especially in instances where criminal proceedings are unlikely to result from someone coming into contact with the police.
And in the case of others like Charles McGillivary, police (or others who may be intervening) desperately need to stop and listen to what informed bystanders might have to say before embarking on a potentially lethal course of action. Unless this happens there will inevitably be more tragedies.
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