Discipline required over video to build public confidence

How many citizens have to brave threats and intimidation from Toronto’s armed authority figures before the lesson is sufficiently taught to officers on the street?

Thestar.com
Jan. 24, 2017
By Edward Keenan

There’s a lot the video doesn’t show, it’s true. Like what happened before it starts — allegedly a man punching and spitting on a woman police officer and then kicking the window out of a police cruiser - and what’s going on around the man’s face, where police say he was biting another officer. The video doesn’t show any of that.

But there are things it does show pretty clearly. For instance, it shows one officer standing over the man being arrested as he lay on the ground and stomping on him even as the sound of a Taser being deployed is audible, and shouting “Stop resisting” as the man lay there apparently motionless. And then that officer pointing at the camera, which is about 20 feet away, and shouting “Get that guy out of my face, please.”

A woman police officer, in a bulletproof vest and with a gun on her belt, strides over to the cameraman, who protests that he’s a witness. “OK then, if you’re a witness then we’re going to be seizing your cellphone,” she says. The video shows that.

Then another officer, a man with a beard wearing a toque, leans in to the cameraman and says, “He’s going to spit in your face, you’re going to get AIDS. Stop recording or I’m going to seize your phone as evidence. You’re going to lose your phone.” The video shows that.

Then the woman officer repeats the threat to seize his phone. And then the video shows that the cameraman turns off the camera.

What the video shows, in other words, is police officers threatening and intimidating a bystander because, from a respectful distance, he wanted to be a witness to an arrest. Police spokesperson Mark Pugash says the arrest itself and the way it was conducted was legitimate. The video doesn’t show that conclusively, one way or the other, though it does raise questions. But the video does show that the officers involved in the arrest really didn’t want it on film, and were willing to abuse their power to prevent it from being recorded.

The video doesn’t show the cameraman, Waseem Khan, but it pretty clearly shows his bravery. Armed agents of the state who are, you could say, “in his face,” are walking toward him, forcing him to move back, threatening to take his property, and worse. Someone’s going to spit on him and give him AIDS? What kind of threat is that? It sounds unhinged. Someone who might say that to you — what else might they do?

Still, Khan kept documenting, for a while, and it is because he did that we have this evidence of the arrest, and how it was conducted, and how some of the police involved conduct themselves.

Toronto police complain, now and then, that gangsters say things like “snitches get stitches” and invoke a “code of silence” to intimidate witnesses. And yet here are two officers specifically, directly saying, “If you want to be a witness,” bad things are going to happen to you. Apparently because, in this case, the police will make them happen. Lose your phone. Get spit on. Horrible diseases, even. Hell of a message for a public servant to deliver to a video camera on the street.

The video doesn’t show that it was only two weeks ago that two police officers who had aggressively blocked a witness from videotaping an arrest avoided misconduct charges because of arbitration, apparently by offering a “sincere apology” that satisfied Mike Miller, the citizen involved, that the police department would not do this kind of thing again. “I believe now that if citizens are going to do this, they are not going to be intimidated,” Miller said.

This video shows that he was, apparently, premature in drawing that conclusion.

It is worth pointing out that the police brass apparently agree that it is unacceptable for cops to do this. “Let me be clear: We have told our officers if somebody is videoing them and they are not obstructing and interfering they have every right to film,” Pugash says, calling this a “teaching moment.” He said threatening to take someone’s cellphone was “the wrong approach.” He suggests Khan can file a complaint. He says the officers involved will get a talking to from their superiors. And that the professional standards unit, which has the authority to issue reprimands or order other disciplinary measures, is looking into it.

Which is somewhat reassuring. But the question many of us have is: How many citizens have to brave threats and intimidation from armed authority figures before the lesson is sufficiently taught to officers on the street? Before members of the force realize that they cannot and should not attempt to intimidate witnesses who are just trying to ensure justice is done, and seen to be done?

Perhaps the professional standards unit can start to provide some answers, to make it a real “teaching moment.” Perhaps real discipline and consequences are required, to ensure that the lesson is learned by officers, and to show the public that the force is not just paying lip service to respecting people’s rights and accepting public accountability.