Sammy’s Last Night

 By Kenneth Bagnell      

                                    One afternoon, a couple of years ago, I landed in Tucson on a task I looked forward to: doing a profile on that desert city, made memorable by the life of a great Jesuit missionary, Eusebio Kino, born in 1645 in what’s now north Italy. He crossed the seas to spend a quarter of a century in Mexico and Arizona, a brilliant man: astronomer, mathematician and cartographer. He established 24 missions and native people still revere him.

   Sadly, a day or so after I arrived in Tucson, a local paper carried a front page story reporting that several police officers had fired 50 to 60 bullets into one man. I couldn’t believe it. I remember saying to my wife that we’d better prepare for a public storm next day. I was wrong. There was more silence than storm. (An official study on US policing and killing reports: “reliable estimates of the number of justifiable homicides committed by police officers in the United States do not exist.” That’s just the way it is.

          All this came back to me in recent days when in Toronto and across Canada, we’ve been in prolonged shock and anger over the shooting of Sammy Yatim. He was an emotionally upset 18 year old son of a physician mother, a pediatrician. On an evening in late July, Yatim was standing alone aboard a streetcar in Toronto, a knife in hand. A police officer, at a distance of about 20 yards beyond the car, took aim and shot him with 9 bullets. It took 15 seconds. It was a grave tragedy all the way around. Even as I write, a month or more after the incident, the papers are still dealing with it. This tells us something deeply important: for newspapers – and other media — are mirrors of public sentiment. They reflect our concerns. And Canadians are deeply, profoundly concerned by what happened that night in Toronto late July. The Police Chief has opened a major inquiry. The Special Investigations Unit has begun its probe. The Ontario Ombudsman is reviewing it. Another public demonstration is planned in front of Police Headquarters. On August 6, over a month after the incident, The Globe & Mail has a Q and A interview with the Chair of the Toronto Police Board, Alok Mukherjee.

   Mr. Mukherjee naturally did his best, but was so obviously and highly cautious, he was thereby revealing. I understand why. I was, years ago, a young editorial writer on two Toronto papers, The Star and then The Globe. Now and then, the editorial board would have senior officers in for discussions on issues of police policy. The off the record talks were in general courteous enough but I soon learned that dealing candidly with the police culture on matters of citizen rights is very challenging. When criticized, even in off the record meetings, the police culture becomes not just defensive but extremely so.

   That “circle-the-wagons-defensiveness” is the biggest problem in dealing with misconduct. A political science PhD candidate at U of T, Jamie Levin, provides a telling personal example. A few years ago with his father, Levin was illegally detained through a police error in the family neighborhood. He lodged a complaint. Two police officers investigated his complaint! “Despite eye witness accounts of police misconduct,” wrote Levin recently in The Toronto Star, “and troubling inconsistencies with police testimony, it was determined that no further investigation was needed and my case was dropped.” (That decision, by the way, was delivered to him not by any independent overseer representative but by a police officer. Isn’t this a bit telling?) So July 30^th, in the wake of the Yatim shooting, Levin wrote: “Despite their claims of independence, the police watchdog agencies have clearly not maintained sufficient distance between themselves and the police, undermining their ability to conduct thorough and independent investigations.” Of course.  The extreme defensiveness of the police virtually prevents any oversight that’s independent and vigorous.

          But, in the darkness, as is often the case, there’s a light, a promising beam reflecting hope. It’s the massive public reaction. Even conservative voices, usually inclined to the “our cops are tops” thinking haven’t remained in silence. The National Post — a highly literate paper and the country’s most consistently conservative -– didn’t spare the rod. It’s insightful columnist, Raymond J. de Souza, a sophisticated Catholic priest, was as fair as he could be. He began by reminding readers that, after all, police officers are human: “Carved from the same crooked timber as all fallen humanity; people who work for the state can make mistakes.”

   That said, de Souza then launched his reprimand. It included not just the outrageous killing of Mr. Yatim, but other incidents from the cruel and fatal tasering of troubled Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport, then the rampant mismanaged policing of the G20 meeting in Toronto a few years ago. And he didn’t just rap police knuckles for their poor performance at the G20, but went on, as he indeed should have, to point out the predictable defensive aftermath: “The lengths to which police officers went to frustrate the subsequent investigation and avoid being held to account was, astonishingly, even worse than the conduct during the G20 itself.” I’d say that is to the point.

          All of this is not to distract from the fact that the killing of Sammy Yatim is a widespread tragedy, not just for Mr. Yatim, his parents, his friends and his life possibility. It is still wider, thereby including the officer who fired the nine bullets, his wife, his family, indeed his future. His life will never be the same. Nonetheless, there is light in all darkness and the light is from the public square. It all reminds me of a line in a novel published a few years ago called Gilead, by the eloquent American novelist Marilynne Robinson. An elderly minister is writing his memoir so that his very young son will, when he becomes a man, be able to read what his father’s life as a minister was really like. Near the book’s conclusion, the aged minister looks back on the sad events he’s witnessed and writes a sentence we might heed: “I have noticed in life that when bad things happen they are often accompanied by other and good things.” Indeed we see it, and we hear it, in the voice of the people.

          August 12, 2013                                                                30