Toronto votes for a mayor on Monday, and both people with a realistic chance of winning are promising to put more police on the street. The service’s own numbers say who is on the receiving end of its use of force: Black people were nearly 40% of incidents in 2020 and about 10% of the city.
That figure, 39.4%, comes from the first race-based report Toronto Police Service published on use of force and strip searches. Black people also made up 31% of strip searches, roughly three times their share of the population. Black people were 2.3 times as likely as white people to have a firearm pointed at them when police did not perceive them to have a weapon.
Interim Chief James Ramer said when the data came out: “As an organization, we have not done enough to ensure that every person in our city receives fair and unbiased policing. And for this, I am sorry and I apologize unreservedly.” Moya Teklu of the Black Legal Action Centre said the complaint processes “are long, retraumatizing and very rarely result in remedies to the wronged people or accountability.”
Challenger Brad Bradford, a city councillor, has pledged to hire 1,000 officers by the end of his first term, including a satellite campus of the Ontario Police College in Etobicoke. His plan would cost about $143 million a year once fully in place, roughly 10% of the police service’s $1.43-billion budget. Mayor Olivia Chow said he “probably doesn’t read the budget.”
Chow points to what has happened on her watch. Her administration has added police officers and mental health crisis workers, and she has proposed a four-year, $28-million expansion of youth violence prevention programs reaching 15,000 young people and 500 parents and caregivers a year. She also announced that 54 Division, closed in 2018, will reopen in 2030 at a cost of $120.2 million. Toronto’s homicides this year are less than half of 2024’s total, she says.
So the campaign is a contest over how many officers, not whether to add them. What it does not answer is a question the 2020 data raised: when the service grows, who will it be policing most heavily? Neither candidate’s published police plan, as reported by the outlets covering the race, sets a target for reducing the gap in force, or commits to publishing new race-based figures on a schedule.
Black Torontonians are not one constituency, and they are not asking for one thing. Some want more officers in neighbourhoods where shootings have taken young people. Others want crisis teams and youth programs to answer calls that do not need a gun. The 2020 report is the only race-based measure the service has released on force, and it is now six years old.
Polls close Monday, Oct. 26. Whoever wins will inherit a police budget of about $1.4 billion and a service that has already apologized once for how it treats Black residents.
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