Jamal Francique’s father told a coroner’s jury on Friday that his son was “glue to our family.” Francique, 28, was shot by a Peel Regional Police officer during an attempted arrest in Mississauga in January 2020 and died of his wounds. Almost seven years later, the inquest into his death opened with his parents describing the man he was.
His father, Derek Francique, and his mother, Ann-Marie White, addressed the jury on the first day. The family has said it wants to understand why the police response ended so violently, and what part anti-Black racism played in the decisions officers made.
It has been a long wait for a public hearing. In January 2021, the province’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) cleared the officer who fired four shots, finding no wrongdoing. Six drug squad officers took part in the arrest at Francique’s townhouse, according to a 2021 submission by the family’s lawyers at Ma’at Legal Services.
Those lawyers asked the SIU to reopen the case and lay charges against the six officers, arguing their actions “at the very least constitute criminal negligence and possibly murder.” That is the family’s allegation, not a finding. The same submission pointed to a contradiction in the SIU’s own report, which says in one section that a gun was found in a satchel and in another that it was found in his waistband. It also noted that of 28 police shooting deaths the SIU cleared between 2017 and 2021, none ended in charges.
The SIU decides one thing: whether a crime was committed. It does not ask whether the plan was sound or whether help came fast enough. An inquest is the place in Ontario’s system where those questions can be put to a jury, with the family in the room. Its recommendations are not binding, and police services are only asked to respond.
For Black families in Peel, that is the point. The record of a police killing usually reaches them in pieces: an oversight summary, a family statement, a lawsuit. An inquest is the one place the evidence can be laid out together.
The jury should be able to answer what the SIU report left open: who gave which order, when paramedics were called, and why six officers were needed to arrest one man. Peel police should hand over every record it holds, and the province should treat the jury’s recommendations as the least it owes the family. The inquest continues in the coming days.
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