A coroner’s inquest began Thursday into the death of Jamal Francique, a 28-year-old Black man from Mississauga, Ont., who was shot in the head by a Peel Regional Police officer in January 2020. The officer was never charged. The inquest is the hearing where the questions the criminal process did not ask can finally be put on the record.
Plainclothes officers from Peel’s vice and narcotics unit tried to arrest Mr. Francique on Jan. 7, 2020, in a parking lot near Winston Churchill Boulevard and Eglinton Avenue West, for breaching his bail conditions. Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the civilian agency that investigates police shootings, found that officers had boxed in his Acura and that he reversed and drove forward to get out. The officer fired four times. Mr. Francique was hit at least once in the head and died in hospital days later.
SIU Director Joseph Martino found no reasonable grounds to believe the officer committed a crime. His report said the car was coming at the officer within metres and that the officer reasonably believed his life was in danger. An inquest is not a trial. Because Mr. Francique died after a police shooting, one is mandatory under Ontario’s Coroners Act, and a jury can only make recommendations aimed at preventing similar deaths.
His family tells a very different story. In a $101-million lawsuit against Peel police, the Region of Peel’s paramedic service and the SIU itself, they allege the officers used excessive force on an unarmed man and did not identify themselves as police. The claim says the officer “subconsciously or consciously acted on racist beliefs” and that no one approached the car for about 20 minutes. It also alleges paramedics took him to a hospital 34 kilometres away rather than one 2.3 kilometres from the scene. None of this has been tested in court.
His mother, AnnMarie White, told the Peel police board in 2022: “My son was loved, he was my world, he meant nothing to the Peel Police officer who left that bullet stuck in the back of his head.”
The SIU answers one narrow question, whether a crime was committed, and in the vast majority of cases the answer is no. Families like Mr. Francique’s wait years for anyone to ask the wider ones: why a bail arrest ended with four shots at a moving car, and what happened in the minutes afterward. Peel has a record on what follows. At the same meeting where Ms. White spoke, the police board had left a coroner’s report on the 2015 killing of Marc Ekamba, a Black man in a mental health crisis, off its agenda, though it contained 35 recommendations.
The jury will hear evidence and make its recommendations. Peel’s board and chief should commit now to answering each one publicly, with a deadline.
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