statism watch

Glowing articles about ‘elite police’ squads, questioning youth and demanding their ID on the street. Good intentions or not, it’s a dangerous precedent, the thin edge of the wedge that eventually wipes out your right to not have to deal with internal checkpoints and police harrasment. You can bet there’s a lot more to this story on the ground in Malvern and paramilitary squads and random police raids are coming to your door (or apartment building) as well unless you, the privileged, speak out about this. Make everybody see: This is how militarized patrols started in other jurisdictions – now, the police carry submachine guns in London, UK. Now, the police carry submachine guns on the NY subway. Now, your bags are being searched to get on trains. Police around the globe feel empowered now to merely point to the existence of crime in order to swell their own operational mandate and justify treating everyone like criminals. The cameras and drones are on their way as well. This is the intended meaning of ‘the day the world changed‘. So remember, citizens, you do not have to identify yourself to police or submit to a search unless they have a reasonable expectation that a crime has been committed. Yet.

Flashback: Winter Olympics on slippery slope after Vancouver crackdown on homeless | Toronto Star Columnist Fiorito: The cops came and took my gun | UK: Anti-terror stop and search policy ruled illegal by European human rights court | UK: From snapshot to Special Branch: how my camera made me a terror suspect | UK: Photographer questioned under anti-terror laws for taking pictures of Christmas lights | UK: Big fall in police use of stop-and search powers after outcry | UK Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’ | UK anti-terrorism strategy ’spies’ on innocent | UK: Paramilitary police placed on routine foot patrol for first time | Olympic security follows protester’s friend | Toronto police seize 400 guns in ’safety push’ | EU Plans Massive Surveillance Panopticon That Would Monitor “Abnormal Behavior” | Pentagon Caught Subverting Protest Group | UK: Big Brother state wants even more spy powers | Toronto TAVIS special police corps demanding ID on city streets | 50 Toronto high schools to have armed police presence | DoD Training Manual Describes Protest As “Low-Level Terrorism” | Lunchtime lockdown to promote healthier eating: T.O. school plan | UK: Police caught on tape trying to recruit climate activist as informant | UK police maintain databank on thousands of protesters | UK: Government ‘using fear as a weapon to erode civil liberties’ | Schools seek more police as crime drops | Former MI5 chief: UK Ministers ‘using fear of terror’ to restrict civil rights | Police presence in high schools makes the grade | UK: Calling the police to account for anti-photography law | Olympic security boss puts protesters on notice | UK Big Brother police to get ‘war-time’ power to demand ID in the street | Safety report author Falconer on armed police in schools: “Facile” | Activists seen as potential threat to Vancouver Games | Frequent school lockdowns raise questions | 27 Toronto schools to get armed police presence | Two trustees stand opposed to armed police in schools | Toronto Police offer gun owners shiny new camera, home visit to disarm themselves | Armed police officers heading to high schools | Protestors added to database of terror suspects | RCMP conducts random search and seizure on Canada Day | Papers Please: UK cops stopping millions in streets | Armed Police to Roam Toronto High Schools | $4 Million Earmarked for Cameras, “Respect” at Toronto Schools | Machine Gun-Toting Officers To Patrol NYC Subway

Moira Welsh, The Toronto Star
February 8, 2010

TAVIS initiative joint effort of province and police

It’s Saturday night in Malvern, and a young black man is leaning over the side of a police cruiser, arms spread wide, crying for a bit of mercy.

“I never did anything wrong,” Dane Brown says as police officers put him in the back of their squad car. “I did nothing! I’m just here to see my baby mother.”

Brown’s indignation grows louder when Sergeant Steve Harrigan arrives to check on his officers, part of the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy. Harrigan leads a TAVIS Rapid Response Team of 16 officers who sweep into areas like Malvern or Jane-Finch, stopping people on the street, in parks, driving cars or in apartment stairwells. They are looking for guns, drugs or information that will lead them to gang-related crime.

Called “targeted policing,” TAVIS is the creation of the provincial government and Toronto police in response to 2005’s “year of the gun,” when gang violence erupted across the city.

Its mandate is to cut crime in high-risk communities across Toronto. One of the ways TAVIS does that is by stopping thousands of people in the targeted neighbourhoods, home to many minorities. This leads to arrests and a growing database of personal information that police gather from a practice called “carding.”

Officially called “Field Information Reports,” the collection of names, addresses, acquaintances and skin colour on small, white cards is a long-time investigative practice used by all Toronto police officers. TAVIS, however, was given the mandate of focusing on high-crime areas. As a result, its officers card more people, and are likely to card more blacks, than any other police unit.

According to police data, TAVIS carded 24,540 people in 2008. Analysis of that data shows that the percentage of black people carded by TAVIS is 41 per cent, compared to 23 per cent with other police units. (Census data shows 8.4 per cent of Toronto’s population is black). In 2009, TAVIS reported that it had contact with 105,800 individuals, community groups and businesses, a number that includes contact cards but extends to other police outreach efforts.

Some neighbourhoods have welcomed the increased police presence: TAVIS officers stop men who are carrying drugs or weapons. But many youths complain they are repeatedly carded while simply walking home from school or from playing basketball with friends.

While a cop can walk up to anyone and ask questions, a citizen does not have to answer those questions, legal experts say. If in a vehicle, the driver may be compelled to show identification or give a statement.

On Empringham Dr. near Morningside and Sheppard Aves. in Scarborough, where subsidized townhouses are packed into narrow streets, the man sitting in the back of the police cruiser tells Harrigan he has no criminal record.

“Sir,” says Brown, 23, “if I get arrested tonight I can’t go to work on Monday. I told them I had marijuana. I said I had a knife and I gave it to them.”

Brown’s car is backed into a townhouse driveway, in the neighbourhood known as ‘Empz’ to locals. Home to minorities, many of them black, Empringham Dr. has been the backdrop of gunfire, stabbings and murders over the years.

One week earlier, 19-year-old Vincent Wright, another black man, was shot in the chest on this street. He died in hospital. One year earlier, Wright’s cousin was killed a few kilometres away.

The Star spent a Saturday evening in mid-January riding with a TAVIS unit. After the police roll call at 32 Division in North York, Harrigan said his officers were to focus on Malvern in northeast Scarborough, because they had information another murder would take place that night to avenge Wright’s killing.

A few hours into the evening, Harrigan stands on Empringham Dr. as Brown pleads for his release. The officer who arrested Brown tells Harrigan he was following the man’s car because his license plate validation sticker had expired. Brown had backed his car into the driveway of a townhouse unit just before the police cruisers stopped him. A resident of the townhouse told police that he did not know the man they arrested.

Harrigan listens to the Brown’s complaints. He lets his officers continue.

They take Brown to 42 Division and have his car searched. An hour later, Harrigan gets an update from the arresting officer. Brown is facing numerous charges as a result of his interaction with police tonight: possession of stolen property (car licence plates), two counts of possession of a prohibited weapon (for two “flick” knives that open with one hand), possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking (for crack that police said they had found in his car), and possession of marijuana.

Brown was telling the truth about his criminal record: He does not have one.

Anger at police is common among young black men, many of whom who say they are stopped too often.

Some, like 18-year-old Christopher Clayton, say they have had positive experiences with white officers who speak to them in a polite and professional manner. “I don’t generally believe police are racist,” he says.

What makes him angry is being questioned when he is simply walking down the street.

“I’ll be with my friends and they stop us,” says Clayton, a Grade 12 student at Westview Collegiate in the Jane-Finch area. “They’d ask our names, the names of our friends, where do we live?

“One time they went into our personal stuff — they said it was to make sure we weren’t carrying weapons. I don’t like it. I didn’t do nothing; why are they doing this to me?”

But as Harrigan says, “Our unit is doing what we are supposed to do.

“If the violence is happening in this neighbourhood, then this is where we should be.”

“But how do we do it without the perception that we are just picking on some people? That is the biggest hurdle.”

The TAVIS mandate is simple: Reduce crime. Make neighbourhoods safer.

It was created in response to the 80 homicides, 240 shootings and 50 gun-related deaths in 2005. Many shooting victims were young black men, like 18-year-old Amon Beckles. Another victim was Jane Creba, a white 15-year-old, who was shot while shopping on Yonge St. on Boxing Day.

In the aftermath, the Liberal government met with Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and told him to come up with a strategy to end the violence in Toronto’s high-risk neighbourhoods.

TAVIS is the strategy Blair proposed. It includes three separate groups: the Rapid Response Teams, which Harrigan works with; the individual TAVIS officers who work in each separate police division, and a summer TAVIS program that focuses on both policing and community-building events.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services approved the proposal, and has done so every year since, giving it annual funding of $5 million.

In an interview, Blair said that he understands why some who face TAVIS’s tactics believe they are being oppressed.

Changing those views will take time, he added.

“If we do this right and we get the bad guys out of the neighbourhood and if we build your capacity to be a safer neighbourhood, you’re less likely to be victimized and you’ll be less vulnerable, you’ll need a lot less of us, and we’ll be fine because we’ll go other places where we’re needed.”

Blair says police had an opportunity to connect with residents though two summer of TAVIS projects, in the neighbourhoods of Jane-Finch and Keele-Eglinton. They helped in local beautification programs, planted flowers, held bike races for kids, and hosted community barbecues.

“They (TAVIS) were there all the time,” he says. “The bad guys left.”

Blair argues that TAVIS’s community policing work supports its focus on tough enforcement.

“When you can create a good relationship with a population, it becomes a lousy place to carry a gun and victimize people or deal drugs.

“So, they go away. Some get arrested and locked up. Some of them disperse, and dispersement isn’t entirely effective, but it helps — certainly it helps that neighbourhood.”

Steve Tasses watched it work in his neighbourhood, at Keele and Eglinton.

Tasses is Greek and owns Variety and Video, a local convenience store. He is also head of the local business improvement association. After a rash of shootings in 2009, Tasses worked with TAVIS officers from the unit’s summer program as they held community events and forced criminals out of local parks.

He said TAVIS officers focused on one park in particular, Coronation, a neglected community jewel. Instead of being filled with kids riding bikes or playing ball, Tasses said it grew into a hangout for drug dealers and gangs.

“TAVIS eradicated them,” he recalls.

“They went in there on bikes, on foot and on horseback. The police were there all day. The gangs got fed up, and got out.”

Police then helped community groups fill the park with families. They cleaned out the graffiti and resurrected an old horseshoe pit. One volunteer organized baseball games for children.

“A lot of people said they were happy with TAVIS getting rid of the bad guys,” says Tasses. “They want the program to keep running all year — they don’t want the gangsters to come back.”

Police say TAVIS is making a difference. The four Rapid Response Teams, each with 16 officers, made 1,108 arrests last year. All TAVIS units seized 280 firearms, including handguns, long rifles and replicas.

Harrigan says each Rapid Response Team will card between 50 to 75 people in one shift. During the night the Star rode with the TAVIS, the team carded 57 people.

In one case, police stopped a woman driving near Neilson Rd. and the 401. “If you have a car with the wrong plates on it,” Harrigan observes, “it gives police an opportunity to ask questions.”

A male passenger with the driver refused to give police his name. He doesn’t have to co-operate, says Harrigan, because he’s a passenger.

In another case, police pulled up behind two cars at a strip mall. One car was a champagne-coloured Cadillac driven by a young black man. A second, smaller vehicle belonged to a young black couple who appeared displeased over their encounter with police.

After the couple drove away, police chatted with the man in the Cadillac for a few minutes before bidding him goodnight. Out of earshot of the officers, the man said to a reporter, “Do you think this is right? That I get stopped when all I am doing is going for pizza? It makes me lose my appetite.”

Harrigan said his officers told him that when they pulled into the parking lot, the couple was sitting in the Cadillac and they had a wad of cash two-inches thick. Harrigan’s officers told him that the Caddy driver was a known drug dealer.

(A Toronto Police spokesman later said officers did not have cause to search his vehicle; an hour later, in Richmond Hill, York Region police pulled the Cadillac over, did a breathalyzer test, and in searching the car found cocaine and marijuana. The driver was charged with two drug possession counts. His licence was suspended for three days).

The next stop was a planned “walk-though” of an apartment building at 100 Wingarden Ct., near Neilson Rd. and Finch Ave. E. Sometimes, Harrigan says, dealers sell drugs in apartment staircases, intimidating residents as they go about their daily business.

Police swarm the building from all sides so drug dealers don’t run out the back door when they come in the front, he points out.

Tonight, 12 officers stand in a parking lot, surrounding Harrigan as he plans the event. He sends two officers to block the exit of one staircase and two to block the other. Another group is to head up the elevator and walk down the stairwells on each side of the building.

“Let’s go,” he tells them.

Police cars head for the apartment building. The manoeuvre is executed as planned. In the stairwells there is graffiti favouring the Bloods and several startled residents, but no drug dealers. A second apartment walk-through at a new location yields the same results.

“It’s been a quiet night,’ Harrigan says as the shift ends after 1 a.m.

“We were told there would be a retaliation killing tonight. Let’s hope that our presence here stopped that from happening.”

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