Tension: In Toronto, Concerns about Police Racism

Those who attend the Malvern Christian Assembly in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough will not soon forget what happened there Sunday evening, January 8. The sermon had just finished and the invitation was under way at the Pentecostal church, 30 percent of whose 500 members are black. Suddenly, four police officers burst in and arrested five teenagers, four of them black. The officers spared no threatening, abusive, and profane language, even when addressing church leaders.

The police were acting on a tip that burglars of a flea market five miles away were inside the church. The case turned out to be one of mistaken identity. Led by its senior minister, Richard Trenholm, the church registered a strong complaint with the two police departments involved in the arrest. The police apologized publicly and placed the offending officers in intensive multiculturalism and crisis-management courses.

Canada’S Miami?

The church accepted the apology, but the incident heightened tensions in Toronto over alleged racism. Within the past year, two Toronto police officers have been charged with manslaughter in connection with the separate shootings of two blacks, drawing comparisons with race-related problems in Miami, Florida.

To Eustace Meade, long-time pastor of the 162-year-old First Baptist Church of Toronto, a 350-member black congregation, there are important differences between the situations in Toronto and Miami. Meade, whose church began out of the movement of black slaves from Southern states into Canada in the 1800s, explains that minority groups in Miami face monumental and grinding poverty, whereas those in Toronto share a measure of the city’s economic prosperity. The unemployment rate among minorities, for example, is just 3.5 percent. Meade nevertheless believes that the problem in Toronto is real.

Meade entered the public spotlight late last year, playing a conciliatory role after the police shooting of a 17-year-old black youth. Because the victim had a Baptist background, Meade was asked to officiate at the funeral and at a tension-filled memorial service. Some blacks believed that those who did the shooting should have been charged with murder instead of manslaughter. Police union officials argued that the officers should not have been charged at all. Meade urged that neither side take the law into its own hands.

Bridge Building

Part of the tension in Toronto is over the question of which black leaders ought to represent the black community. Meade agrees with the police contention that some black leaders have used the racism issue to raise their leadership profiles. But he disagrees that police should discuss tensions only with black leaders of their choosing.

An evangelical, Meade has urged black Christians not to back away from racial issues, as some have, but to provide leadership and to build bridges, including bridges with controversial black leaders. He said he has found that radical black leaders respect his willingness to stand for his Christian view.

Art Francis, a Dominican-born black police officer who is on the executive board of the Toronto Fellowship of Christian Peace Officers, said he is “not so naive as to believe there is no racism” within the Metro Toronto police force. Francis became a Christian nine years ago, after five years on the force. He says his Christian walk has completely reshaped his attitudes toward people of other races. “When you grow in the Lord you don’t see [people who are different] as riffraff,” he said. “You see them as sinners like yourself.”

Francis believes the outcome of the Malvern Assembly clash will be instructive both to police and to the Christian community. He said officers of all races need to learn the customs of various groups and adjust their own attitudes, adding that multiculturalism and stress-management courses offered to police aid this process.

Meade notes, however, that just three of the multiculturalism course’s 88.lessons touch on racism. He contends that racist attitudes among police are so deeply embedded that a much more direct approach is needed.

By Lloyd Mackey, in Toronto.

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