The Toronto Police Service Board’s Public Consultation on Protests and Encampments is a Sham. We Have Urged Torontonians to Boycott the Process Altogether.
Our Charter Protected Rights are Not Up for Consultation!
We have come together today as a coalition of community organizations and activists to speak out against the Toronto Police Service Board’s (TPSB) consultations taking place on Public Order. This process is a sham and a scam that will make communities less secure and less safe.
We condemn this sham consultation process –– it is nothing but a mere façade.
Over the past decades, there have been dozens of consultations on TPS policy and practices including the racist practice of carding, and ongoing disproportionate harassment, arrests, and racist killings of Black, Indigenous, racialized, and poor peoples. Despite apologies and promises to do better, more money continues to be allotted to the already expansive police budget. This results in increased use of biosurveillance technologies, more weapons, and an expanded militarized police force.
The TPSB is tasked with shaping police policy and approving budgets. While the board is often portrayed as an independent body, this is misleading. The TPSB is a highly political body, with members approved by the City of Toronto and Province of Ontario, that effectively acts as a rubber stamp for the police service. It prioritizes the interests of the political and economic elites over the rights and safety of Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans, unhoused, poor, and other marginalized communities who are subjected to everyday forms of violence by the police.
The consultation on Public Order is not only a sham but also a scam. By participating in this TPSB consultation process, individuals risk having their information funneled into TPS databases, including “Project Resolute.” Project Resolute is an initiative by the Toronto police that has drawn significant scrutiny for undermining the Charter-protected rights of expression of pro-Palestinian activists by misapplying “hate crime” charges against them.
Consultations on Public Order in this moment of sustained protests against the genocide of Palestinians are suspect. The presumption and reporting that these protests have been violent and out of control has been used to trigger a consultation process on Public Order. Where we should see work to end the TPS’ violent actions towards pro-Palestinian protesters, instead there is further suppression of all forms of protest and dissent in the city.
WE the undersigned:
URGE all groups and organizations to boycott this consultation process on Public Order which is aimed at undermining freedom of movement, expression, public protest, and in this moment, particularly seeks to suppress protests in support of Palestinian human rights and self-determination.
DEMAND an end to the sham and scam of the Public Order Consultations. The issue here is Police Disorder and its accompanying violence against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters.
DEMAND an end to the aggressive and violent policing against pro-Palestinian protesters who are on the streets, calling out elected officials and companies complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and fighting for justice on university campuses.
DEMAND that police end their attacks on people in encampments around the city, as well as those using harm reduction services, the unhoused, and the poor.
DEMAND that police be defunded and resources redirected to affordable housing, income supports, childcare, healthcare, warming centers, senior services, transit, education, and the many other services which truly keep us safe and alive.
Additionally, the TPSB’s vague and subjective criteria for excluding submissions to the current public consultation under the pretext of “offensive language or hate speech” allow for the censorship of pro-Palestinian, anti-colonial, and abolitionist voices. By design, this lack of transparency ensures another way that the public record will be skewed to favour increased policing, disproportionately benefiting the more privileged communities that the police are inherently set up to protect.
By avoiding the transparency of a meeting which usually happens in front of the watchful eyes of the media, advocates, and community members, the Board is giving itself another way to manage the narrative and filter out critical perspectives, again making it easier to justify increased policing measures and budgets. The sudden shift to this asynchronous deputation process, where it is left entirely up to the TPSB which submissions become public and which do not, further reflects the TPSB’s intent to control and suppress dissent. In the current climate, where the TPS has been overly concerned with “public order” related to pro-Palestinian protests and encampments, this submission format limits the impact of community voices on decisions about daily life and public space.
According to a recent investigation by The Breach, Project Resolute is supported by a secretive committee within the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, known as the Hate Crime Working Group. The Working Group effectively provides politically motivated backing to the police’s efforts against Palestinian solidarity activists, including surveillance and pre-dawn raids of their homes. In numerous cases, however, charges against these activists have been dropped by the Crown, though not before damaging the livelihoods and reputations of the people arrested.
Similarly, TPS has also imposed conditions on Indigenous land defenders and activists which bar Indigenous people from acting against and speaking out about the racism, discrimination, and police violence exerted against them and others on their own traditional territories––a policy that lays bare the recent history and ongoing reality of settler colonization on these lands.
As evidenced in the Ontario Human Rights Commission report published in December 2023, discriminatory policing practices such as this are nothing new for the TPS. This long-standing and well-documented record of TPS’s racist, anti-Black application of policing is a truth that members of the Black community in Toronto have been naming and protesting for decades, only to be repeatedly ignored by both the TPS and its board.
Recognizing this history of discriminatory policing and the associated dangers of speaking out, as well as knowing that the results of this consultation will be biased by design, community leaders have already advised their communities not to participate in this consultation process, emphasizing that “WE KEEP US SAFE.” By boycotting, we aim to protect our communities from further harm and challenge the legitimacy of the TPSB’s process.
SIGNATORIES
Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction
The Quilombo Coalition
Voices for Unhoused Liberation
Palestinian Youth Movement
Occupy U of T for Palestine
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network: Toronto
York Centre 4 Palestine
Jews Say No to Genocide
Movement Defence Committee of the Law Union of Ontario
Rising from our Roots
Coalition Against Pinkwashing
No Pride In Policing Coalition