Former Toronto Police Services Board Chair Still Advocates for Reform in Policing

By Neil Armstrong

Alok Mukherjee hopes that his new book, Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing, will be a resource to the community as it continues to advocate for “a different model of policing, about transformation, about change.”

“It’s an effort to raise a public discussion of a service and institution that I think has outlived its utility,” he says.

To write Excessive Force, the former chair of the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) teamed up with Tim Harper, a veteran Toronto Star journalist and former national affairs columnist, to produce a book that the general public would read, written in accessible language.

Mukherjee, who served as chair from 2005 to 2015 and is now a distinguished visiting professor, equity & community inclusion, and department of criminology at Ryerson University, says in 2005 when the TPSB began its work it was without a big plan.

It was more a question of dealing with some specific issues that the board felt would be tackled through a new policy, better trust and relationship with community, greater diversity in recruitment, hiring and promotion, and more focus on human rights.

Mukherjee says some years after doing all of that he realized that the results were not what the board was expecting.

“People like the first black deputy chief, Keith Forde, did an amazing job in transforming how the organization looked. Peter Sloly, who became a staff superintendent and then a deputy chief, did some amazing work on police-community engagement, on some alternative ways of engaging with the community. But, those were good efforts but they were not really producing the fundamentally different result that we wanted,” says Mukherjee in his office at the university.

The former head of several provincial and national associations of police boards says he began to think about where was the mismatch.

He says there was a mismatch between what the police was really being asked to do and what the model was.

“So, the model that has been inherited from nineteenth century is that you rely on this armed uniformed police officer for everything, but the everything these days has many parts. A small part of it is dealing with what I call conventional crime, violence, murders, theft, etc. But the major part of what police do these days includes social issues, medical issues, issues of age, safety and wellness in a big kind of way. And I began asking if relying on that armed uniformed police officer was the best way to serve in those areas.”

Published by Douglas & McIntyre, Excessive Force is described as rare, “not only in Canada but in the western world,” because it is written from the community’s perspective. There are many books about policing but written either by academics or former police officers.

As someone from the community who was not a career cop, and as an ordinary citizen member of the TPSB -- not a politician -- Mukherjee had a particular take on the issues in the backroom of Toronto’s policing, which he elucidates in each chapter.

There are no books that he knows of that articulates the community perspective in this model of civilian oversight existing in Canada.

“That’s because, partly, civilian oversight of policing is not given the status that is given to the mayor or the police chief, and yet, it is the cornerstone of community-based policing in Canada much more so than in the United States,” he says.

He is hoping that one of the things the book will do is bring more prestige to the role of civilian oversight, “the fact that you can use public interest as the lens through which you govern the police.”

“When you involve yourself so deeply with an important organization you also want to learn from it and you also want to think about it,” says Mukherjee about his reason for writing the book.

Being chair of the TPSB was a profound experience for him as he lived through “some of the most difficult challenges that we faced both as a community and as a police organization.”

These included the troubles around the G20 Summit; the police killings of Andrew Loku and Sammy Yatim; and racial profiling and carding, which disproportionately targeted blacks.

 “It was during my time that we began to talk about the need for a new model of policing, not only because the cost of policing was rising but also because we began to realize that the way we provide services is a nineteenth century model that we’re imposing on twenty-first century.”

Toronto became a laboratory for him of looking at, thinking about, and trying to implement change.

After he left the board, it seemed to him that there were some questions that mattered to the community and although he wrote newspaper articles it seemed important to put all of that together in a book.

Mukherjee and Harper knew of each other but had never met and were brought together by a mutual friend to discuss this book.

“We worked together quite well and I’ve really come to know him as a friend and I certainly respect his views and the work he’s doing,” says Harper noting they collaborated for 21 months.

Mukherjee notes that each chapter is signed off by both of them and is truly a joint-effort.

Harper has been a journalist for forty years, thirty-four of which were spent with The Toronto Star. He ran bureaus in Vancouver, Washington and Ottawa and spent more than five years writing a national affairs column syndicated from coast to coast.

One of the reasons he took on this book was because he had never written about policing, having built a career around writing about politics, so he wanted to tackle something different. 

 “I think it gives you a very good idea of how policing over the years has fallen into patterns that can be best summed up by ‘because we always did it that way,’” says Harper.

He thinks the book provides a fantastic overview on what needs to change and how to change it. 

“The fact that he was able to endure ten years there and never waiver from his principles, I think, is quite valuable and provides a very valuable read of ten years of reform and a look forward as to how reform should continue,” says Harper about Mukherjee.

In Chapter 7 entitled “New Mayor, New Chief,” Mukherjee notes that after much thought he is left with two disturbing conclusions about the selection of Mark Saunders as police chief instead of Peter Sloly in 2015.

“One that the fix was in. It seems work had begun on grooming an alternative to Sloly soon after he was made a deputy chief by the board against Blair’s wishes. Saunders’s rise through the senior ranks – a meteoric rise – began almost immediately after Sloly’s appointment and the public speculation about Sloly being the next chief.”

He notes that unlike Sloly, Forde, McLeod and other black officers, “Saunders had kept his head down, had never spoken about or involved himself in issues of discrimination, had made the right friends and had not rubbed the chief or the police association the wrong way.”

Mukherjee’s second conclusion was that this is an example of the insidious ways in which racism manifests itself.

He notes that there had been a general sense that Toronto was ready for a chief who was from a racialized background, preferably black.

“It would have been extremely problematic, in light of the deep concerns about the relationship between the police service and the Black community, if the board had not selected a Black chief.

“But this had to be balanced against the interests and comfort level of those who exercise social, economic and political power. A Black chief who was seen as too invested in the Black community, too radical, too independent of the establishment –  not “one of the boys” – would not have been acceptable. But a chief who was Black and yet “one of us” would fit the bill.”

The 295-page book also examines the police treatment of its own members in mental health distress and the battles with an entrenched union that pushed back on Mukherjee’s every move toward reform.

“In spite of, or as a result of all this, Mukherjee played a leading role in shaping the national conversation about policing, sketching a way forward for a new type of policing that brings law enforcement out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century,” notes a synopsis of the book.

Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing was launched at Ryerson University on April 5, 2018.