Peter Sloly, who served as a prominent reformer within the Toronto Police Service before his sudden resignation in 2016, has been named the next chief of police in Ottawa, the first Black person to take that position.

Sloly had previously been shortlisted to take over the top job in Toronto before the role went to current Chief Mark Saunders in April 2015.

On Monday, the Ottawa Police Services Board said Sloly hopes to take over as chief in October.

“We wanted to make sure the community saw their feedback reflected in the decision we made,” Board Chair Diane Deans said in a news release.

He will succeed long-serving chief Charles Bordeleau, who retired in May.

Sloly stepped down as deputy chief of Toronto police in February 2016, weeks after he broke ranks and publicly criticized the service’s direction, saying police needed to move beyond an unsustainable “reactive enforcement model.”

His exit came at a time when the Toronto service, like many across North America, was wrestling with major issues involving racial profiling, carding, use of force, treatment of people in mental health crises, a drop in public confidence and a rising budget.

“He was the first guy from the inside to say carding’s a problem, we gotta deal with it,” said former mayor John Sewell, who now leads a police watchdog group, at the time.

Sloly arrived in Canada from Jamaica shortly before his 10th birthday and before turning to policing he excelled as a soccer player in the Canadian national team system.

Serving as an inspector in the early 2000s, he was among the senior Black officers who told then-chief Julian Fantino that racial profiling did exist in the Toronto service.

He was promoted to deputy chief of executive command under then-chief Bill Blair in 2009 after just 21 years on the force — much faster than typical for the rank.

He was in that role during the 2010 G20 protests, for which only a handful of officers were formally punished for a sometimes violent and illegal response.

In 2013, Sloly led an internal review of police carding practices — a topic he called the “single biggest issue in policing” — but later said he was removed from the file.

And in January 2016, the month before his resignation, Sloly gave a controversial speech slamming the service’s ballooning $1.1-billion budget, its “reactive” policing model and the loss of public trust.

That speech drew sharp criticism from the Toronto police union, which called his approach divisive and distracting.

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Sloly resigned Feb. 10, 2016. He insisted his decision to leave had nothing to do Saunders being named chief, nor was he pushed out because of his public criticism.

“I was disappointed, I came back into work the next day and I kept contributing every single day after, right up until the very last day,” he told reporters. “I’m taking a break, but I’ll be back in some form.”

With files from Wendy Gillis and Betsy Powell

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