Toronto police “substantially” overestimate how competent they are at dealing with intercultural issues, which can result in members believing they “get it” and misread conflicts between police and Toronto’s diverse population, reveals a report based on a voluntary survey of more than 800 staff.

The report, commissioned by the Toronto Police Service, paints a service-wide profile of an organization that has a “fuzzy sense of what intercultural competence looks like and what culturally responsive policing involves.”

Outside consultants, including a former Toronto police board member, completed their report in March 2015 — amid intense controversy over racially skewed carding and an aggressive anti-violence unit that is now disbanded — but the report was never made public.

The Star obtained the 135-page report and 270 pages of appendices in a freedom-of-information request.

The report, which included interviews with 15 senior commanders and comments from focus group sessions, provides an inside look into Toronto police culture and highlights areas for service-wide and individual improvement, based on an assessment tool no other Canadian police service had comprehensively used before.

Read the executive summary

Read the full report

As part of the Toronto police PACER review, a group of 809 officers, senior commanders and civilian employees volunteered to take an “Intercultural Development Inventory” test. It’s a questionnaire-based tool developed by Mitchell Hammer, a U.S.-based academic and consultant. Toronto-based diversity consultant Hamlin Grange, a former Toronto police board member and former journalist, was also brought on board, in April 2014, through his company DiversiPro, to do the service-wide study.

The IDI test has been used mainly in the U.S. by large corporations, schools and government to gauge intercultural competence.

Grange said he could not comment on the findings because of a confidentiality agreement with police, but he did say police and any organization that engages with the public “need to become more effective in how they engage with the changing demographics of Ontario and Canada and the world.”

As for police services, Grange said, it is “no longer good enough for police officers to only simply attend events or take part in activities in specific communities. Granted, there are great benefits to this; however, being exposed to cultural differences is not the same as experiencing those differences. This will require a change in the mindset of police officers and a change in the culture of policing.”

The report on the Toronto police tests makes 16 recommendations, and estimates it would require a “significant commitment to intercultural training” over three years to double the number of police staff — from 30 per cent to 60 or 65 per cent — who have an “intercultural mindset.”

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Half of those surveyed scored below that, in the “minimization” range, defined as a “transitional mindset” that highlights similarities between groups of people and uses them as a strategy for “navigating the values and practices largely determined by the dominant culture group,” which “can be a survival value for non-dominant culture members and often takes the form of ‘go along to get along.’ ”

Those with more intercultural mindsets, about 30 per cent, fall into categories of “acceptance” and “adaptation” — people who can “recognize and appreciate patterns of cultural difference and commonality in their own and other cultures.”

The testing found one in seven police staff fell into a “monocultural mindset,” which includes positions of “polarization” and “denial,” which take “us versus them” perspectives and “disinterest” in other cultures and operate based on “stereotypes about the cultural ‘other.’ ”

The goal is to reach “intercultural competence,” defined as the “capability to shift cultural perspectives and appropriately adapt behaviour to cultural differences and commonalities.”

In response to Star questions, the service, through spokesperson Meaghan Gray, said a new phase of the project has been approved and is expected to begin in the fall, led by Deputy Chief Barbara McLean.

The decision to keep the report’s findings from the public was made at the Command level, which includes the chief and deputy chiefs. It was made because the project was “intended to be a developmental opportunity” for members and to release it “seemed contradictory” to a commitment to confidentiality to members, reads the police response, though, senior leaders aside, no one is identified in the final report.

Among the report’s findings:

A “substantial” overall, service-wide overestimation “gap” of 23 points between perceived intercultural competence and “developmental orientation.” Senior uniform officers had a significantly smaller gap and scored higher on the “acceptance” and “adaptation” end of the test continuum. Such a gap in these types of tests, said Gray, is not “unheard of,” and many people think they’re more culturally competent than they are.

Civilian service members had the lowest scores for “developmental orientation” and the highest percentage of individuals operating with a “polarization” mindset.

Scores differed little depending on years of service.

Staff who reported more monthly interaction with culturally diverse individuals were no more interculturally competent that those with less interaction..

There were concerns from the beginning that internal resistance to the PACER report and suspicions over its recommendations “could spill” into the intercultural development program. Some police leaders were unwilling to even read the PACER report “yet have concluded that PACER is designed to hurt” officers, reads the intercultural report’s review of leader comments. However, others saw PACER as “best in class.”

And there were worries about privacy and just what would become of the personal data gleaned from a 50-question questionnaire.

There was also debate about whether completing the questionnaire should be mandatory, and used in screening of new recruits. In the end, the test was voluntary and the results anonymous. For those who requested a personalized debriefing and personalized intercultural improvement plan, identities were protected.

PACER was championed by former deputy chief Peter Sloly, considered an agent of change and a frontrunner to replace then-chief Bill Blair. After a reconfiguration of the police board, Mark Saunders was chosen to replace Blair. Sloly left policing and declined to be interviewed for this story.

Sloly, Blair and 13 other senior police brass and managers were interviewed as part of the PACER-recommended intercultural development program.

Frank, anonymized comments in the report from those interviews — and 29 focus groups involving about 200 police staff — reveal internal struggles about the changing nature of police work, worries about a lack of public trust, particularly from newcomers to Canada, recognition of damage caused by carding, concerns over allegations of racial profiling, mistrust of diversity efforts, a male-dominated workplace, younger officers no longer conducting pro-active investigations, and difficulty dealing with the mentally ill and media scrutiny.

“The moment we look at someone wrong, it’s in the Toronto Star. So we are more cautious about the way we do our jobs,” read one comment from a focus group session.

Said one police leader, on community engagement: “We are trying to create sales people, relationship builders out of soldiers; this is a difficult task.” And, another leader, on credibility: “We can only do our job if the community trusts us. Some in the community think we are racist or engage in racial profiling.”

There were also acknowledgements of outright stereotyping by some officers of Muslims, seeing them as “terrorists or supporters of terrorists,” read one comment attributed to a police leader.

Other comments highlighted “positive” outcomes in encounters with citizens from diverse backgrounds, such as an incident where a family wanted to wash the body of dead loved one before police could check the body and gather potential evidence. After a “little convincing” by police that they needed to do that to catch the person responsible, the family was “OK with us doing our work.”

But, mostly, the comments in the report highlight the daily struggles police have while doing their jobs.

The final intercultural report was delivered at a transitional — and tumultuous — time for the service. A new chief was coming, Alok Mukherjee’s time as board chair was soon to end, a number of legal and public challenges were questioning police practices, mostly carding, which had been suspended by Blair at the start of 2015.

Mukherjee, now at Ryerson University and co-author of a recent book about his time as chair, recalled that the service did not share the results with the board, so Grange approached him directly and, together with one of two U.S. counterparts, gave the board a confidential briefing in the fall of 2014 based on an interim version of the report.

Less than a month after the final report landed, a reconfigured board that included Mayor John Tory chose Saunders as chief. He was also a preferred choice of the Toronto Police Association.

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In an email to the Star, Mukherjee said he was “disturbed by both the extremely low response rate and the findings. It was hard not to conclude that the police service was far from ready to provide bias-free policing.”

The volunteer response represents 11 per cent of service staff. The report’s authors write that the sampling provides a “relatively low margin of error” of 3.3 points, and the results can be used to “generalize” to the services 8,000 or so members.

“In my view, this was an important exercise and needed not only to be repeated but also used as the basis for any service-wide training,” Mukherjee said.

An additional 67 members, including 44 recruits, took the test after the release of the report, Gray said. More than 200 who took the test took part in individualized feedback sessions.

The next phase of the project involves training and licensing police staff to administer the tests, which may remain voluntary. The “in-house” program will last five years and cost an estimated $157,000, Gray said.

Current police board chair Andy Pringle was unable to provide comment on the intercultural assessment report because it was never brought before the civilian board for consideration, said board senior adviser Sandy Murray.

The final Intercultural Development Inventory report includes anonymous comments and quotes from interviews with Toronto police leaders and focus groups with uniform and civilian staff. Here is a sampling, by theme.

Police procedures

“We work in a place where we are taking away people’s rights and we have to protect those that they still have. There is a thin line that we walk in taking away and giving rights.” — Focus group

“When we say that carding is an intelligence-led component to police … if our actions divert from that … if we, for example, stop a kid who is an A student … people in that community will react in a negative way.” — Police leader

“On the operational side, we are over-policing and underserving marginalized communities. We point to crime reduction statistics; but as crime has gone down, mistrust has gone up. Stop-and-frisk is a good example; it has safety value, but its social cost is a loss of public trust.” — Police leader

Community relations

“They (newcomers to Canada) have (a) perception of policing from back home. We get judged before we get there.” — Focus group

Intercultural competence

“I don’t think the average uniform member understands the nuances of the communities they serve, whether it be Sri Lankan, Jamaican, etc.” — Police leader

“A current LBGT hot topic is the ‘trans’ community — a very misunderstood community. I have seen officers working with trans who don’t know the community. Problems are caused by ignorance of that community. I have also seen situations that were handled beautifully and compassionately.” — Focus group

(There is a need to give parents) “the resources to manage their children. I notice it in the Caribbean culture and Indian culture. It is very difficult to try to explain to them that they can’t use belts as corporal punishment.” — Focus group

“I answered a call for neighbour dispute. N1 was a White woman. N2 was a hijab-wearing Somalian. N1 took offence that neighbours had cultural differences although they were doing nothing wrong. We mediated and told White woman that she was in the wrong. Somalian family was grateful that we treated them with respect.” — Focus group

“We have an over-reliance on diverse TPS members, just because we have hired diversity does not mean we understand diverse values.” — Police leader

Human resources

“We are part of an archaic hierarchical command system. We need to develop a more collaborative, intuitive system. If you want change you have to be the change. The people above the officer level have the last say and there’s not enough collaboration.” — Focus group

“Within the service we have focused on certain groups networking using (Internal Support Networks) to make connections with other members of the same cultural background, but I think we should have more networking opportunities as a multicultural service. To me it looks like we are segregating ourselves.” — Focus group

“Need to hire good, educated, diverse people, promote good diverse people.” — Police leader

Race

“You approach the door and the first thing that comes out of his mouth is ‘you stopped me because I’m Black.’ It’s impossible to defend yourself from this. I’m stopping you because of an HTA (Highway Traffic Act) violation.” — Focus group

Mental health

“There is a disconnect between police officers and hospitals … doctors are untouchable if they don’t Form 1 (involuntarily commit) the patient, but police officers are under obligation to respond … anytime someone says they will commit suicide, we have an obligation to take them to hospital … if we don’t we face litigation … hospitals are a revolving door for the mentally ill and police officers have to deal with it.” — Focus group

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