Police Chief Bill Blair’s career has long been defined by his determination to confront racism inside the force. Shameful then, that he ends that career with an act of defiance defending the force’s “carding” practices. His decision to do so not only incinerates his own legacy of goodwill, but will make his successor’s tenure harder.

We’ll get to that, but first, let’s rewind 20 years, to when most people in the city first met Blair.

51 Division police officers in 1995 had a relationship with their community around Regent Park that was defined by confrontation and racism. One cop told theStar at the time that the job of police there was to “go out and kick ass.” Officers called the division “Fort Apache,” after a 1981 Paul Newman movie set in the Bronx about police who viewed their station as an outpost in enemy territory.

In August 1994, a drug raid held up as an example of “community policing” involved rounding up every black man in a park, “whether they were playing dominoes, kicking a soccer ball or dealing drugs,” before charging seven of them and letting the others go.

Then-CityTV producer Dwight Drummond filed a complaint in 1994 that he and his friend had been racially profiled and subject to a “high risk takedown” at gunpoint. When the officers involved in Drummond’s complaint were charged, the rest of 51 Division staged a wildcat strike in January 1995 — still the only strike in the police force’s history — barricading the station doors and refusing to patrol for a day. In the aftermath of the Fort Apache Standoff, the staff inspector in charge, who said the strike was caused by “politics and bull----,” was removed and put up for discipline. William Blair, a former Regent Park beat cop, was promoted out of the homicide squad to take over the rogue division.

Weeks after he arrived, there was a race riot, in which 45 cars of police officers fought with hundreds of local residents who were throwing bottles and screaming. Police said it was sparked by interference in a drug arrest, while residents claimed it began with an officer shouting a profane racial slur at a bystander. The upshot was eight officers injured, three residents arrested, and many bystanders pepper-sprayed.

At a community meeting the next day, recounted as a turning point in a Toronto Life profile in 2011, Blair acknowledged racism in his division (just as “racism is a problem in society and among all humans,” he said) and promised to confront it head on.

A year later, the Star ran a story about Blair winning the respect of local activists with his community policing approach, the origin of the reputation that propelled him to chief. Back then, he said his approach involved having police know the people they were policing by talking to them. “If there are 18 kids on a street corner and you know 15 of them, then the chances of you having to grab all of them to get the drug dealers who residents have complained about is very slim,” he told the Star at the time.

Fast-forward to 2005, when Blair was sworn in as chief. The outgoing boss, Julian Fantino, often seemed to view his job as leading an occupying army. When the Star documented the force’s widespread racial profiling practices in 2002, it was a bombshell Fantino denied had landed. He denied the force racially profiled anyone, said he was disappointed the Star had looked at racial data at all, and accused the reporters of being “intent on causing trouble.”

For its part, the Toronto Police Association, the union representing cops, launched a $2.7-billion libel suit against the Star.

So it was significant when, at his inauguration as chief right on the steps of police headquarters, Blair once again confronted the problem head on. “There is no greater challenge to our relationships with diverse communities than the corrosive issues of racism and racial bias,” Toronto Life recounted him saying.

Blair was commended in his years as chief for his cordial relationship with the human rights commission. For actively recruiting a more diverse force of officers. For promoting and mentoring black officers, especially deputy chief Peter Sloly (a leading candidate to replace Blair). “‘Black leaders’ engaged on this file have the perception that the police department is trying to improve relations and is more open to criticism and change,” my colleague Royson James wrote in 2010. “As well, inside police headquarters, the senior management is more enlightened.”

James was writing then about the troubling revelation that the force’s “carding” practices — notably, part of the community policing initiative Blair himself had made the force’s standard — unfairly targeted, stigmatized, and persecuted young black men in the Toronto.

The calls to reform carding became a chorus. Eventually, the police board demanded that the racist practice needed overhauling. In response, Blair, despite the optimism James had expressed, dug in his heels and refused the key changes needed.

James has recently written a series of scorching columns on how Blair let down the city by stubbornly defending the practice of harassing people without any clear public safety purpose and creating police files on those who’ve never broken the law. Most recently, he reported the astoundingly candid observation of police board chair Alok Mukherjee that the board had only one option other than compromise — to charge the chief with insubordination.

It’s interesting to note that the practice Blair appears willing to torch his legacy to defend seems to have sprung from the philosophy that initially won him progressive accolades. In Regent Park and afterwards, he advocated police talking to people in the community and knowing them. Carding involves police talking to people and recording those interactions so that the police know them. Maybe that explains Blair’s inability to see or deal with the monster he created. But it is a monster that will continue to prey on innocent people, especially innocent black men, and to eat at the city’s trust of its police force after he’s gone.

As a boy scout, I was taught that you always leave a campsite cleaner than you found it. Whoever comes next should find an even better situation than you did. Here, in his final months in office, Blair has refused to do that. He arrived promising to address racism and racial bias, yet the mess over the racial impact of carding is of his own making. Despite good information, good advice from some of his own officers, and orders from his civilian overseers, he refused to fix it on his way out so the new chief could arrive to a clean slate.

Instead, the new chief, black or white, will find a racially charged battle waiting for him, with reformers hungry to fix carding on one side, and the status quo advocates within the force and the police union on the other.

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A fine hello, courtesy of the guy saying goodbye. And exactly the kind of mess many thought Blair would be the man to clean up.

Correction- April 16, 2015: This column was edited from a previous version that said police chief Bill Blair is ending his career with an act of “insubordination” and that police board chair Alok Mukherjee had characterized Blair’s intransigence as actionable insubordination in a previous interview with another Toronto Star columnist. In fact, Mukherjee was talking about options available to the board, which included charging the chief with insubordination.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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