The recent police killing of Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old black man of South Sudanese heritage, has prolonged an appalling trend in Toronto since the late 1980s. Black people account for at least half of all people killed by police during that time, even though we’ve made up less than 10 per cent of the population.

Before we insist on better training or smarter technology for police, let’s be blunt about the disproportionate harm they have done to black men, particularly those in crisis or experiencing mental illness. Until we begin to address anti-black racism in policing, and in daily Canadian life, black people will keep suffering at the hands of police.

In a rare opinion piece in the Star, former police chief Bill Blair wrote last year that he and his force “do not tolerate racism or racial profiling in the Toronto Police Service.” Blair was responding to increasing outrage about carding, the local police practice of stopping and documenting innocent residents, including a shockingly disproportionate number of black Torontonians.

“Our contacts with the public will never be in direct proportion to census figures because poverty and unemployment are disproportional,” Blair wrote. In other words, as long as black people in Toronto are disproportionately poor, ill, and without work, we should expect the lion’s share of police attention, and the potentially damaging consequences of that attention.

The key question Blair’s statement evokes is why unemployment, poverty, and mental illness unevenly affect black Torontonians. The answer is our country’s historical and ongoing plague of anti-black racism, which persists today even though our leaders outwardly condemn it. With a classically Canadian nonchalance, our institutions normalize, justify, or simply ignore systemic anti-black racism, and it festers like an untreated wound.

In August of 1988, David Deviney of the Metro Toronto police (now the Toronto Police Service) shot and killed Lester Donaldson, a 44-year-old black man who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and had a history of violent police encounters. Deviney was one of five officers who entered Donaldson’s room in a rooming house and confronted him for 20 minutes. Donaldson produced a paring knife and Deviney shot him.

When the province decided to lay manslaughter charges against Deviney, hundreds of officers staged a day of impromptu sit-ins in their patrol cars, and many left their weapons at home in protest. Art Lymer, the spokesperson for the police association of the day, warned that his officers ''are going to be reluctant to arrest black people, and they'll just take over the city.'' Deviney was ultimately acquitted of manslaughter.

Four months after Donaldson’s death, Peel police constable Anthony Melaragni shot Wade Lawson, an unarmed 17-year-old-black youth, in the back of the head while Lawson was driving a stolen car. The fatal bullet from Melaragni’s gun had been hollowed out to expand upon impact and burrow deeper into its target than a normal round — the use of such ammunition was illegal in Ontario.

Melaragni, too, was found not guilty of manslaughter. Days later, four officers in Los Angeles were acquitted of the infamous videotaped beating of a black man named Rodney King, and riots ensued across the United States and Canada. After hundreds of protestors smashed retail store windows and raided businesses on Yonge Street, City TV reporter Ben Chin declared that the unrest “had little to do with race.”

Our collective cowardice in naming racism has continued over the years, and so has the use of excessive police force against black people: Sophia Cook, shot in the back by police in 1989 while riding, unarmed and oblivious, in the passenger’s seat of a car; Hugh Dawson and Ian Clifford Coley, two black men who were shot four years apart in the 1990s by the same local officer, who escaped criminal convictions in each of their deaths; Michael Eligon, shot and killed while wearing a hospital gown in 2012 near Toronto East General Hospital, where he had recently been admitted for a mental assessment.

“We are not racist but we are all human,” Blair wrote in last year’s opinion piece. He described the so-called “bias-free” training his officers have been receiving. “The science of bias teaches us that even the best-intentioned, most decent and honourable people can be influenced by the implicit bias all people have.”

Yet no one is born with a specific bias to mistrust, fear, and criminalize black people. Those attitudes are a learned part of our culture and its accompanying discrimination of dark-skinned people. We cannot avoid conversations about race with the feeble excuse that we are not racist. The sooner we name and acknowledge anti-black racism, the sooner we can eliminate it.

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Correction – July 17, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled the surnames of Art Lymer and Anthony Melaragni.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.

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