A Night With Police
How a summer night streetcar ride ended with guns drawn, tasers in our faces, and a candid conversation with Toronto Police.
The events detailed below took place on the night of June 25th of this year, with the incident continuing to the early hours of the 26th.
The events of that night will be delivered in chapters, and a link to our conversation with police will be at the bottom of the story.
It’s 10:00 pm, and three friends and I have just hopped onto an east end Toronto streetcar. Within seconds we’d have guns in our faces.
Hours later we’d understand we were believed suspects in a supposed armed robbery that had taken place just minutes before our incident with police. They’d claim three young men were robbed with tasers of their belongings, and point at us as fitting the description of the alleged robbers.
The prequel.
The night seemed pretty typical and began as most usually do. We all meet up at our friend's place, decide where we want to go for the night, figure out Uber and TTC, and eventually make our way downtown. Little did we know we’d be so brashly confronted with Toronto’s burdening police issue.
It’s a little ironic: for us, going out is one of the only ways we can even begin to separate ourselves from the troubling aspects of our day-to-day lives. Chill with friends, meet some people, have a couple of drinks, and leave all existential crises at the door — race, police, whatever.
But sometimes the universe doesn’t work that way — and you’re confronted directly with the very thing you’re doing everything you can to avoid.
In retrospect, we’d be given front row seats to a CNN, CBC, BBC (take your pick) special on police violence and force. An instance that could’ve very easily taken a disastrous turn, as so many unfortunately do.
The incident.
The four of us stepped onto the Broadview 504 streetcar around midnight, just minutes away from the station. We were in great spirits, and headed to a pre-drink at a friend’s downtown condo. As usual, we assumed our regular position at the back of the less than crowded train, and spoke loudly, as young people do at 12am on a Friday, about the shit we were going to get into that night.
We notice something weird on our ride almost immediately. A number of Toronto Police cruisers are passing our streetcar — and they’d soon have it surrounded. As has become customary in Toronto, there was a drunk-ish homeless man sitting a row or two in front of us, and as per usual I think we all kind of expected the police to be there for him.
We all thought: they’d jump on the streetcar, ask him to politely get off, and we’d be on our way, right? No.
Instead, 45 seconds into our ride, two officers with their hands fastened onto their pistol-clad waistbands charged onto our streetcar, screaming at us to have our hands in the air. To be fair, none of us really knew what was going on.
As prepared for it as we should be, it’s a weirdly out of body experience having a weapon-toting cop roaring at you to have your hands in the air for something you know nothing about.
A third officer very quickly followed them onto the streetcar, this time with a taser pointed fastly on the four of us, but we all followed their prompts, because we knew where this could go.
At this point we’re asking the police everything from: “What did we do?” “Is this for real??” “This has to be a mistake” to “We just got on here.”
But none of it did any good.
The few scattered people on the train watched, confused, as police with war-like precision walked methodically to our end of the car, hands still fastened on their weapons.
Once they got to us, they began with the regular Toronto Police spiel: “Where are you coming from?”, “When did you get onto the streetcar?”, and “What’s your business here?”, with the taser wielding officer asking to search one of our bags.
My friend politely told the officer he was free to go through it himself, to which the officer declined. (My assumption being he knew as well as we did that he had no right to search his bag). But because of what we’ve seen so often in the media, with police overreactions, and dead young men; he decided to just go through his bag himself.
While in conversation with the three officers in question, a fourth approaches the front door of the streetcar. He clumsily squeezes his way between the two cops standing directly in front of me and awkwardly stumbles into our conversation.
By now, things seemed to have died down, but the fourth officer reignites the tension. He, as they did minutes ago, starts yelling at us about why we’re on the (publicly available) streetcar at night. And although it had by this point become obvious that this was nothing more than a case of wrong place at the wrong time, he loudly continues to demand that we “show him some fucking identification.”
Of course, we say no. I tell him that I’m uncomfortable with offering my identification when it’s not necessary — and he becomes visibly agitated.
When asked whether we’re under arrest he sharply replies, no.
But here’s what made this all the more alarming for all of us — almost immediately into our interaction with the fourth officer it becomes increasingly clear that he is visibly intoxicated. No way around it: his eyes were glossed over, he was slurring his words, swaying back and forth, and the faces of those watching, the TTC operator, and his fellow officers, in particular, all but confirmed this for us.
In retrospect, I wish this could now unequivocally be proven, but with all eight of our hands still firmly in the air, getting a camera out could’ve been the difference between life and death.
After a few more minutes of TV-like police questioning, threats of arrest, and false custody, the fact we were completely innocent had been all but confirmed. So finally, I proceed to ask the fourth officer for his name and badge number. And this is where everything changed.
He gave us a coy smile and beelined for the closest exit. I locked eyes with the two officers immediately in front of me and began to get up after him. Not soon after, those same two officers blocked my path to the exit, as the officer believed to have been drunk continued to his vehicle, which he then swerved off in.
At this point I’m incensed, screaming at them for bullying us, and yelling at them for wasting everyone’s time. I’m leaving no doubt that they understand it is interactions like this that cause the police tensions that plague our inner cities today.
They stare back at us blankly, the curve of their lip just barely hiding a shared triumphant smirk. They’d won.
Even still, the guilt on their faces was palpable, it was definite, and it was gross — they knew what they’d done.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. It’s deeper than the actual offending officer, but it’s those that proudly stand beside them in blind solidarity, fully aware of their imprudence.
It’s the officers that stood and watched as Eric Garner cried out for help 11 times, the cops that mangled Freddie Grey’s body in the back of that court van, and the officers that left Michael Brown’s lifeless body in the middle of a summer street for a grueling four hours.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamour of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people — Martin Luther King.
They are the blue wall of silence, and they are the greatest contributors to the reality so many of us face today.
I’d never seen the institution of policing work with such an extraordinary efficiency. I was watching centuries of history materialize in front of my eyes, and I felt helpless. It was equally fascinating and abhorrent.
I guess even I, deep down, would sometimes like to buy into the idealistic rendering of our police — some small part of me is still devastated every time I’m reminded that some of us just don’t have that liberty.
I, like so many, saw with my own eyes what all of you see on your Facebook feeds and TVs every day. It’s an experience that can almost become impossible to separate from your own reality when you’re overwhelmed with these images in the way that we are.
In men and boys like Trayvon Martin, Andrew Loku, Tamir Rice, or even Sammy Yatim — you can’t help but see yourself. That takes a toll, and its effect is something that doesn’t get talked about enough — a sort of post-traumatic stress that we talk nothing about.
It literally feels like every day we see another die at the hands of an overzealous officer. And its mental toll becomes especially true in a town like Toronto: a city that stop and frisks its minority population at a greater rate than even its worst American counterpart.
The possibility that you might be next becomes a weight you put on every time you walk outside your door. And run-ins like this only reinforce that.
The Aftermath.
Hours after the altercation we couldn’t stop talking about it. We still felt helpless. As you’d imagine, It’d completely thrown off the course of our night, and we couldn’t believe how easily the situation could’ve turned deadly. If nothing else, we were happy we hadn’t yet been more intoxicated ourselves at the time of the incident.
After much prodding on my part, we decided to head down to 55-division and file a formal complaint; hopefully to find out who the fourth officer was, at the very least.
Once finally allowed into the building we were met with a supervisor, who introduced us to a woman he’d claimed had been on the scene (outside the streetcar albeit). She predictably reassured us that she had “not known any of the other officers on scene,” which figures, I guess.
The supervisor would continue to bring in two additional officers that had responded to the call (a few streets behind us). They were little to no help, and over the course of a two-hour conversation, seemed intent instead on lecturing us on effective police protocol; why racial profiling doesn’t exist in Toronto, and how I may indeed be a reverse racist.
Here’s the catch though: I recorded the entire interaction at the station. They were unaware, and speaking pretty candidly because of it. And I have over 40–50 minutes of talking time, which if nothing else offers a pretty clear and relatively unprecedented look into the mind of Toronto’s police.
The conversation is devastatingly fascinating, and It’s what you’d never see: a first-hand account of a group of young minority men and an active police officer engaging in an open and intellectual discussion. It’s what we need to see more of, but sadly probably wouldn’t have been possible had they known I’d been recording.
We were eventually sent home without the names of the officers involved, no closer to finding out who that fourth officer was, and with an assemblage of sheets on how we could later file a report. But the interaction, scary as it was, taught me a great deal about how to deal with police, and this is important.
I need people to understand that in that moment, no matter how glaring the incivility of an officer, no matter how obvious the misconduct or mistreatment — you cannot win. No matter how inconceivably disagreeable the current system holding our officers accountable is, or how much it may hurt your ego, make sure you make it home. Because in that tempered moment, it’s impossible to beat them. Make sure you’re able to tell your story.
Don’t leave it to them. Never leave it to them.
As for me, I’m a project baby, raised wholly to Toronto’s inner city. So trust me when I say, the beautiful potential of our ghettos are a fountain completely untapped.
An unfortunate byproduct of this is that nearly all data empirically guarantees the fact I’ll soon suffer another burdensome run-in with police because of it.
Just as the emotional weight of what could happen begins to lessen, the universe will remind me again, right on time: there’s still a world of work to do.
Until then — here’s to none of us becoming a hashtag.
The conversation below was recorded at Toronto’s 55-division police station in the early hours of that night. It’s a 30-minute piece of a much longer recording, and in it we hear an officer speak about how he would’ve had his rifle pointed at us had he been on the streetcar, why inner-city kids don’t join the force; race, profiling, and violence, among other things.
Take a listen below, and keep the conversation going.
