Of course there was that singular moment, after George Floyd's execution was captured on camera, when the idea of 'de-funding' or, to use Sewell’s word, 'de-tasking' the police began to not only seem viable but, in some communities, imperative. Among our lawmakers, though, that notion appears to have had about as much resilience as a soap bubble floating over a sea of broken glass (“De-task the Police, Says Former Toronto Mayor”, an interview with John Sewell in The Tyee, Feb. 16, 2022). It’s no wonder, then, that so many BIPOC activists across the country are justifiably calling for the outright abolition of our police services or, for that matter, that Jesse Wente would choose to end his memoir Unreconciled with the quote above, demanding that it’s white people’s turn to replace the myth of this country with the truth.

My own journey towards understanding the reality behind Canadian policing began as early as grade ten. That year, I was bullied by a former friend for reasons that are still unclear to me. His campaign of fear and intimidation climaxed, when 'Corey' paid a fellow classmate to threaten me with a knife on the front steps of the Secondary School we attended. Shortly thereafter, an odd thing happened: I stopped seeing Corey in any of the classes we shared. After he’d been gone for more than a week, I asked a mutual friend, whose father also happened to own the local newspaper, about his absence. He'd learned from one of his dad’s sources that Corey’s father, an O.P.P. sergeant stationed in Bracebridge, had been transferred to Timmins and taken his family along with him.      

       Apparently, my friend continued, the sergeant had pulled over a speeding car on Highway 118 and found that both the teenage driver and her equally underage female passenger were drunk. He’d offered, allegedly, to let them off without charges in exchange for a blow job. The girls had refused and, after their parents filed a complaint, Corey’s father had been demoted and sent to Timmins by way of disciplinary action (a story, I'll add, that never appeared in his father’s newspaper).

     Several years ago, when I asked another mutual friend about Corey, I was told he had since killed himself. Whether his father had anything to do with him taking his own life, I’ll never know.

During the intervening years, I’ve not just personally witnessed off-duty officers proudly displaying tattoos related to the Aryan Brotherhood, while harassing peaceful Indigenous protesters in Regina at a Vigil for Oka, but also observed a casual act of police brutality in Surrey, BC, and two O.P.P. officers 'shaking down' the Middle-Eastern owner of a pizza restaurant just after midnight on North Bay’s Main Street. Furthermore, I've heard seemingly endless first-hand accounts of police brutality and corruption in every one of the six provinces I’ve lived in - corruption that includes collusion with criminal organizations throughout Northern Ontario. And that, of course, is in addition to the highly publicized accounts of police brutality, up to and including murder and rape, that have become an all-too-common feature of our daily news cycles.

      Meanwhile, every single time I myself have called the police, the only outcome was to provide me with more evidence that to report a crime is, at best, a pointless waste of time, regardless of what issue I contacted them about; my son's stolen bike, an incidence at the youth center I was running where one of the kids held a knife to a young Syrian refugee’s throat or the time a meth-crazed father threatened me with violence for banning his teen daughter from the same center, as a result of her bullying other kids and staff.