By ARNOLD A. AUGUSTE, Publisher/Senior Editor
Someone called me recently to remind me of an article he said I wrote about 30 years ago in which I suggested that in order to be promoted on the police force one had to be a member of a Lodge.
I don’t remember writing that article but it sounds like something I might have written. I know I would have said that my understanding is that one had to be Irish in the early days in order to join both the police force and the fire services.
As a bit comedian Bill Maher used to do on his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, “I don’t know this for a fact but I know it’s true”, it does ring true to me and no one has ever disputed it.
Things have changed over the years. We have had a number of Black officers hired and promoted up the ranks, we have had two deputy chiefs (at the same time) and, of course, a Black chief.
So, why did Supt. Stacy Clarke feel she had no choice but to try to give Black officers in line for promotion a heads-up regarding the questions they would have to face? She claims it was to level the playing field. Which means that, from her vantage point in the upper ranks of the Toronto Police Service, she was aware of inequities that we could only suspect.
Policing is hard. For Black cops, it has been a lot more difficult.
Many are the stories of the virulent racism Black cops have faced from fellow officers with little or no support from the senior ranks if they complained. Add to that, the racism and or disrespect some have been known to face from the general public and the rejection from many in their own community.
An old friend of mine, long retired from Toronto Police, told me of an experience he had as a young cop some 50 or so years ago. He said he stopped a White motorist for a traffic offence only to have the guy spit on him. He said he reached for his wallet in his back pocket, opened it to look at the photos of his wife and kids, put the wallet away, wiped the spit and continued to write the ticket.
He said the motorist apologized afterwards but that experience never left him.
Sometime last year, we ran a story of an interview Ron Fanfair did with a retired cop, one of the early hires, and while he said he enjoyed being a cop, the one regret he has is that he was not allowed to be promoted to sergeant. He said that would have provided him with a better pension.
The article didn’t elaborate on why he wasn’t promoted but his is a common story throughout the history of our community. There is enough reliable evidence that Black people have not always been treated properly.
There was another article we published in which a former educator who retired as a vice-principal said that although he qualified several times for promotion to principal he was never given that opportunity. We could only speculate as to why that was.
In the banking sector, we have heard stories from Black employees who said that they were required to train new White employees who then were promoted over them and became their supervisors.
There is the mantra that most people from underrepresented communities – women, LGBTQ2S+, Black people and other people of colour – that one has to be twice as good to get half as far. Then when one gets a valued position for which they are most likely overqualified (you know, twice as good) questions are raised as to whether or not their hiring was fair. Cases like this only serve to reinforce those suspicions.
There is another mantra, usually from those same communities, that we lift as we climb; we don’t pull the ladder up behind us.
That seems to be what Stacy Clarke was trying to do. She wanted to lift up others of her race, just as all those other White guys have allegedly done before her whether they were Lodge members, Irish or just family members. She said she wanted to level the playing field. And there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that she personally benefitted from her actions.
Clarke does not strike me as a stupid person. So, if she felt that the playing field was not level then I take it that it wasn’t (isn’t), in spite of the two former deputy chiefs and the police chief.
There is also the saying that two wrongs don’t make a right. It is never right to do the wrong thing. But that goes both ways. If those in authority have been putting their thumbs on the scales for others as has been suggested, at the expense of qualified Black candidates, that is not right either.
This police service has come a long way over the years thanks to the work of a lot of good people on the service and in the community, but it seems that there is still more to be done.
This case should be a wake-up call for everyone involved.
