In 1994, at 28 years old, Jim Rankin got his big career break and joined the Toronto Star’s city section as a reporter and photographer. He quickly discovered the newspaper was also the region’s unofficial police complaints bureau. A significant number of Black Torontonians told him they’d been stopped by police engaging in “racial profiling,” the targeting of people based simply on the colour of their skin. Still, Rankin would hear only a small fraction of these stories that haunted the city for decades, terrifying one segment of the population as another denied that they could be real.

There was the teacher who counted down from 10, waiting for the inevitable flashing lights, every time he saw a police cruiser pull up beside him; the law student stopped so often he began to feel South African-style apartheid was alive and well in Toronto; the young journalist approached by officers for walking down streets he “didn’t belong” on, in a city he had come to call home.

Rankin was struck by the fear and anger associated with these stories. So, he spent years trying to understand why the relationship between cops and Black citizens was so clearly troubled. After many interviews with police representatives and members of Black communities, he’d gathered hundreds of anecdotes and countless accusations from both sides. But he didn’t have enough data to comprehensively report on the sense of injustice.

That began to change early in 1999, his fifth year at the Star. Rankin was at his desk, looking through a run-of-the-mill press release from the Toronto Police Service (TPS) about a male robbery suspect.

As he read it, he noticed a bizarre reference, just one word, an adjective that would prove crucial to understanding the tense relationship between Black Torontonians and the city’s cops. That word was “yellow.” Rankin wondered: how could a suspect be described as yellow? Did he have jaundice?

The surprising answer led to more than a decade of groundbreaking reporting that has exposed “carding,” the nationwide police practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people, even without suspicion of criminal offence. Many believe it is racial profiling.

The Star’s coverage of carding has been the result of a combination of persistent reporters, committed editors and supportive publishers willing to take on serious financial risks. Together, they make a strong case for how a healthy newspaper industry can amplify the voices of marginalized populations that democracies haven’t done nearly enough to serve.

One of the voices the paper helped magnify was that of Chris Williams, an academic and activist. “Investigative journalism, from the standpoint of a lot of people, is dying, primarily for fiscal reasons. This series,” he says, referring to the Star’s carding coverage, “shows how indispensable such journalism is for public education, for holding public institutions accountable and for fostering critical consciousness generally.”

The hunt for the meaning of “yellow” began when Rankin and then-colleague John Duncanson, who died in 2009, embarked on a year-long process of piecing together snippets of information from trusted police sources they’d built up throughout their careers. The first major breakthrough was the discovery of a fingerprinting program, the Repository for Integrated Criminalistic Imaging (RICI). One of the database’s headings, “colour,” allowed users to choose from white, brown, black, red or yellow when identifying suspects. These colour codes were converted into ethnicities before appearing in press releases. “Yellow” should have appeared as “Oriental” in the release—though police now use “Asian”—but a clerk at police headquarters had forgotten to make the change.

The journalists pressed police contacts to discover what else the force was tracking. “John Duncanson was a terrific cop reporter and could get almost anyone to talk and say things that they really shouldn’t be talking about with a reporter,” Rankin says. Digging deep through police contacts eventually yielded more gold, as Rankin acquired the name of two additional databases. After filing a Freedom of Information (FOI) request through the TPS, he learned that both contained race fields. This was the first hard evidence that Toronto cops were recording racial characteristics. These steps were crucial to putting together the information required for a specific enough FOI request to get the databases, which Rankin submitted in March 2000 after consulting his editors.

For two years, the Star negotiated with the police through the municipal FOI act. They reached a compromise in the summer of 2002: the TPS gave the Star access to the Criminal Information Processing System (CIPS), which allowed analysts to search for racial disparities in the way police treat people after arrests. “We knew more about what was in CIPS, and we had ideas about what we could look for in terms of differences that might speak to potential racial bias,” Rankin says. “We also had to be pragmatic. Police had never before had a request like this, and we knew it was eating up their resources—and ours.”

The Star’s “Race and Crime” series in October 2002 found that in cases of simple drug possession, Black people were taken into police stations more often than white people, and they were held overnight for a bail hearing at twice the rate. “The Toronto crime data also shows a disproportionate number of black motorists are ticketed for violations that only surface following a traffic stop,” wrote Rankin. “This difference, say civil libertarians, community leaders and criminologists, suggests police use racial profiling in deciding whom to pull over.”

The series had a huge impact according to Frances Henry, a retired York University professor and leading racism expert: “The fact that the Star and all those very good journalists they had at the time decided to do that piece of research and that series was a milestone, I would say, in journalism on race and racism in this country.” Henry and co-author Carol Tator, an instructor and consultant who has worked in the anti-racism movement for decades, cited “Race and Crime” in Racial Profiling in Canada: Challenging The Myth of “a Few Bad Apples,” their 2006 book. “The series in the Star provoked a discursive crisis that continues to reverberate,” they write. “The concept of a ‘discursive crisis’ refers to a set of conditions that has a profound impact upon society and, more specifically, the state of minority/majority relations.”

But cops weren’t as impressed with “Race and Crime.” The Toronto Police Association (TPA), the union representing the city’s law enforcement, launched a lawsuit against the Star in January 2003, alleging the series labelled every officer in the force as racist. The TPA sought $2.7 billion in damages ($375,000 for each of its 7,200 members). “It’s cartoonish, the amount they were seeking,” says Rankin. “It’s hard to take it seriously, but at the same time, you go to bed at night and you think, what if we didn’t do it right? We all lost a lot of sleep.” Throwing out the case in June 2003, the judge concluded, “The allegedly defamatory comments and innuendoes in the articles cannot reasonably be understood as intended to apply to every officer in the TPS.”

“Race and Crime” was a success, and the Star had dodged a massive lawsuit. But Rankin wasn’t satisfied. As the years went on, he kept in touch with his police contacts to develop a better understanding of the database the paper had failed to acquire with the 2000 FOI request. He desperately wanted access to the Master Name Index (Manix). The information on hundreds of thousands of people in the database included their race, which officers marked on a contact card after stopping them. He filed another FOI request, but the TPS quickly denied it.

After the drama of “Race and Crime,” Rankin wasn’t surprised by the rejection. But he wasn’t about to back down. He went to his editors, and despite the likely challenges ahead, they were willing to take the TPS to court for information contained in the carding database. He was thrilled, remembering exactly why he loved working at the Star. Knowing that his colleagues, all the way up to the publisher, were committed to the story gave him the confidence to slug through a seven-year legal battle while continuing to report on allegations of police brutality and racial profiling.

In early 2009, the Star won the case, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered the TPS to reimburse the newspaper’s legal fees. Rankin taped a copy of the $40,000 cheque, along with another for $35,319.49 from the TPA’s earlier failed class action lawsuit, to the side of his desk. They were souvenirs of the battles he fought in the name of good journalism.

By January 2010, he was looking over a breakdown of carding stops in Toronto from 2003 to 2008. The data he had used in “Race and Crime” was complex, but Manix was straightforward. “Within a day or two of looking at the carding database, we could see a pattern,” Rankin says. There was a shocking racial disparity: Black people made up 8.4 percent of Toronto’s population at the time, but a staggering 22.6 percent of contact cards. He recruited help from the Star’s investigative reporters, as most of his original team from “Race and Crime” had moved on. Over the next month, they put together a new series.

“Race Matters,” published in February 2010, reported that Black people were three times more likely to be stopped than white people; Black males aged 15 to 24 were carded 2.5 more times than white males of the same age; and Black people were carded at significantly higher rates than their overall census population in each of the city’s 74 police patrol zones. The series included interviews with Rohan Robinson, a teacher who became the first face of carding. He described being stopped by police 30 times since 2001 without being ticketed.

Black communities in Toronto already suspected they were disproportionately stopped by police and had discussed it for decades, according to Anthony Morgan, a policy and research lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic. “Unfortunately, that’s part of the Black experience,” he says. Yet data confirming the systemic nature of carding, and its extent, was new. “It helped me recognize this isn’t just a feeling that something is wrong with these interactions,” Morgan says. “These things were actually wrong, and I was being targeted. Up until then, it was difficult to feel comfortable saying that.”

John Sewell, coordinator of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition and former mayor, says the story made his group realize this wasn’t happening randomly or from an individual officer. “This was a real strategy of the police force, and was something that was requiring all police officers to stop random people and record data about them.”

Despite interest from civil liberty groups, Rankin was underwhelmed by the public’s reaction to the series. He expected outrage from Torontonians. Instead, he says, it didn’t spark the city-wide conversation on carding that he’d hoped would occur. Rankin and the other reporters had taken only a month to put together the story, eager to publicize the racial disparity in carding stops, especially after waiting seven years for the data. The rush to release the series meant there wasn’t enough in-depth analysis. “What I didn’t think of at the time was other comparisons we could have done there,” Rankin says. Those included breaking the analysis down to a neighbourhood level and comparing the results. “We didn’t frame some of the questions the right way.” He believes they could have exposed the racial disparity in a more provocative manner.

The series also lacked the sort of wide-ranging personal experiences that would have conveyed the pain of being disproportionately carded. This was a significant flaw since many supporters of the practice saw it as a relatively harmless way of gathering information. The people who typically came to the Star to discuss encounters with police were often involved in legal disputes with the TPS. But the carding sources were everyday people affected by the practice and scared of the potential backlash of stepping into the spotlight, according to Patty Winsa, a general assignment reporter who worked on the series. “It was very difficult to get people to speak out,” she says. “So we didn’t personalize it enough.”

Eager to tackle the story with a new angle, Rankin filed another FOI request in 2011 to acquire updated carding data, as “Race Matters” included data only up until 2008. The March 2012 “Known to Police” series that came out of this FOI request finally brought carding the attention Rankin felt it deserved and forced politicians and police to address the practice. Rankin, Winsa and several multimedia journalists used the new information to present a provocative question: was it possible every young Black man in Toronto had been carded?

“A Star analysis of Toronto police stop data from 2008 to mid-2011 shows that the number of young black and brown males aged 15 to 24 documented in each of the city’s 72 patrol zones is greater than the actual number of young men of colour living in those areas,” the series noted. The ratio of Black men who were carded increased in predominantly white, affluent zones.

Rankin and Winsa also explored what carding meant to people in patrol zone 121, located in the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, an impoverished area of Toronto with a particularly high rate of carding. The series included interviews with Black youth and community workers from this area, immersing Star readers in the grim realities of carding, something Rankin felt past series had failed to do.

One of the officials he’d hoped would consider his reporting was Alok Mukherjee, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) from 2005 to 2015. After the 2010 series, Mukherjee told Rankin, “I can’t explain to you why you see the pattern you see today, but come back to me in two years, and if we have not seen a change, then there will be some questions that we will need to answer.” Mukherjee was shocked to hear the disparity had increased and began pressing the TPS for change.

The Star, meanwhile, continued pushing carding as a story, although the most important addition to the next series came from two men outside of the publication. Williams filed an FOI request for his own carding data in June 2012. After receiving the data, he contacted his friend Knia Singh, a student at Osgoode Hall Law School, and urged him to do the same

Singh filed his request in December 2012, and then the two men contacted the Star. Williams believed working with the paper would be “beneficial to the community because the experiences of me and Knia intersect with the experiences of hundreds of thousands of other people.”

“Known to Police 2013,” published in September, told their stories and included powerful video interviews. The series stressed that both men are young, Black, without criminal records and active in their communities, and they still had been carded. Singh says the reaction to their front-page photos illustrates how important their stories were for shattering stereotypes about carding. “It looked like Chris and I were suspects in a crime, because you usually don’t see two Black people on the front cover unless they’ve committed a crime, right?” He adds, “Some friends of mine thought I had either committed a crime or was a victim of a crime until they read it.”

Just under a month later, the TPS released the Police And Community Engagement Review (PACER) report, suggesting substantive methods to work toward bias-free policing. Many of these suggestions were incorporated into a progressive carding policy reform the police board voted for in April 2014, and the number of contact cards issued had begun to drop the year before. A few months later, Rankin asked TPA president Mike McCormack what had caused the reduction. The union head responded, “There’s definitely a sense out there amongst my members that they don’t want to be the one that’s, quite frankly, on the cover of the Toronto Star.”

Civil rights organizations used the Star’s data analysis as ammunition to put pressure on the police. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor in criminal justice at Indiana University who’s studying the views of Toronto police officers on race, says the Star had done a good job of reporting on anti-Black racism for years. Yet he also notes personal stories, common in the paper’s reporting before it obtained the databases, were typically ignored by police officials. “This type of data is often dismissed as being anecdotal because it’s individuals relaying their experiences.” But the databases provided quantitative evidence that was more difficult to dismiss, says Owusu-Bempah. “If it weren’t for the work of journalists, we would be much further behind in what we know now than we do.”

Shadya Yasin, a coordinator with the York Youth Coalition who works in the Weston-Mt. Dennis neighbourhood, believes the reporting helped transform attitudes toward carding. “When the Black community speaks about carding, it’s just like, ‘Oh, look at those people, it’s just their issue,’” Yasin says. “But when the Star’s reporting came out, it actually gave proof and made it real to other people who think it’s always just Black people complaining about race issues.” Singh adds, “The reality is, if the journalists didn’t cover it, it would be a dead issue. It would be very easy for the police to just trample our rights, and we’d never have any recourse.”

These investigative series also opened the door for Black journalists, personally affected by carding, to vigorously report on the practice with the aid of quantitative evidence. The Star’s Royson James has tackled carding in his columns, especially starting in 2014, and helped put pressure on politicians to address the problem. In April 2014, the TPSB passed what many believed to be a progressive policy. A year later, the TPSB reversed many of these changes when it passed a new carding policy.

In June 2015, James argued that the dismantling of the 2014 reform was “beyond disturbing.” Noting citizens’ lack of trust in the political system, James wrote, “They do not want to hear from Mayor Tory on the issue. He symbolizes the problem.”

Singh says James’s reputation played a role in mobilizing Black Torontonians against carding. Williams agrees the columnist’s attacks on carding were crucial. “Royson James plays an important role in terms of conveying the deep-seated sentiments of large segments of the Black population in particular and marginalized populations more generally.”

Few other columnists discuss carding on a routine basis, according to James, who says, “He who feels it, knows it.” He believed he was the only one able to give Black communities in Toronto a voice they lacked in Canadian journalism. “I decided I was going to have to be that voice,” James says, noting a sense of personal responsibility.

James’s writing over the years inspired Desmond Cole, a freelance journalist who began reporting on carding after reading “Known to Police.” His personal essay in the May 2015 edition of Toronto Life left a mark on the city. Cole believes his piece was especially influential because of the magazine’s audience. “This was really not in their mode, so it really, really grabbed people’s attention,” he says. “It was sent into the homes of people who aren’t used to reading about these kinds of issues on a regular basis, or maybe never have.”

Cole’s view on the lack of public knowledge of carding, which others share, raises a serious question: stories about biased policing have existed for decades, so why did it take so long for mainstream journalists to cover the issue?

Owusu-Bempah doesn’t blame the Star for the delay, claiming the fault lies with police since they don’t regularly release carding data. And that information was of the utmost importance, according to Sewell: “It was that data that just blew things apart.” The Star’s coverage is invaluable, says Williams. “Any time you have journalistic work that disrupts the privilege of such a powerful public institution, I think that’s vitally important.”

Public discussion about carding reached new levels last October, when the province of Ontario proposed draft regulations to regulate carding and, many hope, to eventually ban random stops. Rankin is eager to see what will come of these regulations, though he believes systemic bias in policing will continue and, therefore, the reporting will as well.

Despite these concerns, the announcement marked the beginning of a happy few days for Rankin. Current and former colleagues emailed and called to congratulate him for his dedication to reporting on carding throughout the years. “It took a lot of Star resources and a really dogged team of journalists, editors, data gurus and bosses to keep on this issue,” Rankin says. “Because I am the only one still on it from our 2002 series, it feels extra special to be able to see it through to where we are today.”

One message particularly stood out. Rankin left work the day after the announcement, walked his dog and came home to a phone call. It was Scott Simmie, one of five journalists who worked on “Race and Crime.” Simmie told his former colleague that his reporting was a legacy. “It hadn’t hit me until that,” Rankin says. “You’re lucky in this job if you can look back and say there’s something that we did that made a difference. That’s definitely one of them.”

As they chatted, people around Toronto picked up copies of the Star with a front page filled with an article from Rankin, a photo of Singh and a column from Cole. The headline blazed across the page in large, capitalized print and announced just how significant their work had been: “Random Carding: The End.”

By Miro Rodriguez

Martin Baron walked home from a late dinner with his wife and son on a warm July night in Toronto, he saw what appeared to be an empty streetcar stopped in the middle of the road. Brushing it off as just broken down, the family continued walking. Suddenly, police officers ran toward the empty streetcar. With guns drawn, they yelled: “Drop the knife!”

Baron stopped and, looking closer, saw a lone man inside, holding a knife. “Drop the knife!” the officers continued to yell. Baron pulled his iPhone from his pocket, unlocked it and started recording. What he couldn’t have known was what repercussions the one minute and 37 seconds of video he shot would have for the public, the police and journalism.

An officer fired nine shots, and eight of them struck Sammy Yatim. Then another officer Tasered the 18-year-old as he lay on the ground. About one hour after the shooting, Baron uploaded his video to YouTube, tweeted the link and sent it to a local broadcaster. It wasn’t long before reporters contacted him with interview requests. “Having that video was huge in terms of getting the amount of coverage that it did,” says former National Post reporter Megan O’Toole. Toronto Star reporter and photographer Jim Rankin adds, “You can count the bullets, you can count the seconds, you can see what the officers are doing.” Baron’s video—and others from that night—offered a rare look into a tragic incident and shaped how journalists pursued the story of the police shooting. Cellphones allow the public to capture events as they happen. Video, Baron says, “provokes an emotional response without having to think about it.” And the existence of video shot by citizen journalists, as in the case of Yatim, leads to more coverage and more in-depth analysis from professional journalists.

***

Citizens have been recording violent police behaviour for years. In 1991, Los Angeles police officers were caught on video viciously beating Rodney King, a 26-year-old African-American man pulled over after a high-speed chase. Their subsequent acquittal caused riots and brought issues of police brutality and racial pro- filing to the forefront.

An October 2007 video shot by Paul Pritchard captured four RCMP officers repeatedly Tasering Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man immigrating to Canada who had grown agitated after a long flight and hours spent in the airport’s customs area. He died on the floor of a Vancouver airport terminal. One officer claimed that Dziekanski “came at” police officers, screaming and brandishing a stapler. Pritchard’s video proved that was false, and the evidence led to perjury charges against all four officers in 2011 (one was acquitted last summer; the others are expected to go to trial this year).

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression presented its first Citizen Journalism Award to Pritchard in 2009. The association’s president, Arnold Amber, said at the event, “The remarkable partnership between investigative journalists and the citizen who recorded the last minutes of Dziekanski’s life has led to all these revelations and impact.” Later, Star public editor Kathy English wrote, “Mainstream media have come to count on those tech-ready citizens with a sense of news to help us cover breaking stories.”

Early news coverage of the Yatim incident relied heavily on Baron’s video. The partner at Teeple Architects in Toronto made the recording because, he explains, it was “something crazy that happened in front of my house.” He says the officers made no attempt to talk to Yatim: “It was instant guns-out, yelling demands.” Baron planned to upload the video to Facebook to share with friends, but he quickly realized how horrific the situation was. The video has since received more than 600,000 views on YouTube.

Mainstream news outlets piled on: a January search for “Sam- my Yatim” on the CP24 website yielded 66 results. The same search turned up 81 hits on Citynews, 97 on CTV news and 364 on CBC. When the police shoot someone and citizen video doesn’t exist, the story doesn’t attract the same amount of attention: a similar search for “Michael Eligon,” a 29-year-old shot in 2012 after leaving a Toronto hospital and stealing scissors from a convenience store, yielded 13 hits on CP24, 11 on City, 19 on CTV and 47 on CBC.

At first, broadcasters were cautious about showing video of the Yatim shooting. CTV news’s executive producer, Lisa Beaton, says she and many others at the network had several discussions with legal experts before deciding to air the video. “It gives an irrefutable record of what happened,” she says. “If you have video testimony, you really can’t dispute it.” Soon, though, newscasts began to air citizen videos of the incident repeatedly, newspapers ran screenshots of the streetcar and websites embedded the video in their stories. “To some extent, the video was the story,” says Star crime reporter Jennifer Pagliaro. Post columnist Matt Gurney agrees, adding that the initial coverage was repetitive and broadcasters took a “let’s see that video now” attitude. “There wasn’t a lot of in-depth analysis.”

Questions about Yatim’s home life, how many shots struck him and which officer fired the shots didn’t surface right away. Although the coverage soon improved, gurney says, “The first few days were a whole lot of outrage, not a lot of information.”

Torontonians were galvanized. Hundreds of people marched on July 29, protesting what they believed to be the use of excessive force. Others took to social media, tweeting, “unfortunately, the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim by @TorontoPolice is nothing new,” and “Dear @TorontoPolice, why not taser #SammyYatim first? He had a knife and you outnumbered him. Was 9 Shots necessary?” Another rally took place in mid-August, when hundreds of people marched to police headquarters to demand “justice for Sammy” while the Toronto Police Services Board met inside.

***

“Video has changed the game, not just offering proof when none existed in the past, but raising public consciousness about the fact that some police do engage in illegal behaviour,” Kirk Makin, former justice reporter for The Globe and Mail, writes in an email. At each step of the Yatim investigation, the public knew what was happening. Tamara Cherry, CTV Toronto’s crime reporter, says journalists might sometimes be cautious in reporting details of incidents like police shootings because they don’t want to jeopardize their relationships with the police. She says that when she was first to identify Const. James Forcillo as the officer under investigation, some colleagues were concerned about how the Toronto Police Service (TPS) would react.

Before citizen video, coverage was based only on witness accounts and police statements. In some cases, dashboard video (from police cruisers) or surveillance video captured the shootings, but that footage didn’t go viral or wasn’t released until much later. In the case of Sylvia Klibingaitis, who was killed by a police officer in 2011, the dashboard video wasn’t released until the October 2013 inquest into her death and the deaths of two others.

Access to information beyond that was scarce. Once the Special Investigations unit (SIU) looks into an incident—as it must whenever a police incident results in a serious injury or death—officers are prohibited from discussing it. As Rosie DiManno, a columnist for the Star, wrote in August, “When reporters asked the TPS for the relevant in- formation about Forcillo, they were provided with the minimum that could be disclosed.” And in a column published two days after the shooting, DiManno wrote, “Police in this country have become accustomed to withholding information, as they choose, ducking behind the curtain of privacy laws selectively wielded.” If the public were to depend solely on police accounts, she argued, “the truth might never come out.”

Although citizen video is great for capturing a moment, Star columnist Joe Fiorito says, “It’s not necessarily as good or as thorough as what mainstream newspapers do in terms of follow-up reporting.” His paper was first to offer a closer look into Yatim’s life, but soon all Toronto dailies began to ask friends and family about the young man, and a more detailed picture of the victim emerged. The papers reported that Yatim immigrated to Toronto in 2008 from Aleppo, Syria, which was then peaceful. He lived with his father, Nabil Yatim, while his mother, Sahar Bahadi, stayed in Aleppo and worked as a pediatrician (the couple was divorced). It is unclear when Bahadi came to Canada, but Yatim’s younger sister, Sarah, moved to Toronto about two years ago. Yatim enrolled in a Catholic school, but he completed his final credits at an alternative high school geared toward teenagers new to Canada and marginalized students seeking a “new beginning.” His math teacher in grades 9 and 10, Megan Douglas, was surprised to learn that Yatim’s mother didn’t come to Canada with him, but says Yatim was always smiling.

However, Douglas noticed a change after Yatim moved on from her class. He wore hats in school even though they were forbidden. He wore baggier clothes, listened to different music and associated with a “rough” crowd, with whom he partied and smoked. Teachers and students told Douglas that Yatim began skipping a lot of his classes in grades 11 and 12. “He was trying to fit in and trying to be this cool bad-boy, but I knew it wasn’t him,” she says. “I figured he had to be on something [at the time of the shooting]. There had to be drugs or alcohol involved because somebody like him, if you said, ‘Drop the knife,’ and he was of sound mind, he would have done it.”

Reporters portrayed Yatim as a young man trying to find him- self, “someone who struggled to fit into a new culture,” as the Star put it. “All the times I’ve read about young black men being caught up in these kinds of police confrontations,” says Star business reporter Ashante Infantry, “I never recall reading such a sympathetic view of the challenges that a troubled kid could have found himself in.” Gurney adds: “It was not treated as just a police shooting where a carjacker or a drug dealer had pulled a knife and an officer opened fire.” From the outset, he says, journalists presented the case as the shooting of someone who had a mental illness, although Yatim’s mental state has never been confirmed (his family has denied he had any mental health issues).

But not all police shooting victims get compassionate treatment. Like others in the past, Yatim was holding a knife when police shot him. But the tone of the reporting differed significantly this time. O’Brien Christopher-Reid, a mentally ill man, was 26 years old when he was shot and killed by police officers in 2004, after he pulled a knife during a confrontation. In the Globe, Jonathan Fow- lie and Christie Blatchford wrote that Christopher-Reid “pulled a long knife and attacked police.” The Globe’s Oliver Moore was more gentle about Yatim: “The teenager was killed after he bran- dished a small knife on a streetcar in late July.”

***

Two days after the July 27 shooting, the police force suspended Forcillo. Less than a month later, he was charged with second-degree murder and released on $510,000 bail. He’s only the second Toronto police officer to be charged with the offence since Ontario created the SIU in 1990. CBC’s Daniel Schwartz wrote, “The SIU . . . acted with uncharacteristic speed in the Toronto streetcar shooting, perhaps because of videos of the incident that have been watched around the world.” According to The Canadian Press, Forcillo’s criminal case is “proceeding with unusual speed.”

Pagliaro says although police shootings are rare, they don’t always get a lot of attention. Just over a month before Yatim’s shooting, Toronto police shot and killed 39-year-old Malcolm Jackman, but, absent a video, the story received little coverage.

The public often criticizes police tactics. Many victims of police shootings—including Klibingaitis in 2011, Reyal Jardine-Douglas in 2010 and Edmond Yu in 1997—have had mental illnesses. Although some of these shootings were captured by dashboard cameras or surveillance video, without immediate and viral citizen video, the public didn’t see the events leading up to these deaths the way they did with Yatim. These incidents have led to the current debate about police training and de-escalation strategies. It is clear that Yatim was in distress: witnesses reported that he had a “knife in one hand and his penis in the other.” But police say that these situations are not clear-cut: Const. Andrew Boyd testified at the 2013 inquest into three police shootings that the Eligon incident was not “a situation where you can have a nice leisurely chat.” According to the Toronto Sun, he added, “We’re not psychiatrists.”

The Yu shooting was a watershed moment. The victim suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was carrying a hammer on an empty TTC bus when police shot him three times. The subsequent inquest led to the creation of the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team (MCIT), a program within the TPS that pairs psychiatric nurses with trained officers when needed. Through a partnership with Toronto East General Hospital, the program has recently expanded to cover 12 of 17 policing divisions. Hospital CEO Rob Devitt called the MCIT initiative “a wonderful way to provide an additional layer of support within an integrated mental health system.”

Former Sun crime reporter Rob Lamberti says coverage is too concerned with whether or not a police officer was justified in shooting; it should instead focus on the victims’ circumstances. He’d like to see more coverage asking why the healthcare system leaves people with mental health issues on the street for police officers to handle. The citizens taking videos are recording history in the moment, he says. “And it’s up to the journalists to try to figure out what is happening, why it’s happening and what led us here.”

Others believe reporting on police shootings needs to be better. Mark Pugash, director of corporate communications for the TPS, says experienced journalists are losing their jobs because of news- room cutbacks. “So you’re seeing, in many cases, inexperienced people with not much supervision. That doesn’t usually lead to accurate reporting.”

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One of the videos that surfaced after the June 2010 G20 summit in Toronto exposed the way police officers handled protestors. Bystander John Bridge caught a police officer beating protestor Adam Nobody with a baton as he lay on the ground. Because of the video—which Toronto police Chief Bill Blair initially claimed had been tampered with—the constable was convicted of assault with a weapon.

Steven D’Souza, a CBC Toronto reporter who covered the two-day summit, believes such incidents changed the relationship between the public and the city’s police. Video often attracts close public attention, which can lead to more calls for change. Since the videos of the Yatim shooting drew such outrage, there have been four investigations: the SIU probe into his death, Blair’s internal practices review, the Ontario Ombudsman’s investigation into de-escalation strategies and, most recently, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director’s examination of the TPS’s use of force in dealing with people with mental health issues.

Procedures are also changing. The province recently allowed police forces to arm all front-line officers with Tasers, but the TPS board rejected Blair’s request for $386,000 to increase the force’s Taser arsenal by one-third. Following recommendations from a 2013 Police and Community Engagement Review and the recent coroner’s inquest, the TPS will be testing out lapel cameras this year.

Forcillo remains suspended with pay, and a preliminary inquiry is set for spring. He faces a disciplinary charge of discreditable conduct, which has been put on hold until the end of the trial. “The video laid the basis for the charge,” says prominent defence lawyer Peter Rosenthal. “Without the video, who knows what the police would have said happened, and who knows whether they would have been charged or not.”

In his exit interview with CBC News in October, Ian Scott, former director of the SIU, said that smartphones and surveillance videos are not only “compelling pieces of evidence” but ultimately are “truth-seeking tools.” 

Digital media writer Jesse Brown is glad citizens now have a way to “document police behaviour and hold law enforcement to account,” he writes in an email. “I know that the next time I see the police involved in any kind of altercation, I’ll be taping them with my smartphone and I encourage everyone else to do the same.”

This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.