Andray Domise is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
In 2013, Wisconsin’s then-governor Scott Walker passed legislation striking down residential municipal requirements for public employees in Milwaukee. Up to that point, police officers – as well as teachers, firefighters, and other public sector workers – were required to live within 15 miles of their place of employment.
It was another of the many furors inspired in the state’s largest city by the onetime presidential hopeful. And while some of the backlash concerned the potential for a mid-sized U.S. city to lose a significant portion of its tax base, Milwaukee’s demographic geography also played a role: 40 per cent of Milwaukee residents are black and live in a tight cluster close to the city’s core. Its white residents, on the other hand, make up 44 per cent of the population, and primarily live in the suburbs. Milwaukee’s police service, on the other hand, didn’t come close to matching these demographics. Only 18 per cent of officers identify as black; more than 60 per cent are white. After the law was passed, many officers fled the city, which only added to an emerging American narrative that police are disconnected from the communities they purportedly serve.
That’s had meaningful implications for the nature of policing there. The change only continued to strain relationships between residents and police during an already fraught time in the United States, exemplified by the riots sparked by the police killing of Sylville Smith in 2016, and the high-profile tasering and arrest of Milwaukee Bucks’ guard Sterling Brown over a parking violation. As of February, 2018, the number of officers who live outside the city core comprises 37 per cent of the service.
And it was all foreseen by the black service members of the Milwaukee Brotherhood of Firefighters, who were among those in favour of keeping the requirement intact because of its impact on community relations. “I’ve been able to help defuse situations because of having some insight,” said then-president DeWayne Smoots. “When I see somebody who’s getting upset, I understand where it’s coming from.”
So, it comes as rather alarming development when the Globe reported last week that, within the Toronto Police service, less than a quarter of its officers live within the city. In fairness, housing prices in the city have soared; at current trends, even officers pulling six-figure salaries could find themselves hard-pressed to purchase a family home in the inner suburbs. But that systemic problem shouldn’t supersede the reality that when officers are parachuted in from beyond the city limits, experts say, there are a multitude of knock-on effects.
In his recently published Independent Street Checks Review, Ontario Appeals Court Justice Michael Tulloch said the problems officers face around living where they work “should not overwhelm the benefit of having locally-based policing.” His report says much more about the downsides of parachute policing, including resident concerns that when officers drive into the neighbourhood and spend the majority of their shift in their cruisers – rather than actually speaking to residents and ingratiating themselves within the community – “those police officers were perceived as being less knowledgeable about the dynamics of the community they served, and not representative of the community itself.”
When neighbourhood residents know their officers as invested stakeholders in the community’s fortunes, the relationship generally changes for the better. Especially when those officers are of the similar ethnic backgrounds, speak the same language or dialect, have attended the same grade schools, know the same local touchstones, and are so familiar with neighbourhood residents that street checks become redundant. A retired officer once explained to me that this was the central conceit behind both the community liaison process and the Youth in Policing Initiative in Toronto, which not only increased local recruitment and improved community relations but, for a time, coincided with a lengthy tapering-off in per-capita violent crimes across the city.
The idea of instituting incentives (or mandates) for police officers with a Toronto postal code is certainly a tough sell. But as it stands now, the perception that officers have no stake in the community once they’ve stowed their badges and guns can only further erode resident trust of police, given the history of random street checks, brutal force applied to civilians who have committed no crime, and failure to report incidents to the civilian oversight agency. And it certainly makes for a bad look when carding frequency maps help create a perception that out-of-town officers have been collecting a paycheque in Toronto to enforce an unofficial form of neighbourhood segregation.
With a massive budget already allocated to policing in Toronto, the status quo has resulted in continuously worsening community relations. So, the question isn’t whether residency requirements or incentives can be accomplished. The question, really, is this: What do we have left to lose?