Police fight for the right to be wrong
Cops value their right to take action, but not their responsibility to explain themselves
by Desmond Cole
Left: Constable Jeffrey Northrup died was killed in 2021 during an accident in a parking lot. Centre: Umar Zameer speaks to CBC News after being acquitted of murdering Northrup. Right: Toronto Police chief Myron Demkiw (foreground) speaks to media after in Zameer’s acquittal as Margaret Northrup, Jeffrey’s widow, looks on. Images taken from the TPS website and CBC News: The National.
When two strangers approached Umar Zameer and his family in their car in an underground parking lot in 2021, and began gesturing and banging on the vehicle, he reacted as many would. In his belief that he, his pregnant wife Aaida Shiekh, and their young child were being attacked or robbed, Zameer tried to drive away. A van with more strangers moved in to block his escape, and as he manoeuvred to flee, he ran over and killed a man who had approached his car. The strangers in the van rammed into Zameer’s car, took him to the ground, and handcuffed him. He says he only then realized the people pursuing him were cops.
At Zameer’s criminal trial, he and Shiekh both testified that they didn’t know the strangers accosting them were Toronto Police officers, because the cops were wearing civilian clothes and never identified themselves. Zameer also said that in his panic, he didn’t realize he had run over Constable Jeffrey Northrup, a 55-year-old veteran officer. Crown prosecutors claimed that police did identify themselves, and that Zameer intentionally ran over Northrup. The jury that acquitted Zameer of murder this past weekend seems to have believed his version of the story.
The cops were looking for a brown-skinned man who had stabbed someone earlier that evening. Police admitted Zameer didn’t match this man’s description, and that they had no legal reason to detain or arrest him. Yet the pursued him, terrified him, and tried to stop him from leaving. His initial crimes were existing as a dark-skinned man, and trying to escape the police’s unfounded suspicion of him. Zameer’s struggle reminds us that cops believe their right to pursue of a suspect, especially a racialized person, should outweigh the law, public safety, and common sense. Police maintain their power by targeting civilians with impunity, by fighting for the right to be wrong, even at the cost of human life.
The prosecution’s version of Zameer’s experience is too absurd to fully parse here. Justice Anne Molloy chastised Crown prosecutors for changing their theory of events mid-trial. Molloy instructed the jury to “consider whether there has been collusion” between police officers, whose stories matched each other but relied on events that never happened, and on evidence that did not exist. The judge also offered Zameer her “deepest apologies” upon his acquittal, a rare gesture that suggests she recognized the absurdity of his trial.
Police claimed they saw Northrup standing in places that video evidence refuted. They said they heard Northrup and his partner identifying themselves to Zameer as police officers, even though the 34-year old Thornhill accountant and his wife said police did no such thing. Some of the cops who targeted Zameer put on their police vests, but only after he had tried to flee. Prosecutors even argued that Zameer had intentionally driven his car at Northrup, without plausibly explaining why he would do so.
The police testimony didn’t form a coherent story, and that likely wasn’t its goal. Instead, police narratives sought to justify every shady decision the officers made, to gaslight the public into believing the cops’ actions were justified, regardless of the horrific outcomes they produced.
Sergeant Lisa Forbes, Northrup’s partner on the night he was killed, said in court that police were looking for a stabbing suspect with brown skin, a heavy build, a long beard, and big hair. When police saw, Zameer, who is Pakistani, he did not have big hair or a long beard. Forbes agreed that Zameer’s appearance wasn’t enough of a match to justify arresting or even detaining him. But she and Northrup approached him anyway, and needlessly set off the series of events that led to her partner’s death.
In total, four police decided to confront Zameer in the parking lot: Northrup and Forbes approached on foot, while two others in an unmarked police van moved to block his exit. After Zameer had run over Northrup and stopped his vehicle, Constable Antonio Correa rammed the van into Zameer’s car, which contained him, his pregnant wife, and their two-year-old son. After Correa had arrested and handcuffed Zameer, his partner Constable Scharnil Pais punched Zameer in his face. Throughout this melee, the person police were actually looking for was nowhere to be found.
Pais said he punched Zameer not out of anger for killing Northrup, but because the handcuffed man didn’t follow his instruction to get up off the ground. The police can always justify their violence, even when it exposes their cowardice. Pais has a history of misconduct: in the now infamous 2011 case of the “Neptune Four,” he and another officer approached four Black teen boys in an unmarked van, assaulted them, and held them at gunpoint. Pais and his partner then flipped the script on the boys by arresting them and charging them with assaulting police and uttering death threats.
The Neptune confrontation didn’t need to happen. The boys police accosted were simply walking to a mentorship program in Lawrence Heights. Most who remember that story understood it to be carding, the police practice of detaining civilians without suspicion of a crime. The police have apologized repeatedly for carding, a practice they use routinely against Black and other racialized young men. They’ve claimed to have understood the harms of carding (multiple reports show that the practice continues). Yet Pais, who was convicted of misconduct in the Neptune case, was in the mix a decade later during the racial profiling, assault, and faulty prosecution of Zameer, a Pakistani man who immigrated to Canada from Malaysia.
It makes sense that police almost never account for their violence or admit wrongdoing. Violence without accountability is their trade and calling card. Police demand full discretion to use force, and paint our attempts to control them as openings for danger and crime to flourish. Police deference, especially towards people with dark skin, is a threat to the white supremacist power structures they serve and protect.
A Toronto Police webpage honouring Northrup says he died after a “dynamic event” in a parking lot. Police are fond of using the word “dynamic” to reframe their recklessness as cruel fate. These “dynamic” situations regularly result in civilian deaths or injuries. In this case, a police officer died because he and his colleagues accosted a dark-skinned man they had not identified, did not reasonably suspect of any crime, and had no legal right to detain. Racial profiling and carding live on, with predictably catastrophic consequences. Police insist they must jeopardize some of our lives in order to preserve others.
After the outrageous, unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Zameer, the public is as angry at Toronto Police as it is relieved for Zameer and his family. Many are demanding consequences for the cops who apparently perjured themselves during a murder trial, while others are calling for chief Myron Demkiw to step down. But our city has been down this road too many times to accept new promises of individual police accountability, or even broader gestures of reform like the ones Demkiw recently announced.
At a press conference after Zameer’s acquittal, Demkiw offered the tired trope that “every Toronto Police officer should go home to their family at the end of each day, after serving and protecting.” Nevermind that his officers were not serving or protecting anyone when they targeted Zameer, who missed the birth of his second child while in jail for a murder he did not commit. For Demkiw, the officers’ lives comes first, especially when confronted by people who dare to claim an equal right to safety and self-defence.
We live in a police state where cops value their right to take action, but not their responsibility to explain themselves. Until we directly challenge the police power to control our bodies and movements, their carnage will continue. More of us need to take up the basic demand put forth by Black and Indigenous people for generations—that armed overseers of the state have no place in our daily lives. We need to dismantle a policing system whose power is designed to dominate us, and build more equitable and reciprocal approaches to safety.
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