Rewards for Racism
A Toronto cop who killed two Black men is now leading police oversight and professionalism
By Desmond Cole
Rick Shank (right) sits alongside former Toronto Police chief Mark Saunders and city councillor Frances Nunziata during an August 2019 meeting in the city’s Falstaff neighbourhood. (Photo by Rene Johnston, reprinted with permission from Getty Images)
A notorious Toronto police veteran who shot and killed two Black men in the 1990s now has a leading role in police oversight and professionalism, a role he’s held quietly for nearly two years.
Rick Shank was a constable in April of 1993 when he killed 20-year-old Ian Clifford Coley by shooting him twice. The provincial Special Investigations Unit (SIU) decided not to lay criminal charges against Shank. In March of 1997, Shank and another officer shot 31-year-old Hugh Dawson—Shank reportedly fired his gun ten times. The SIU charged Shank for manslaughter against Dawson, but a jury found him not guilty in 1999. Today, Shank is a superintendent, and the head of the Professional Standards unit at the Toronto Police Service (TPS).
Professional Standards handles investigations of police who seriously injure people, including police who shoot civilians. According to TPS, Professional Standards is also responsible for police professionalism, including “the practices, conduct, appearance, ethics & integrity of its members to strengthen public confidence, and co-operation within the community.” Staff at professional standards confirmed Tuesday that Shank still holds the position.
Shank’s career has been marked not only by the killings of Dawson and Coley, but by accusations of assault, home invasion, kidnapping, the planting of evidence, the filing of bogus charges, and arbitrary detentions, none of which seem to have resulted in any formal consequences. Instead, Shank’s bosses have repeatedly promoted him—he is currently outranked only by staff superintendents, deputy chiefs, and the chief of police. According to provincial records, Shank’s 2021 salary with the Toronto Police was $190,391.
Shank’s documented history of anti-Black violence in Toronto is horrific. He killed Coley two years after joining what was then the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force. While working with detectives from a unit called the Black Organized Crime Squad, Shank and his partner followed a car in which Coley was a passenger. When Coley exited the vehicle, the cops chased him.
Shank, who had no clear reason to detain Coley, claimed he had shot Coley after the young man pointed a gun at him. As reported in a scathing investigative piece by Canadaland in 2020, the SIU determined that the gun police tied to Coley showed no signs of being fired, and did not have Coley’s fingerprints on it. Police also claimed Shank then took the weapon from the scene, and brought it to a police station. Nevertheless, the SIU chose not to charge Shank.
None of the officers at the scene gave Coley any medical assistance as he lay bleeding on the ground. At the inquest into Coley’s death, Shank was asked if he had considered giving first aid to the man he’d just shot. He replied, “It occurred to me, but I was not gonna do it. I was not gonna put my life in danger or other officers lives in danger by approaching him.”
Four years after he killed Coley, Shank was leading a squad that planned to arrest Dawson, whom the police suspected of dealing drugs. Police claimed that after they surrounded Dawson’s car, he tried to grab Shank’s gun. The cops reportedly shot at Dawson eleven times. CTV News reported that Shank had shot Coley eight times, and that “Dawson was unarmed, and died still strapped in his seatbelt.”
The SIU charged Shank with manslaughter, and after a jury could not come to a decision, a second jury found him not guilty of the charges in 1999. Officers attended Shank’s second trial wearing buttons with the words “I support Badge #6045”, in reference to Shank’s badge number. Two months after his acquittal, Toronto’s police board approved a payment of just over $673,000 to cover Shank’s legal fees.
Among the Black people Shank has harmed over the years, some survivors are still demanding accountability. Paul Reece says Shank and his partner Rick Asselin assaulted him in Scarborough 30 years ago, only five months after Shank had killed Coley.
Police alleged that Reece had assaulted Shank in the street, which led the cops to follow him to his house to arrest him. They then claimed Reece had punched an officer in the eye. Police arrested Reece and charged him with assaulting a police officer. But according to Reece, Shank and other officers entered his home without knowing who they were looking for, assaulted members of his family, arrested him, and beat him badly on the way to the police station.
Reece sustained several injuries, including several broken teeth. When a surveillance video played at Reece’s trial showed the cops taking his limp body from their cruiser, Shank claimed Reece had faked his injuries. A judge found Reece not guilty, and slammed Shank for testifying that Reece was pretending to be hurt. Reece then sued the police and won a small settlement.
“This is a shock to me.” Reece said when I told him about Shank’s promotion and current role during a phone interview. “That’s crazy. He committed so many different atrocities. So then who’s looking over who?” He recalled details of the beating he suffered three decades ago, and told me both his parents were also harmed when police entered the house to arrest him.
“I didn’t know they still have him on the force,” said Reece. “What he had done to me, that was so completely wrong, and I can’t see how he’s still in the police force up till now.”
Bruce Livesey, an investigative journalist who interviewed Reece for Canadaland, described Shank’s promotion as “outrageous but not surprising.” Livesey’s rigorous work includes a 2017 piece entitled “Above the Law,” in which he documented how police in Canada rarely face legal or internal consequences for violence and misconduct.
“It’s not that they’re not held to account at all, but the standard that they’re held to account is far, far lower than the general public,” Livesey said in a phone interview. “They’re given far greater latitude to engage in unethical, corrupt, and illegal behaviour than the rest of the population.”
Shank has avoided consequences despite the claims of members of the public, like Reece, and of criminal defence lawyers including Peter Rosenthal, who served as the lawyer for Coley’s family during his inquest. Rosenthal suggested that Shank had planted the gun he accused Coley of pointing at him. Nothing came of the allegation.
Similarly, defence lawyer Leona Shemesh accused Shank and his colleagues of planting evidence in the car of her client, Velle Chanmany, during a 2008 drug investigation. A drug squad that included Shank had charged Chanmany, a self-described cocaine dealer, with possession of 7 kilograms of crystal meth. The cops said they saw the drugs sitting in the backseat of Chanmany’s parked car.
Shemesh revealed in court that eight days before this alleged discovery, Shank had seized 52 kilograms of crystal meth from two men in a van, but had let them go without charges. Police did not present any photographs of the drugs from either incident. Once again, Shank faced no apparent consequences for this accusation.
Shank’s rise in the ranks from constable to superintendent includes a recent role leading the Public Safety Response Team at TPS, which brands itself as a link between people accused of crimes and local community services. Toronto Star reporter Betsy Powell interviewed Shank about that position in 2021, just before his promotion to Professional Standards. Powell described Shank as “an officer who prefers to stay in the background,” but did not mention his killings and violent reputation.
A Google search of Shank’s name turns up several news stories identifying him as one of the few officers to face a homicide charge in recent Ontario policing history. Yet his promotion seems to have escaped any mainstream media attention.
The Toronto Police Accountability Coalition did notice Shank’s appointment by the Toronto Police Services Board last summer, and wrote about it in a bulletin. “Police might talk a good line about stopping racism, but as the appointment of Shank reveals, in real life that talk means nothing,” the bulletin remarked.
Chanelle Gallant, a feminist organizer, writer, and activist, sees the promotion of harmful cops as a broader signal of the police desire to normalize and expand their violence. Gallant was one of approximately 350 women directly impacted by a Toronto Police raid of the Pussy Palace bathhouse in 2000. Myron Demkiw, Toronto’s recently appointed police chief, was one of the officers who planned and executed the raid, which the Ontario Human Rights Commission later deemed a violation of the bathhouse patrons’ human rights.
Gallant and JP Hornick, who were both original members of the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, wrote a letter in October challenging Demkiw’s appointment as chief. “We rang the alarm not because Demkiw was the new chief of police, but because of the people who put him there, and what they were planning to do,” Gallant said during a phone interview.
“We were concerned that his appointment signalled a move towards a more aggressive, bigger, more bloated, less accountable, more violent police force that was going to suck up more city resources, and that’s exactly what happened.” Regarding the TPS’ tendency to reward and promote notoriously violent officers, Gallant said “we’re not trying to reform an individual officer’s behaviour, we are demanding accountability from the institutions that protected and promoted him.”
Gallant added that such promotions send a message to officers that “you can engage in all forms of human rights abuses, sexual harms, even murder, and not only will you not face any consequences, you’ll be rewarded for that.”
Reece, who survived his encounter with Shank those many years ago, seems to agree. He worried that in his new role, Shank “will be covering up a lot for the rest of the police officers committing different stuff.”
He also suggested the problem goes beyond Shank himself. “Somebody is covering for him to give him that kind of a position. Something is definitely wrong, and that needs to be drastically looked into.”
Correction: The original version of this piece mistakenly named Shemesh as the person charged with drug crimes, rather than Chanmany.