Category: OPS

Categories
Anti-Black racism OPS

Two Ottawa companies support systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism…by working with a Black owned company

Normally, when we claim white-led companies are supporting systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism it’s because they’re not hiring or partnering with Black companies even though those Black companies are highly competent. However, another way companies support systemic anti-Black racism is by hiring incompetent Black firms, apparently with the goal of having them fail.

A growing body of evidence indicates this is what two Ottawa companies may have apparently done.

On May 30, the Ottawa Police Services Board gave the Ottawa office of global executive search company Odgers Berndtson the green light to award Black-led Hefid Solutions a $76,500 contract to assist with the design and implementation of the community engagement process for recruiting Ottawa’s new police chief. The Board did this despite community groups publicly exposing weeks earlier that Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) had awarded a $50,000 contract to Hefid for the development of a new street violence and gun violence strategy in Ottawa despite Hefid having no apparent experience in street violence. 

The Board also did this despite having been previously informed of several things on Hefid’s website which raise questions about Hefid’s competence and credibility, including:

  • The website has no information on who owns or works for, or with, Hefid.
  • It says, “Founded in 2008, Hefid corporation has grown to become trusted (sic) management consultancy with millions of assets under management.”
  • It says “220+ happy clients from largest corporations” (sic).
  • Under Values on the About Us page, it lists Transparency as a key value stating, “There is nothing frustrating than trying to cover up something when it should not be so. Hefid Solution prides itself as ridiculously transparent. We are an open book. This has ensured the public trust us and our clients adore us.” (sic)
  • The website had quotes (since deleted) endorsing Hefid, and at least one Hefid staff member, that appeared to be fake as they appear on multiple websites. 
  • The site plagiarizes an entire 2017 CEO Magazine article, Teams are a reflection of the leader, posting it as a 2019 Hefid blog post. 
  • There are no details on any specific projects Hefid has done related to either street violence or community engagement.

Furthermore, a leaked presentation Hefid did for CPO identifies the African Canadian Association of Ottawa (ACAO) as the sole “community partner” on the street violence project and six of the eight individuals listed as members of the “Engagement Team” are either current or former ACAO executives, directors or members. This is particularly concerning as, after being asked several times who owns Hefid, CPO executive director Nancy Worsfold finally admitted that ACAO founder and executive member Hector Addison owns it – which makes the central role of ACAO in the proposed street violence strategy a direct conflict of interest. All six members of Hefid’s engagement team for the chief recruitment project are ACAO members – with five being directors or officers.

Finally, Hefid owner Hector Addison is a long time member of the Ottawa Police Service Community Equity Council (CEC) which the OPS funds and acting Ottawa Police Service chief Steve Bell co-chairs. 

The Board hired Odgers Berndtson Ottawa to run the police chief recruitment and Odgers recommended hiring Hefid to run the community engagement. Odgers has, therefore, hired the same person who is a member of the group created, run and funded by the OPS, and chaired by acting chief Bell, to run the community consultations to hire the new chief. There could be no clearer conflict of interest.

Hefid’s presentation to CPO indicates they’re partnering with CTLabs on the street violence project. CTLabs is part of Lansdowne Technologies that lists the Ottawa Police Service as one of its clients.

Why would Odgers Berndtson Ottawa and CTLabs, both highly respected, highly competent firms, hire and partner with a firm with such clearly questionable competence? This could not have been a mistake. We wrote to both companies for an explanation and neither replied. We must, therefore, assume they hired Hefid with the intent for Hefid to fail and to maintain the status quo of systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

If this is the case, it would be very similar to what we have argued Steve Bell has been doing for years with the CEC which Bell has co-chaired since its creation in 2018. 

The stated goal of the CEC is, “To improve relationships between Indigenous, racialized and faith-based communities and the Ottawa Police Service.” However, according to the April 2022 report, Troubling Encounters: Ottawa Residents’ Experience of Policing, the CEC has helped do exactly the opposite as the report shows that racialized and low income Ottawa residents have extremely low levels of trust in the Ottawa police. In fact, the report states, “In short, for many people in this city, police do not contribute to individual or community safety, in fact, they appear to do the very opposite.” This is directly related to the CEC having no measurable success criteria as confirmed by former CEC vice-chair, Gerard Etienne who, in summer 2021, replied to the 613-819 Black Hub’s request for the CEC’s success criteria by saying, “It has yet to be defined.” Bell has, and continues to, enable the CEC’s ineffectiveness and, by doing so, continues supporting systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

Any community engagement to recruit the new chief or street violence strategy led by Hefid will have no credibility with the community. But that doesn’t seem to matter as the aim clearly appears to be to crown Steve Bell as Ottawa’s new police chief and create a street violence strategy that does nothing to reduce street violence – and Odgers Berndtson Ottawa and CTLabs appear to be fully on board for both.

Categories
Mental health NRTs OPS

2021 wins

The 613-819 Black Hub’s strategic plan starts with this:

Good evaluation is hard in any field but especially hard regarding advocacy because:

  1. Success can take years;
  2. Many people, groups contribute to success so it’s hard to evaluate the impact of your organization;
  3. There is often an active opposition working against you; and
  4. Good evaluation can be prohibitively expensive (i.e. measuring changes in public opinion).

Despite these challenges, advocacy work can, and must, be measured to:

  1. Know if strategies are working; and
  2. Demonstrate success to Black communities, potential recruits and funders.

Many people only consider final outcomes like successful policy change as “wins” but there are many other types of success that are important to measure to maintain optimism – and momentum. This post describes two big wins, and one partial win, that we lead or participated in during 2021 – and how we plan to follow up on each of them in 2022.

Compassion not Cops – In February 2021, we launched our Compassion not Cops campaign to produce a proposal for an alternative, non-police mental health crisis response system for Ottawa. We raised $25,000 in three months to pay the consultants who produced an excellent report that people continue to reference in efforts to freeze the Ottawa Police Service budget.

Getting cops out of Ottawa schools – We supported the Asilu Collective which led the successful campaign to get cops out of Ottawa schools by ending the Ottawa police’s School Resource Program. While Asilu members maintained pressure on Ottawa Carleton District School Board trustees by regularly presenting at Board meetings, we continued to raise the issue during our many presentations to the Ottawa Police Services Board. We also joined Asilu members on the OCDSB’s Review of Police Involvement in Schools working group.

Freezing the Ottawa Police Service budget – We joined many other groups in leading a year-long campaign to freeze the Ottawa Police Service budget. We presented almost every month at Ottawa Police Services Board meetings, applied pressure by demanding answers of the OPS via email and Freedom of Information requests and had supporters calling and emailing city councillors right up until the day councillors voted on the budget. In the end, the Board and council didn’t freeze the OPS budget. They gave the OPS an $11 million increase instead of the $14 million the OPS asked for. Many saw this as a loss but it wasn’t as it was the first crucial step in making any big change: legitimizing the idea that it can even happen. The $3 million reduction showed for the first time that the Board could give the cops less than they ask for.

Another success related to the police budget was the City Hall sit-in organized by the Ottawa Black Diaspora Coalition during City council’s vote on the police budget. The sit-in showed you don’t need lots of people to produce very powerful symbolic moments. One of those moments was when one of the OBDC sisters – who’s about 6ft 2 – started speaking with a megaphone right after city officials – backed up by the presence of several police officers – told the organizers they couldn’t use a megaphone. As soon as they started speaking, a police officer approached and said something to them. They stopped speaking, looked down at the officer without saying anything – then turned back to the crowd and continued speaking with the megaphone. The officer melted into the background. I spoke after them, also with the megaphone – and said that I hoped that, by risking being arrested, I would inspire young brothers and sisters to rise to a new level of militancy.

In 2022 we plan to follow up on all these successes.

Compassion not Cops – We launched the Compassion not Cops campaign partly in response to the Ottawa Police Service launching a process to create an alternative mental health response system. The problem is the police were leading it, including handpicking the “Guiding Council” that would manage the project. When we and others raised this, the OPS quickly agreed to let the City lead the process. Only they didn’t. After much asking, we got a copy of the Guiding Council’s terms of reference and saw that the OPS was now on the Guiding Council.

At the Nov. 2020 Ottawa Police Services Board meeting OPS Chief Peter Sloly made it very clear that the OPS would be at any table creating an alternative mental health response system – he just failed to mention that they were now back at the head of that table. We responded by saying that we did think there was a role for the OPS in developing an alternative, non-police mental health response system. It’s similar to the role an abusive husband plays when his wife finally decides to leave him. He needs to be around to give her the keys to the house and the car and the wifi password – but he will absolutely not be at the table with her team that will help her design her new life without him.

Chief Sloly and the police union, the Ottawa Police Association, called the police Board and City Council’s decision to give the OPS an $11 million raise a “cut”. Why would the Chief and the OPA say that? They’d say it because they know that, because the Board and Council didn’t cut large amounts from their budget and free it up to go to things that actually keep us safer, like mental health programs – that the crises will keep happening – and then the OPS can say, “You see what happens when you cut our budget?” – and ask for an even bigger increase next year. In 2022, we will use our Compassion not Cops study to counter this narrative.

Cops in schools and the police budget – Succeeding in getting cops out of schools was a huge success. Keeping them out will require continued vigilance as we fully expect the OPS to try to maintain its connection to schools through some form of layered policing.

In his March 2021 Spring magazine article, Layered policing’ expands police amid calls to defund, Jeff Shantz said:

In response to community calls to defund police and fund necessary social resources, cities across the country have instituted “layered policing.” From Lethbridge to Saskatoon to Kitchener-Waterloo, these moves would actually deploy more police throughout the community, and embed policing in everyday social life. All while presenting a model in which social services are framed as policing functions (or policing “partnerships”).

We expect the OPS will push for continued strong involvement in the mental health response system, framed as “partnerships” with social service agencies, while fighting any reductions to their budget that would free up money to go to these “partner” agencies. We also see them attempting to continue to try to deploy more cops in the community under the guise of the Neighborhood Resource Team program, which is their latest name for “community policing”.

The OPS NRT program has gone from $2.5 million and 18 officers in 2019 to over $11 million and 89 officers in 2021. And the OPS is currently leading an evaluation of the program that’s pretty much guaranteed to conclude that the program is great and should be further expanded. The project started in fall 2019 when the OPS hired Carleton professor Linda Duxbury to lead it. After we found out about the project, we met with Duxbury and asked her why no Black groups were included in the project description for her project on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council website (SSHRC gave her almost $200,000 for the project). She said she had included Indigenous groups.

Duxbury’s NRT project is yet another example of the OPS ensuring that anything that’s meant to hold them accountable, or evaluate them, produces positive reviews they use to justify asking the Board and City Council for more money. We will continue to expose this in 2022 in the run up to the vote on the OPS’ 2023 budget – and the Oct. 2022 Ottawa municipal election.

We will also work to have similar successes in 2022 in areas beyond policing by increasing our efforts to connect with – and be guided by – community members most affected by the systems we’re trying to change.

La lutta continua.

Categories
black death OPS Police

Ottawa police fail to serve and protect Anthony Aust

On Wednesday, Oct. 10, 23-year-old Anthony Aust fell to his death after several heavily armed officers with the Ottawa Police tactical unit burst through the front door of his 12th-floor Ottawa apartment.

An Oct. 10 CBC story said Aust’s family was worried about his mental health and that he was falling into a depression and quoted his mother, Nhora Aust, 50, saying, “He was terrified of his peers, terrified of the police and terrified of jail.” His mom said police told her they were looking for a gun and cocaine. She wasn’t told if they found anything.

She’s not confident that Ontario’s police watchdog will lay charges in her son’s death. Media reports say the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has assigned four investigators to the probe, which will take months to complete. Only five per cent of SIU cases result in charges, the agency said in 2019.

Ottawa is currently awaiting the verdict in the trial of Ottawa police constable Daniel Montsion in the 2016 death of Abdirahman Abdi. The SIU led the investigation.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that such “no-knock” warrants could be used in urgent cases. But in February of this year, an Ottawa judge ruled that the police had violated one woman’s charter rights after raiding her home using “dynamic entry”, as the method is known. Superior Court Justice Sally Gomery said that “police cannot operate from an assumption that they should break in the door of any residence that they have a warrant to search.”

In an Oct. 9 story, the Ottawa Citizen said, “Despite the ruling, the police service has defended the practice and said it will continue using the entry when the service thinks it’s necessary to ensure public and officer safety or if there is a risk that a target might destroy evidence.”

Before he retired in 2018, Jeff Kilcollins was a duty inspector on the Ottawa police force and was on the SWAT team for two decades. Quoted in a CBC story, Kilcollins said dynamic entries are the “bread and butter” of tactical officers because of how common they are. He said most dynamic entry warrants are issued when there is a concern that suspects will try to destroy evidence if police don’t act quickly and with surprise. 

“There are demands from the court system, the judicial system. They like it much better when the accused is in possession of the evidence. Narcotics are generally considered disposable evidence, much like child pornography,” Kilcollins said.

However, CBC also quoted veteran defence lawyer Mark Ertel, who won the February Superior Court case before Gomery. Ertel said search warrants are often granted based on intelligence from unsavoury characters who may not be telling the truth.

“It’s usually informant evidence — information from people who are paid to provide information to police or will have charges withdrawn if they provide information to police. These are people with criminal records and a lot to be gained by providing information.” Ertel also said the ruling doesn’t appear to have curbed the use of surprise raids by the Ottawa police – but Aust’s death could be a turning point.

Given all this, Aust’s death raises a number of questions:

  1. If one of the aims of dynamic entry is ensuring public safety, why did the police seemingly disregard the safety of Aust’s family by raiding his apartment when his family, including his 12-yr-old brother and his grandmother were home?
  2. As Aust was also a member of the public, did the police not have an obligation to keep him safe, even as they attempted to take him into custody?
  3. Given the May 2020 falling death of Regis Korchinski-Paquette, and the fact that, like Korchinski-Paquette, Aust was known to be experiencing mental health issues, why didn’t the police anticipate Aust might jump and be prepared for that with something outside to break his possible fall? Did they speak with his family before the raid to assess his mental state?
  4. Do police keep stats, by race, on how often they use dynamic entry?
  5. Since Aust was wearing a GPS ankle monitor as part of his bail conditions, why couldn’t the police have chosen to work with his parole officer to find a time to apprehend him that would put as few others at risk as possible?
  6. Do the police believe that avoiding lost evidence is worth endangering people’s lives?
  7. How often are the police basing their raids on information from “unsavoury” characters?

The facts would suggest that Aust’s 12-yr-old brother saw him jump to his death.

We will ask Ottawa police chief, Peter Sloly, all the questions above, and one more: how were the police protecting Aust’s 12-yr-old brother by causing his older brother to jump to his death in front of him?