Police and Trust

It’s been a disheartening couple of days in progressive Hamilton politics. First, Hamilton Police Chief Eric Girt went on CHML’s Bill Kelly Show and gave an absolutely appalling interview which featured the chief, when asked about the HPS’ relationship with the LGBTQ+ community, promoting and supporting the worst sort of homophobic stereotypes of queer people. It’s just… wow. If you care to listen — and I admit that I couldn’t get through the whole segment — the relevant portion of the interview starts about 22:45 if you click the link above, but his comments referenced public sex, pedophilia and the rather asinine complaint that police are actually quite tolerant because they even protect demonstrators that have signs “that say Eff The Police.”

The response from the LGBTQ+ community was immediate, loud, and justifiably upset. Chief Girt has since issued a patently insincere “apology” which notably failed to include any substantive commitment to doing better, just the usual — and it has become routine by now — increasingly hollow claim that the HPS is committed to repairing the relationship with the LGBTQ+ community.

I’m going to repeat myself here but I think it bears repeating: Any attempt to repair that relationship is going to require a genuine action. To start: dropping all charges against the Pride defenders. Arrests of the actual violent hate group members which attacked Hamilton’s Pride. A genuine and sincere apology to the LGBTQ+ community for deliberately withholding police protection from Pride. And, it’s become clear, the resignation of Police Chief Eric Girt who has not only failed in his professional duty to an absurd degree but who clearly holds homophobic and transphobic prejudices that have no place in a modern police force.

We cannot move forward when it’s obvious that the police chief lacks the slightest amount of respect for or understanding of the LGBTQ+ community.

The mayor of Hamilton, Fred Eisenberger, doubled down with a statement of support for the Chief the next day on the same radio show. The Police Services Board had their monthly meeting yesterday, and despite an excellent delegation from Michael Demone, resolutely failed to address the issue. They did deign to add a discussion to the agenda at next months’ Police Services Board, to consider whether there should be a review of police conduct at Hamilton Pride. I’m not a gambling man, but I’m going to confidently predict that discussion’s outcome: No, there won’t be a review of police conduct. (If there’s anyone willing to bet against that prediction, my preferred medium of exchange when wagering is moderately-priced whiskey.)

Hamilton has a problem. Yes, we have hate groups wandering the streets and threatening people at the City Hall forecourt and openly assaulting LGBTQ+ people in front of police who then arrest the victims. Yes, you have street harassment and hateful graffiti and fascist groups putting up recruitment posters. Yes, the city employed a known neo-Nazi leader for more than a decade and tried to conceal that fact from the media. And oh yes, Hamilton has managed to earn itself the disgraceful title of “Hate Crimes Capitol of Canada.”

That is not the problem. Those things are symptoms of the problem.

The problem is that Hamilton’s so-called civic leaders, from the Mayor’s office to the Police Chief and all the way down the chain of command, are enabling hate. Whether that enabling is through inaction or through deliberate encouragement is something to be debated (and the Chief’s statements are an important data point for one argument) the end result is that hate groups are being empowered to operate in Hamilton.

Oh, I know there are members of City Council who have been active in opposing these groups, and that’s to their credit, but mayor Eisenberger seems to think that ignoring the issues will make it go away. Of course, I don’t just mean he’s just ignoring the hate groups: I mean that he’s also ignoring the LGBTQ+ community as much as possible. Eisenberger is fond of pointing out the city’s “Trans Protocol”, but very little is being done to actually implement it. One of the better symbols of the city’s lip-service-but-no-more approach to the LGBTQ+ community was illustrated earlier this week in Cameron Kroetsch’s opinion piece about the damage to the city’s “rainbow crosswalk” in front of city hall: the city might have painted the crosswalk in support of the LGBTQ+ community (which is the municipal government equivalent of gifting someone bath salts, by the way), but it’s not doing a damn thing to protect or maintain it; show me a better metaphor for the neglect and disdain the city shows for its relationship with LGBTQ+ people.

And the ongoing low-grade homophobic behaviour of the city’s police — well, it’s obvious where that comes from. If the Chief of Police is comfortable going on the radio and making outrageous statements about public sex and pedophilia — in response to questions about public safety from hate group attacks — then the most generous conclusion that I can come to is Chief Eric Girt simply isn’t competent to hold his position. The least generous conclusion I can come to is that the man is a homophobe and is deliberately abusing his authority to punish the LGBTQ+ community… and I won’t be taking bets on that one, either way.

The public trust in the police, at least in the LGBTQ+ and racialized communities in Hamilton, has utterly been destroyed by the Hamilton Police Service this summer. They have made it clear that they far prefer going after the victims of hate rather than the groups that are perpetrating it.

And yesterday that was demonstrated beyond a doubt when the Sexual Assault Centre Hamilton (SACHA) announced that they were cancelling the annual Take Back The Night March for the first time in 38 years. Several reasons were cited, particularly the fact that the city was insisting that there be a larger police presence which SACHA, a small and underfunded nonprofit would have to pay for… which seems somewhat extortionate to me: “We’ve failed to keep hate groups in check, so you need more officers, which you’ll have to pay for.” But the reason that caught my eye in the article was that SACHA’s membership, particularly women of colour and LGBTQ+ women, “Don’t feel safe with having so many officers there.”

There it is. They don’t feel safe. March organizer Jessica Bonilla-Damptey explicitly states in the above-linked Spectator article that “We were receiving feedback that having more police officers isn’t a solution for safety from the perspective of our community members… We know that racialized individuals feel unsafe around police as well as individuals from LGBTQ+ communities, all marginalized folks.“

Women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people don’t feel safe in their community, and one of the things that makes them feel unsafe is the presence of the police.

That’s how you know you’ve fucked up, Chief Girt: Your officers are as frightening to minorities as the literal Nazis you allow to threaten us.

I feel unsafe on Hamilton’s city streets, in front of city hall, and hell, even writing about this on my blog. If HPS will arrest Cedar Hopperton simply for complaining about their misconduct and failure in a public meeting, will they go after me for writing public criticisms? And what would be my recourse if they did? They’ve already demonstrated that there’s little to no accountability for police officers and that Hamilton cops will use whatever excuse to go after anarchists and those they deem “troublemakers.”

And if I’m afraid of that — as a large, bearded, white cis-male writing from a position of considerable privilege — then how much more do women, trans-people, people of colour and other marginalized communities have to fear? As disheartening as I find SACHA’s decision, I’m frankly unsurprised by it. If there’s surprise at all, it’s that it took as long as it did for the decision to be made. Like Ladybird Fancypant’s decision to discontinue the Drag Queen Story Hour, vulnerable people cannot be expected to risk themselves in the face of normalized hate.

The Hamilton Police Service has failed its community, and continues to fail it.

In response to that failure, the community itself has having to organize. The police may condemn the Tower anarchists and anti-fascists as well as, increasingly, the rather more white-middle-class No Hate In The Hammer crowd, but the truth is that these are the people who’ve been doing the real work of keeping the hate groups contained. In the absence of police protection and civic leadership it has fallen to the citizens to stand up.

In the interest of ending this post on a positive note, this morning someone passed along a Facebook event: an Autonomous Take Back The Night March is being planned. The event’s motto: Because We Don’t Need Their Permission! And we don’t. The city tried to extort money out of a non-profit for more police protection in response to their failure to protect the community. The correct response, the empowering and exhilarating response, is to say exactly that: If you won’t extend your protection then we don’t need your permission.

There’s an old anarchist slogan that I think applies here: The Police Don’t Keep Us Safe, We Keep Us Safe. It’s become clear, over the summer of 2019, that those words definitely apply to Hamilton, Ontario.

Stay safe out there, folks.