Toronto Cop Who Quit Amidst Racial Tensions Discusses the ‘Hatred’ Currently Facing Police

Former Toronto police officer Marc Rainford. Photo submitted

Marc Rainford is full of mixed messages.

The former Toronto police constable quit his job July 8 following a three-year struggle with depression. It was exacerbated, he said, by racial tensions that have been mounting in the city.

“Seeing the deterioration police and community… listening to the hatred. People aren’t being constructive about policing, they’re using hatred as a form of empowerment against police and it’s not productive,” Rainford, 44, told VICE in an interview Tuesday morning.

In recent months, anti-black racism organization Black Lives Matter Toronto has called out law enforcement for perpetuating systemic racism; most recently the group asked that police not have an official presence at future Pride parades. South of the border, the shooting deaths of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, at the hands of police, were met with fury, sparking protests across the US. In the immediate aftermath, two targeted attacks on police—one in Dallas and the other in Baton Rouge, where Sterling was killed—left a total of eight cops dead. The incidents have thrust a spotlight on racism in the context of policing.

Rainford, who is black, worked as a constable in Scarborough for ten years, before eventually moving into Police and Community Engagement Review (Project PACER), which was established in 2012 to determine how cops could “enhance public trust and safety, while delivering bias free service.”

He said a negative experience he had with with a cop in 2001 is what prompted him to become an officer. He’d witnessed two young men handling a gun at Don Mills Centre and soon after tapped on the window of a nearby police cruiser to report the incident. In response, he said he was treated suspiciously.

“He jumped out of the car came around, he patted me down really quick said ‘I need to check you for weapons,’” Rainford said.

“In my head my initial thing was, ‘Why not just ask me what these guys look like and go to your radio?’ That’s not what happened, it was all focused on me.” As the interaction was ending, the cop offered Rainford a ride back to work. When Rainford declined, he said the cop asked “‘Are you embarrassed to be driven to work in a cop car?’ That was the part that really really upset me. Here’s a guy that’s saying that because I’m a racialized person.”

Rainford claims he’s not a defender of police, but his views quite often seem to suggest just that.

While he admitted systemic racism was an issue in policing (and called Toronto Police Association spokesman Mike McCormack “reckless” for suggesting otherwise), he supports carding and said he’s not convinced BLMTO’s tactics are effective.

VICE asked Rainford why he’s critical of BLMTO and about some of the major race-based challenges currently facing the city’s police force:

VICE: Do you think BLMTO is the cause of this “hatred” against police you mentioned?
Marc Rainford: They’re the lightning rod for it. My opinion of them is very mixed. I understand that they represent the lived experiences of the most victimized, I really get that and I really empathize with that position. That voice needs to be heard. By the same token, there are ways to have that heard that motivate and inspire people to be their best selves; I don’t believe the way in which it’s going about is effective or helpful.

What do you think needs to happen to make progress on this issue?
The hate that goes back the other way is when people get mad at BLMTO and say ‘What about black men killing black men?’ Society is aware that black men are killing black men, that’s not a secret. But to always have a rebuttal of aggression to the other side rather than listen to BLM and say ‘We hear you and we feel you and we’re going to work towards a better relationship’ is not saying that the people currently in power are guilty of something, it is an acknowledgement that historically we’ve failed. Both sides don’t want to own things—that hasn’t happened for a small part of the black community and it hasn’t happened enough for people in law enforcement, to hear a group like Black Lives Matter say ‘Officers we hear you. We hear that the rate of homicide within the black community at the hands of the black community is a big problem for you.’ We need to hear BLM acknowledge that.

Did you witness systemic racism at play while you were a police officer?
I didn’t witness it as a practice but I witnessed it as a lived experience. When you’re in a police car and you receive information over the radio that something’s happened and descriptions are very vague, people will say ‘he’s a male black, dark clothing.’ You know how many people that covers in a given area? Police officers are not shy people, if they see 1,000 people that match that description, they are going to talk to as many of the thousand as they can and that is a very fair and responsible thing for police officers to do. If they did not do that, crime would not be solved. The problem in policing is that police officers don’t see their job as having any sort of residual emotional impact. So if I come and I investigate you and I don’t tell you what’s going on, but I treat you like you might have been involved in a crime, when I’m done and I realize you’re not the person I’m fine with that. But I’ve left you feeling like you going to the grocery store has criminalized you.

What are your thoughts on carding?
It is a real shame that it’s gone. It’s a shame that was misused. If it was used properly there’s so much value in it. The simplest thing was solved with a card. When you find a purse, nine out of ten times it doesn’t have a wallet in it because the person has stolen the wallet but they will leave everything else in that purse. When you start to run all the little identifiers in that purse, because of carding you’re able to return things to people. I remember carding people where my contact with them at the time was the very contact that exonerated them from something. Nobody wants police to do all the things they do until they themselves are a victim. And then once you become a victim you want police to have the authority to have everything. You want the police to stop every car, talk to every single person, get their fingerprints, you want the police to identify the person that victimized you at all costs.

But there’s no hard data that proves carding helps solve crimes. Everything you’ve said is anecdotal.
It is anecdotal. All people seem to care about is the criminal side of policing. The amount of work that officers do and the amount of that work that turns out to be criminal is relatively low. Because it’s relatively low people have now taken away a tool that assisted their daily lives a lot more. The public are the ones that are going to be victims of their own decisions. People weigh in on policing all the time. Everybody thinks they know how to do this job, because they see it on TV, they have an opinion. ‘Why does it take three officers to arrest somebody?’ Well there’s a reason why.

But when you look at the deaths of people like Jermaine Carby, should police be better at de-escalating situations?
I think all police officers should be better at de-escalating. If everybody in society knew that officers were highly skilled at de-escalation people would be a lot more comfortable. But people are isolating certain factors without looking at the context of policing. There is no other job in which your work environment is constantly changing. If you have to walk into a house that you’ve never been in before and you’re there for a violent domestic and the person you have to arrest is standing in the kitchen, in the kitchen there are a lot of knives. To now put on the police officer you have to stay focused on de-escalation when you don’t know how many rooms are in a house, you don’t know what weapons are in the house, it is a little bit naive by the public to make this assertion that officers should just be able to de-escalate things in any situation.

Well there’s some situations where—when you look at Sammy Yatim—it seems obvious there should have been better de-escalation because the officer was later convicted of murder.
People that have never been in those situations will always tell you they can do it better. People are so convinced that they can do policing better than police officers can.

I don’t know if people are convinced that they can do policing better than police officers, I think they think police can do a better job. And as much as you want to argue about going into a house and not knowing who’s in there, that’s your job.
The Toronto police I think last year received just over 3 million calls for service and attended almost a million calls. If you then go on the police website and see how often use of force was used, it’s next to none. When officers are required to use force or if they make a bad call on using force it becomes the trigger point for society to re-evaluate police.The average citizen hates the police. The public is swaying towards let’s not trust the police, let’s not help the police, let’s not make communities safer through the police.

Why don’t people trust them?
Because they’ve had shitty lived experiences and those lived experiences are at the hands of officers who have not empathized with the public. So I’m not blaming the public at all. I don’t blame the public, I don’t blame police. Within society, we need to change the discourse. The ‘us versus them’ is not police versus community, that’s the wrong dividing line. There are police and community members that are committed to working together to make society better, that’s the ‘us.’ The ‘them’ are police officers that don’t feel working with the community is valuable and community members that refuse to work with the public or with the police because they don’t think it will ever produce results. Let’s put them in a room and get them to work together and say ‘OK children, you need to sort your shit out.’

Speaking of, do you think someone from Toronto police, maybe Chief Mark Saunders should have met with BLMTO protesters during tent city and started a dialogue?
Protesting in front of police headquarters, at best is symbolic. The kinds of things that BLMTO is asking for—the chief of police doesn’t have the power to change law. When you have an issue with how policing is done as a profession, there is nothing the chief of police can do. The chief of police can come out and speak to people absolutely and empathize but when you’re actually talking about fundamental change, that’s the Police Services Act.

I think there’s a strong argument that him coming out and addressing that crowd and acknowledging some of their concerns could have gone a long way even if, as you said, it’s more symbolic.
I totally agree, it could have. To date we don’t get a sense from BLMTO that somebody coming out and acknowledging them would satisfy. It might actually escalate the situation.

BLMTO is not known for being a violent group so when you say escalation, I’m not sure what you mean.
I’m not suggesting at all that people would go violent, but what I am suggesting that to automatically assume that him coming out would have disrupted how long BLM stayed, how they would feel after, we’ll never know. So, I don’t like talking about the what if. I’m not against or defending either side.

How do you think BLMTO’s demand that police not have an official presence at future Pride parades is impacting officers?
For officers a lot of this stuff doesn’t change what they have to do as their job, it’s one more obstacle that they have to face. The average officer is just in a place now where they’re like ‘OK, we still have to answer radio calls, we still have to help victims, and now we have to do it with a whole lot of criticism for who we are and what we’re about.’ Officers are used to being criticized for everything they do, that is the culture. It’s sad to see people who, with the best intentions, wanted to do something good for society hear that. But it’s also sad to see that the public feels like they’re targeted. It’s sad on both sides. It is really tragic times right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.