Contexto Social

Across the western world law and order is replacing social and economic equality measures as the centrepiece of Government social policy. In Toronto, law and order policies cut a wide swath through the city, creating a growing divide between those residents considered worthy of protection, and those cast as the source of disorder. Race, gender and poverty are the determining fault lines.

Policing takes up a greater share of the City's net budget than any other area of program spending. In 2003, the City of Toronto allocated 22% or $634.5 million dollars to The Toronto Police Service. Although the Mayor and council have repeatedly cried poverty when it comes to funds to stop TTC fare increases, recreation user fees, or cuts in community programs and grants, hefty increases have been awarded to the force every year since amalgamation. No other area of spending has had such favourable treatment. This pattern has held steady even as the police department has been hit by successive scandals and charges of misconduct towards poor and homeless people, racial profiling, refusal to implement measures and protocols on violence against women as well as internal corruption.

In October 2002, The Toronto Star published a special series uncovering

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Force. The response of both the Mayor and the Chief of Police has been to deny the existence of systemic racism in the force, and attack the credibility of the Star, its reporters and researchers. The Police Union in turn launched a lawsuit against the newspaper.

In 1998, a successful suit against the Toronto Police Service by a Jane Doe led City Council to ask the City Auditor to conduct a review the force's

investigation of sexual assaults. Working closely with Jane Doe and numerous women's anti-violence groups and the Police, the Auditor released his report in 1999, containing 57 wide-ranging recommendations for changes in Police procedures. To date only the most minor and technical recommendations have been implemented and women's groups have been sidelined and dismissed from the process.

Shortly thereafter, a police protocol for domestic violence was shelved at the eleventh hour by the Police Department. This, despite the fact that the protocol had been developed, over a number of years, through a collaborative process between police department officials and volunteers from numerous

women's anti-violence groups from across Toronto.

As crime rates fall, Councilors and Police use public perceptions and fears of crime and the notion of 'crime prevention' to justify increased spending. During the summers of 1999 and 2000 City Council approved funds for a targeted police initiative dubbed 'Community Action Policing' aimed at

neighbourhoods identified as crime "hot spots"32_{. Police officers, working at}

overtime rates, were deployed into racialized low-income neighbourhoods such as Regent Park, Parkdale, Jane-Finch, Rexdale and Glendower on foot, in cars, on bicycles and motorbikes. Most of the targeted communities are home to large numbers of people of colour, new immigrants, single mothers and young people. A survey conducted by the community-based Committee to Stop Targeted

Policing found that residents experienced harassment, intimidation, threats and violence in the period of the initiative.

Young, racialized and homeless people, sex trade workers and poor white residents reported being unduly stopped and harassed by police officers in public areas such as parks and the streets. This criminalizing of large numbers of people, and ongoing public portrayal of them as potential criminals, leaves them more vulnerable to public discrimination, harassment and violence.

Low-income women who are victims of sexual assault or domestic violence are caught in a lethal catch 22. They are caught between legitimate concerns for their safety as women and their well-founded distrust of the police. Young women who see their neighbours and friends roughly treated by police

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are less likely call for help or report assaults. Dual charging in cases of domestic violence is becoming commonplace, particularly among racialized and low- income women. Anti-violence advocates are raising the alarm at the numbers of cases where women call the police for assistance and end up facing charges themselves.

A National Council of Welfare report on Justice and the Poor in Canada describes differential police attitudes towards women:

Social class and race can also make a difference in the treatment of female suspects by the police. Studies revealed that some police officers gave women the "chivalrous treatment" meaning they were more lenient with women than men in similar circumstances. The main problem is that this benefited some female suspects more than others, in particular those who were middle- or upper-class, white, well groomed and apparently

submissive, and who reacted by 'crying, pleading for release for the sake of their children, claiming men had led them astray.' Women who did not fit this stereotype, who were not white, or who were drunk, unkempt, hostile or selling sex, were treated as harshly as men.33

Against this backdrop, women who are among the poorest of the poor in all communities are waging a quiet struggle to make life work for themselves, their families and their communities. They are women of colour, immigrants, refugees, sole support mums, widowed, divorced, separated or single and their relationships are shaped as much by their cultural communities as by where they live. Lack of time, resources, social supports and English language skills leave them isolated from each other and the mainstream of City life. They have few opportunities to meet with women from other cultures or neighbourhoods, and no advocacy network to counteract their absence and erasure in the all-important territory of social policy-making.

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