OCDSB In Trouble With the Police

From an Ottawa School Board Critic

By

Shannon B Douglas

I remember visiting my small-town grandmother from our home in the big city when I was a teen.    She was possessed by the idea, from her limited selection of television news, and AM radio stations, that teenagers had ALL become corrupted by drugs and crime and that we needed more police to protect the social order.  She was consumed by fear and her distorted but grand story about the state of the world, was gathered from limited sources and framed with limited experience.  QAnon people did this.  So did Flat Earthers, 911 Truthers and fake moon landing theorists.  Some point to MAGA too, a polarized information bubble, and confounding as it was, it was impossible to talk grandma out of her beliefs.    

It's not just “those people” that we need to scrutinize though, because if we acknowledge we live in a polarized world, we might just be staked out at the opposite pole ourselves, missing just as much about the state of the world from our limited view, and limited experience, as grandma was.  We, as individuals and as institutions, can easily mistake our own views as coherent, while condemning others, not seeing our own blind spots created around the charged pole of our own beliefs. 

The Ottawa School Board for example, is just as vulnerable to galvanizing around extreme ideas as any other group of people.  To be kind, when this happens, we call this “Groupthink” instead of conspiracy theories, but recent histrionics and head-scratching decisions by the board leave many wondering about their cosmology. 

Groupthink happens when no-one is allowed to question the prevailing set of beliefs, when dialogues are suppressed by ideologues, and when deviation from distorted beliefs are understood to be verboten.  A perfect example of this groupthink is the OCDSB’s approach to police and they’re demonstrating that it’s time for an open dialogue and to arrest the destructive grand stories that children are learning in Ottawa schools. 

The current creation myth about law enforcement is rooted in the dubious idea that we live in a society radically divided by a thin line between oppressors and oppressed; that Canada is a systemically racist country and that ALL measurable disparity between racial groups is evidence of systemic racism and oppression.  We are fostering fear and fragility in children, defending claims that children are made unsafe by seeing police in uniforms and that they are made safer, shielded from harms, by the cancellation of school resource officers (SROs) and the banning of uniforms. 

Activist-members of the OCDSB used the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis to justify institutionalizing a distorted but grand narrative about police.  They used a crisis that they could have risen to, that should have been a teachable moment, to institutionally endorse prejudice and indeed hatred against police in Canada and to teach children to disrespect the brave men and women who don the uniform to serve and protect.   

Beneath the superficial claims of “Defund the Police” are radical activists who believe the stories that All Cops are Bastards (ACAB) and that we must abolish police all together because they are stooges of a society created by exploitation, domination, and systemic racial oppression. 

The mechanisms used to enforce the group think include employing ideological enforcers like Nili Kaplan-Myrth, who calls anyone who questions these polarized extremist views a racist, misogynist, bigot, white supremacist or a phobe.  Along with the help of media allies, these people entrench groupthink by charging the ideological pole with demands for compliance, and threats or public attacks for non-compliance.  This is not how to run a school board.  The way to make policy is to seek out and evaluate claims and evidence and makes rational, thoughtful decisions, instead of ones driven by the histrionics of the likes of Kaplan-Myth.

A year ago, CBC Ottawa ran a headline: “Ottawa Police more likely to use force on Black, Middle Eastern, Indigenous people: report,” which interpreted 2020 data about police interactions.  That year, mostly dominated by the pandemic, the data showed that police received 220,700 calls.  They made 8,000 arrests and 348 arrests involved use-of-force.  

Let’s assume that a certain number of police calls will always require an arrest and that this will never change.  Let us also accept sadly that a certain number of arrests will always require physical force to restrain a suspect.  All societies have criminals and criminality and part of the role of police in even the healthiest society is to maintain the social order.  Then let us look at the data:  in 2020, 1/632 calls ended with a use-of-force arrest.  Overall, the police made 8,000 arrests, 1/23 of which involved the use-of-force.  This means police broadly exercise a tremendous amount of restraint in their engagements and that police violence is by far the exception, not the norm.  The data shows that ninety use-of-force arrests involved suspects with weapons, fifty were due to disturbance, (I imagine alcohol use, domestic or public violence and resisting arrest).  Sadly, forty of these arrests involved mental health issues.  It’s possible that some of these situations could have been avoided; a fraction likely went too far.  Just like criminality, bad apples exist in every sphere.  The exception, not the norm. 

Anti-Police activists, and BLM, ACAB abolitionists however push the opposite of what my grandma believed: that police are violent, racist oppressors that need to be defunded.  They claim that a disproportionate number of people experiencing use-of-force by police are people of color.  They somehow don’t ask the question: why is this small sub-group of people of color more likely to have weapons, to be causing disturbance, to have warrants out for their arrests or be experiencing violent mental health issues?  Why do the conclusions assume prejudice when so many use-of-force arrests involved weapons and disturbances dangerous to the police or the public or both?  Why are we elevating fractions of fractions of people here into grand narratives?  Why are we accepting limited views assembled from limited sources, with limited thinking.  The only cause is racism?  To question this is racist?

There is no scrutiny of other contributing factors in the study, such as the average age of racial cohorts in Canada, or the impact of poverty, or addiction, or single-parent households.  These questions are heretical to the groupthink.  The board, like so many polarize dradicals, can only see one factor at play: so-called systemic racism and can only manage one creation myth upon which to base policy: that all cops are bastards, terrorizing people of color, indiscriminately violent, killing Black people with impunity.

Contrary to my grandmother’s paranoid view of the world that all teenagers were addicted criminals, we know this is not the case.  Contrary to the groupthink of the school board, neither is it the case that police are systemically violent, scary, oppressive, racist, white supremacists.  Police are community helpers who have a tremendously difficult job, and who sometimes find themselves in dangerous situations, where they must act to protect themselves, or to place themselves between dangerous situations and members of the public.  What we need removed from schools are the small minded, dangerous, divisive polarizing narratives about the police, about race and about the nature of Canada as a country.  Confounding as it is to try to get them to see, we did find it was eventually possible to talk grandma out of her distorted beliefs.  As for the OCDSB, the case grows to vote out the groupthink in 2026.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Confronting Activist Myths: Decolonization, and the Spirit of the Times

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