Mark Saunders gives Toronto police a chance for a new beginning

Mark Saunders seldom looked as happy as when he announced on Monday that he will step down as Toronto’s police chief at the end of July.

No wonder. Simultaneously too cautious for critics of policing in general and the Toronto force in particular, and too inclined to shake things up for many of his own officers, Saunders ended up caught in the middle.

He was said to be the “status quo” choice when he was appointed chief in 2015, but instead proposed a transformation plan that would have cut some $100 million from the force’s budget of $1 billion and trimmed hundreds of uniformed officers from its ranks.

These days, after massive protests against police violence in both Canada and the United States, that might be welcomed as a step toward “defunding” the police and redefining its role.

Instead, Saunders ran into massive resistance from the police union, which successfully pressured his political masters into reversing course. When a new wave of gun violence broke out, the police services board and city council threw money at the force again, increasing its budget by $40 million and hiring hundreds of new officers. Instead of defunding, the city in the end chose re-funding.

And yet Saunders refused to feed into public panic as the number of shootings rose. He insisted, rightly, that policing could be just part of the solution, that it’s wrong to “think we can arrest our way out of this.” Governments, he said, must also invest in social supports for troubled communities.

It shouldn’t have been unexpected, then, that Saunders made the dramatic gesture of “taking a knee” last week in the midst of a protest against police violence.

As the first Black chief of the Toronto force, he needed no lessons in the corrosive impact of racism. And he gave a strong hint of the direction he may take once he leaves his current job. “I see a lot of young Black boys getting killed by young Black boys,” he said. “I want to find a cure for the disease.”

Whatever the verdict on his time as chief, Saunders has done the Toronto force a final service by stepping down now, eight months before the end of his contract.

Debate over the role of policing has never been so charged. Proposals to defund, even dismantle, police forces have moved from the radical fringe to the centre of public discussion in a matter of days, driven by world-wide outrage over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In Toronto, two city councillors, Josh Matlow and Kristyn Wong-Tam, kicked off the debate on Monday by proposing a motion to cut 10 per cent of the budget of the police service, or about $122 million, and reallocate the money to community programs.

That will be far too little for some critics of the police, who just want to tear the whole thing down. But it would be a big step toward rebalancing the city’s priorities, if the mayor and council are willing to stick with it in the face of inevitable push-back from the police union and its many allies.

Matlow and Wong-Tam also want the province to give city council more control over details of the police budget, the city’s biggest spending item. It’s doubtful the Ford government would go along with that, but it should, if only in the name of democratic control.

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This is the context in which Toronto will select its next chief. The times call for a truly extraordinary leader. Reform on the scale that Saunders proposed in his transformation plan won’t be nearly enough to satisfy the demands for change in the months ahead.

Toronto’s force needs something much more ambitious, and a chief capable of delivering on it. The new chief must also excel at communicating the need for change, something that wasn’t Saunders’ strong suit. He was right to step down now and clear the way for a new beginning.