“Only an idiot would have faith in the SIU” – so stated lawyer Clayton Ruby in 1996 in response to the Special Investigations Unit investigation into the fatal police shooting of 16-year-old Faraz Suleman by York Regional Police Detective Bob Wiche.
Fast forward to the present and the essence of Ruby’s barbed statement still resonates, largely due to the low rates at which officers in Ontario are charged following killings of civilians. For example, from 2017 to 2022 the SIU concluded 53 firearm death investigations; only two of those investigations resulted in charges against involved officers, a charge rate (3.8 per cent) which gives continual rebirth to claims that the SIU evinces pro-police biases.
But as the controversy following the February 2023 Toronto police shooting of Devon Fowlin demonstrates, the earliest stages of SIU interventions – rather than just the endpoint SIU Director decisions – provide another means to assess whether the SIU lives up to its mission to “conduct thorough and unbiased investigations.”
According to Fowlin, he was in a park on February 27, with no one else near him at the time, doing prayers while holding a knife and performing arm motions. Sometime thereafter, a group of officers arrived, commanded Fowlin to show his hands then fired taser darts and bullets at him, resulting in firearm injuries to his wrist, chest and abdomen.
In contrast, the SIU news release – “SIU Investigating After Toronto Police Officer Shoots Man” – asserts that “officers were called to a park in the area of Black Creek Drive and Trethewey Drive for a report of a man with a knife threatening another man.”
But did the SIU provide the public with preliminary information – or misinformation? The question is relevant because, despite the regularity with which the SIU self-presents as unbiased, objective and scientific, SIU news releases often read like the products of police media relations units.
Indeed, an examination of the news releases section of the SIU site reveals several instances in which the SIU fuels the automatic demonization of civilians killed or injured by police. Enter the term “gunfire” as a keyword, read the news release titled “SIU Investigating Police-Involved Shooting in Nepean,” and focus on the assertion that “there was an exchange of gunfire” between Ottawa officers and a man who sustained serious injuries after being hit by police bullets.
The shooting occurred on the night of March 4, 2023 and the news release came out the next day so, unless the SIU performed ballistics testing within a short timeframe, how does the SIU justify telling the public about an exchange of gunfire?
Let us turn to another example, this time with reference to the word “machete,” which leads to a news release titled “SIU Investigating Serious Injuries Suffered by Youth After Arrest in Toronto.” Officers were apparently responding to “a disturbance involving three youths” which then resulted in the following altercation: “Officers located one of the teens and while attempting to make an arrest, the boy and another youth swung a machete at an officer.” Once again, far before a proper investigation could have been initiated, the SIU confidently propagated a narrative favourable to the police.
In these cases, the practical impact of SIU news releases is to cast malign aspersions against people on the receiving end of police force; members of the public, thus influenced, will likely have zero sympathy for the injured or deceased civilians. After all, if a man in a park with a knife is threatening another man, or if a man exchanges gunfire with police, or if a youth swings a machete at an officer, each of them got what they deserved, right?
The dubious character of many SIU news releases is compounded by the fact that the 2020 “Summer of Racial Reckoning,” sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, generated critical lessons about policing, one of which is straightforward: following acts of police violence, do not reflexively believe the police version of events. As the police killings of George Floyd, Tyre Nichols and others demonstrate, police accounts can be replete with deliberate omissions and outright fabrications. So although the SIU vehemently denies that their operations are shaped by pro-police bias, their track record suggests otherwise. The SIU can aspire to be as unbiased as possible or they can function as a conveyor belt for police narratives, but being the latter equals proving that Clayton Ruby was correct.
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