Alok Mukherjee was the civilian overseer of the Toronto police between
2005 and 2015, during the most tumultuous decade the force had ever
faced. In this provocative and highly readable collaboration with Tim
Harper, former Toronto Star national affairs columnist, Mukherjee
reveals how Police Chief Bill Blair changed the channel after the
police-killing of Sammy Yatim. He explains how society has given police
tacit approval to cull people in mental health crisis and pulls the
curtain back on a police culture which avoids accountability, puts
officer safety above public safety, colludes on internal investigations
and pushes for use of force over empathy and crisis resolution.
The book takes the reader inside the G20 debacle; the police push for an
ever-growing budget; the battle over carding, which disproportionately
targeted blacks; the police treatment of its own members in mental
health distress; and the battles with an entrenched union that pushed
back on Mukherjee's every move toward reform. In spite of, or as a
result of all this, Mukherjee played a leading role in shaping the
national conversation about policing, sketching a way forward for a new
type of policing that brings law enforcement out of the nineteenth
century and into the twenty-first century.
There is no shortage of "inside" police books written by former cops.
Here is a rare title--not only in Canada but the Western world--written
from the community's perspective.
