Fighting Racial Profiling and Casual Systemic Racism in New Westminster, British Columbia
On November 19th, 2020, the New West Record ran a story (https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/new-westminster-taking-on-racism-and-diversity-3141524), entitled “New Westminster Taking on Racism and Diversity,” wherein it was reported that the city would begin the implementation of a new “diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism (DEIAR) framework” for which it hired a private consulting firm. This consulting firm promises that the inclusion of the term “anti-racism” sets New Westminster apart from other organizations, and perhaps suggests that major changes are afoot in our fair city.
In theory, this is cause for great optimism, given that city staff has seconded the drive behind the new framework by asserting in a report that this will “support the city” in developing hiring practices to build a “balanced, diverse and inclusive workforce,” and that this will make city government a “healthier, productive, and innovative organization.” The Record cites the framework’s goals to include offering “equitable employment” so the city can attract a workforce that “reflects” “diverse residents.” In addition to this, the framework also lists “inclusive decision-making” which will produce “diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist policies, plans, practices and measures.” To this effect, the article also quotes Mayor Cote, who stressed the importance of ensuring that “really important conversations” don’t only “happen in isolation, in a bubble.”
In that spirit I have decided to offer an important critique of the new framework, as well as the immediate fear by some in the community, evinced by the reaction of Councilor Das, who react negatively to what Das refers to as a “deficit-based approach,” which Das describes as being defined by focusing on “gaps and problems.” Das is quoted as saying that what should be followed instead would be an “asset-based approach,” which will produce a “workforce” which will “deliver our work better.”
Sadly, all these statements sorely miss the point of anti-racism, which is to eliminate racism. Racism is not a bad thing simply because it is currently defined as being against the prevailing morality of the day; rather, it is immoral and anti-social in nature because it proclaims according to arbitrary quasi-biological criteria that one “race” is superior to all others, and, usually, that this means some herrenvolk is deigned to be worthy of greater rights and privileges than others in society. By corollary, it also strongly states or powerfully implies that groups that are not in the chosen elect are deserving of lesser rights and privileges, and that when their rights are violated, there is a legitimate excuse for that owing to their lesser status. In a fascist state or a totalitarianism, like Nazi Germany or the Confederate States of America, or its successor regime of the Jim Crow Southern United States, racism makes perfect sense — indeed, the entire basis of these societies was to elevate the master race at the expense of others, by design. In a democratic and multicultural state like Canada, the United States, or India, the circulation of racism, or, in India, its ancient antecedent, casteism, is fatal to the operations of the body politic and the government, as social trust that evolves through faith in the rule of law is fatally undermined in practice, rendering the peace that it can provide a mere fiction to large segments of society which are not conformist to the majoritarian project of whiteness in North America, or Brahmanical Hinduism in the Indian subcontinent.
In all these contexts, of race, of caste, and of class, there emerges a social ideology of supremacism which castigates the affects and behaviors of subordinated groups for permanent judgment by the ruling group. In India, “lower caste” persons are considered unclean and “upper caste” persons will not share food with them, or enter their abodes; in Nazi Germany, Jews were considered “dirty” persons whose very being was a disease to the health of society; and in the United States and Canada, and the broader Anglo-global worlds which share a common culture with the North American giants, a variety of racial tropes circulate which define Black, Indigenous, Latinx, South Asian, East Asian, African, Arab, Persian, Turkish, and a variety of Others in light of “orientalist” discourses which were created in the colonial political economy of the British empire and have been transformed into a universal English by Hollywood and American dominance of global culture for the last several decades. These include, among others, the racist notion that Muslims are “terrorists,” that persons from Colombia and Mexico are involved in illegal drugs trade, that Indigenous persons are not industrious enough to adapt to capitalism, and that all colored persons are potential physical threats to the safety of all non-colored persons more generally. The figure of the criminal, the vagabond, the highwayman, the car-jacker, the pickpocket, and even the rapist is a figure associated in the racist imagination of white supremacy with the degeneracy and uncivilizability of colored persons. There are other variations of this theme of essentialized, unchangeable difference reflected across social groups — the ascription of wild sexuality to women and to the queer, for example — which have historically led to concrete differences in how groups are treated by persons responsive to those tropes. Sadly, this is often a majority of persons, or what seems like a majority of persons, and in Anglo countries has informed the formation of laws and law enforcement practices, and expectations of social enforcement on the parts of dominant groups.
What this all boils down to, in a practical sense, is that colored persons are seen by non-colored persons to be a threat to the social order, especially so if they are not interested in conforming to the social norms of non-colored persons. As such, black men, bearded men, women who dress in physically revealing ways, gay people who are flamboyant and expressive, and the very existence of transgendered persons are all policed with hyper vigilance, whilst non-colored persons, especially non-colored men, are permitted to move about freely and without appearing conspicuous.
These calculations take place in encounters that occur innumerable times every day, and everyone knows it. On the day of July 27, 2020, I was spotted by one Officer Alex Oprea of the New Westminster Police Department, as I was leaving my building at 318 Agnes Street, near the heart of downtown. That morning I was meeting my colleague who resided about a block away from me at that time, and we were going to go have a socially distanced walk and a coffee on the pier. As I rounded the corner to head to the church courtyard, which is directly adjacent to their building, I heard a voice shout “hey you.” As I was minding my own business, I felt it was appropriate to ignore this command voice — perhaps it was intended for someone else. Again, the voice bellowed “hey you,” in a sharper tone.
I turned around and notice two officers coming down the hill at me, walking at a deliberate pace. I pointed at myself and said “who, me?”
To which officers responded, “yeah, you.”
At that point, as a colored man who has been racially profiled for my appearance many times in Canada and in the United States (where I am from), I elected to stop, wait, and seek to deescalate the situation with these seemingly aggressive officers.
As they approached me, one officer — Oprea — asked me if I was an individual named “Abdul.” I responded in the negative, but that was met with a repeat of the same question, “are you Abdul?” At some point I began to giggle because this was simply stupid.
“No,” I responded again. This time, however, Officer Oprea responded by saying “c’mon man, you look exactly like him.” Now this began to feel threatening. However, as a scholar of political science trained by the finest minds at the University of California in that field and in Black studies, I felt courage and I stood my ground. I said to the officer “I don’t know what to tell you.”
At that point I was asked for ID, which I did not have on my person as it was summer and I was wearing surfer shorts and out for a quick neighborhood walk, with the capacity to pay for purchases with my smartwatch. I informed officers I was out for a walk and that I resided in the building down the block, to which I pointed. At that point, the officers muttered, “it’s not him,” and turned to go back up the hill. No apology was provided and no explanation, either. So I stood there, at the bottom of the hill, watching officers leave. Indeed, at that point their conduct had alarmed me immensely and I was incapable of looking away from them as they left the scene of their police criminality; and sensing I was watching them, Officer Oprea turned to face me once more.
“What?” he said to me, shouting from a small distance. To this I responded simply “what?” and threw my arms up in exasperation. Officer Oprea said “what?” again, and this time I responded by informing both Oprea and his partner (whose name has never been provided to me) that I was “shocked by what just happened.” At that point Officer Oprea’s side partner appeared to convince Officer Oprea to leave the scene of police criminality with him and allow me to continue my day. At no point was I informed this was a street check which I could voluntarily leave, nor that it was an investigative detention which would preclude me from leaving the encounter. This distinction becomes important later when Mayor Cote attempts to retroactively classify the incident as an “investigative detention,” but which he characterizes as “brief in nature” in his correspondence with me, which would justify, according to his “reasoning,” that officers never informed me of my charter rights or the nature of the stop I was being forced to be subjected to arbitrarily.
By failing to provide clear instructions and simply accosting me on the street on a phenotypic hunch, officers racially profiled me and also created a dangerous situation that if I did interpret it as a street check which I was free to leave, that they could have attacked me and seen me as uncooperative and necessitating physical restraint. That grey area creates immense mistrust and difficulty for colored persons, since our being subject to this form of arbitrary authority can always be explained by how we fit the description of a violent person.
Indeed, on July 27th, officer Oprea indicated that I “looked exactly like” a dangerous criminal named Abdul. Later that morning, I called the New Westminster Police Department and arranged a call back from the shift commander who deployed the coppers that morning, Eamon Ward. I asked Ward for a picture of “Abdul” at that time and Ward informed me that there was in fact “no picture” that Oprea was operating from that morning. This was shocking to me, since I was not aware I could appear to look “exactly like” someone for whom there was no photo. He promised me to look into it. Later that day I got in touch with the officer in charge of provincial standards at the NWPD, Aman Gosal, who subsequently emailed me a written description of “Abdul” which described him significantly as a “middle eastern male” with other similar features to myself, such as “medium complexion,” and a similar height. I provided this information to local media and the story was covered on CBC and CTV; however, both of those outlets did not investigate beyond the first layer of claims and public relations obfuscations by the police department (for example, they later claimed there was a picture provided, but have remained tight lipped on the details and have not released the photo).
In late August I had a Zoom call with the mayor, in which the mayor seemed to be quite taken aback by the lack of procedure in the way that the officers behaved with me, but, like a politician, he attempted to placate me with half-measures and smiles and shared with me plans to significantly defund the New Westminster Police Department, which I can certainly appreciate. However, that doesn’t mean that the mayor is willing to take responsibility or hold the police department accountable for these practices, and perhaps is indicative of a wider pattern of cooptation and half-reforms bandied about as “anti-racism” that are now part and parcel of inauthentic proponents of popular activism culture. The most visible proponents of these political maneuvers are semi-liberal closet-conservative politicians like Cote who say one thing to one audience and another thing to another. Indeed, I imagine conservatives are just as upset at Cote for his disingenuousness on these matters — they want to fund the police and he is playing footsie with defunding the police — just as those of us on the left are going to call him out for his platitudinous commitments which are given the lie by his actual actions.
After that Zoom call with the mayor, In October, the New Westminster Police Board met to discuss my service and policy complaint, which they then dismissed, all the while citing the lack of a public trust complaint against individual officer actions in the case. This was quite uninformed of the board, as I indeed myself initially opted to not go after the individual officer as an element of working-class solidarity and in recognition that Oprea’s professional failure was mostly the fault of his substandard training, supervision, and bad policy on the part of the city which on the face seem to severely restrict racial profiling, but which in practice can be retroactively justified by mayoral and police board fiat. In their dismissal letter, the Police Board never once described the incident as I have described it here nor how Officer Aman Gosal wrote it up in initial reports made available for the board, and whose veracity was never challenged by the police or the mayor. They described me as resembling a “criminal” in this letter, but never as a “middle eastern male.” The coverup was beginning.
Following receipt of that letter, I responded to the mayor by challenging his failure to include crucial details in the police board letter which he authored, and I called him out for his visceral reaction to the description of officers’ lack of adherence to procedure when I described the incident to him in the Zoom call, but his failure to properly represent that sentiment to the board or in the board’s letter. In response to that, the mayor responded with another letter on the 13th of November wherein he once again referred to me as a “male” and not as a “middle eastern male” — which covers up how I was profiled in the first instance as admitted by all officers in question — and he also claimed that I was not subjected to a street check, but that the investigative detention to which I was subjected was in fact “brief in nature” and so I didn’t need to have my Charter rights read to me. He also indicated that he was proud that his police department has only done 6 street checks since January of 2020, down from about 380 the previous year. It is highly problematic that the mayor consistently refers to the police department and himself with the collective “we” more than once in the police board letter and in his subsequent correspondence, as this undermines any semblance of independence, which the board is supposed to strictly maintain, from the police force, as per the BC Police Act governing procedures for local municipalities in British Columbia with their own police forces. An identical scandal is currently besetting our neighbors in Vancouver and is also under investigation by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner.
Is it possible that street checks are simply being reclassified as investigative detentions, and that those themselves as all too brief to warrant being recorded? That would certainly appear to be more than likely.
I share this story with the community to inform every one of the fact that these police procedures are inherently violent, unprofessional, do not lead to arrests, and produce potentially even more dangerous situations. In addition to that, they are utterly humiliating. Since November 13th, when I received the mayor’s last correspondence, I have suffered non-stop anxiety related to being a colored person in a white supremacist country that historically and currently favors and normalizes the lifestyles and behaviors of non-colored persons. Whenever I leave my apartment, non-colored persons in some small number stare at me as though I am a dangerous looking person who could do them harm. That coupled with the official culture of denial of systemic racism in the police force and the government, and a culture of cover ups, all point in the direction of the need for an actual anti-racism education program for the entire city that focuses on rooting out the instinct, the venal, sniveling instinct, the shameful instinct that racists hide because they know they should be ashamed of themselves, to group people based on stereotype threat. That move, culturally rooted or otherwise, is fundamentally at odds with a democratic and equal society and allows the subterranean meekness of bad faith actors to poison the social fabric by undermining collective commitments to equality and justice with low-minded cynicism and manipulation of the fears of ignorant people.
That is the recipe for a populist fascism, or a white supremacist feudalism. But not modern Canada, and certainly not modern New Westminster, which will become more and more diverse in the coming years. Will this city be policed by subtle and intelligent persons? Or thugs and jump out boys? And will we have a noble mayor who protects the community? Or a cowardly individual who says things to please whomever they have last spoken with, and then when they are faced with rational critiques they attempt to hide behind institutional gravitas and bureaucratic buck-passing?
We deserve better, and Mayor Cote must resign. In addition to that I call on Officers Jansen, Ward, Gosal, and Oprea, to all immediately resign from the New Westminster Police in order to provide a real framework for anti-racism, which can be led by actual anti-racists, instead of those who at best have a passing commitment to this democracy-saving work. I have filed human rights complaints for their role in the incident and the resulting coverup against accused Oprea and Cote and will be filing corroborated accusations against other persons as fit in the coming weeks. This case is also under review by the OPCC.
