After Sammy Yatim videos, we’ll all want to see what’s next: DiManno

 

There is no justification — none — for nine shots in 13 seconds in the middle of the city.

You know when that kind of lethal fusillade typically occurs in a densely populated urban area? During shootouts between heedless, sloppy, sociopathic street gangs.

Cops are supposed to have better judgment.

There would, rightly, be outrage if feuding thugs with guns started blasting on a well-travelled downtown artery, much less aiming their fire at a streetcar. Sadly, this phenomenon is not unknown in Toronto: 11-year-old Tamara Carter struck in the head by a “stray” bullet in November 2004, after a man told three youths who had been harassing other passengers on a Jane St. bus to knock it off; Jesse Kay paralyzed from the neck down when stepping off an Eglinton bus, blasted three times in the chest at close range in 2011; Richard Haynes opening fire on a man with whom he’d quarrelled earlier in the day, Feb. 23, 2009, bullets ricocheting around the Oakwood Ave. bus as women with children dove out of the way.

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That last incident was recorded in breathtakingly clear images by four on-board surveillance cameras — horrific footage to watch but impossible to dispute, which is why Haynes pleaded guilty to attempted murder, receiving a nine-year sentence. The installation of those unblinking lenses was part of a $17-million project equipping all TTC ground vehicles with high-quality cameras.

Presumably, therefore, just as good video images exist of what exactly happened on the 505 Dundas streetcar shortly after midnight Saturday, resulting in the death of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim: Shot by cops.

We rely on indirect and second-hand ID because neither the cops nor the Special Investigations Unit have yet released the victim’s name. This, just for starters, is unacceptable. Death by cop, or in any violent circumstances, is not a private matter. As harsh as it may sound, the dead don’t have any right to privacy, to be anonymously mourned by loved ones.

The nameless are also the faceless and too easy to ignore. Further, the whole community has something at stake when so public and alarming an event occurs. Yet police in this country have become accustomed to withholding information, as they choose, ducking behind the curtain of privacy laws selectively wielded.

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Similarly, if we were to depend on cops for a forthright account of what transpired in and around Car 505, the truth might never come out. Are there witness officers, those who can be compelled to answers questions from the SIU? Or are they all subject officers, who by law have the right to lawyer up and decline interviews? That would depend on how many of the cops present discharged their firearms — another detail not yet disclosed, though SIU investigators would have gathered all the weapons by now.

In olden days — about 15 minutes ago — we would have relied on witness accounts and investigator interviews (if their contents were ever disclosed) to understand how such a dreadful outcome resulted, the killing of what may have been yet one more mentally distressed individual who challenged police officers. That knife-brandishing person does not appear to have put any civilians at significant risk because, according to one passenger who spoke to the Star afterwards, the young man had ordered everyone off the streetcar just west of Bathurst St. It’s been claimed the victim was even pleading for help, left alone on that streetcar.

There was no innocent bystander in his immediate vicinity.

There was no gun in a crazed man’s hand.

There was no close-quarter struggle.

There was little likelihood the disturbed individual would take the rail-bound public vehicle on a police chase, as did Richard Kachkar, with such tragic results, in his commandeering of snow plow.

There was, in fact, no “showdown” — the word applied by media to whatever provoked the lethal use of force by cops — at least not as indicated by citizen-journalism video that captured the event, snatches of cellphone video posted online. One, in particular, shows the teenager standing just above the well of the streetcar’s front door. It’s not clear if Yatim is the person who can be overheard saying — on one enhanced version of the audio — “You’re a pussy. You’re a f---ing pussy.” What can be heard are the repeated orders from police to “drop the knife.”

And then the relentlessly bang-bang-bang, bang, stop, bang, stop, more bangs still.

One knife, multiple guns unholstered, and no reason — to these eyes — why the situation might not have been de-escalated. Certainly there seemed no necessity to rush toward an avoidable climax; perhaps wait for police experts in negotiation to arrive.

Instead, a Toronto family is planning a funeral and yet again police will be assailed for imprudent action taken in the heat of the moment. But was it so very hot and seething?

Studies conducted by criminologists have indicated that roughly one-third of police shootings in Canada that resulted in death or injury involved people either diagnosed or suspected of mental illness.

We don’t kill crazy people, do we? Well, I guess we do, or cops do, and they rationalize it as an appropriate response to a threat. After-fact review routinely agrees with those decisions.

But the world is changing. An officer’s word need no longer be the determining factor. There are eyes-on everywhere, and ubiquitous gadgetry to record what’s in dispute.

Coroner’s inquests have been held, over and over, at least 10 probes of fatal shootings by police in Toronto over the past two decades: Lester Donaldson, Edmund Yu, Wayne Williams, Reyal Jardine-Douglas, Sylvia Klibingaitis, Michael Eligon, Byron Debassige, Otto Vass — the names of the dead go on and on, purported menaces to the public and police, whether wielding a paring knife or a pair of scissors but really armed with little more beyond the paranoia in their head and irrational behaviour exhibited.

The coroner’s recommendations are inevitably the same: better training for officers, better access to treatment when people are in mental crisis, intercession before a situation erupts in lethal firepower — such as the mobile crisis intervention teams that have been created for some Toronto police divisions, incorporating a plainclothes officer and a psychiatric nurse.

Police say those units are not equipped to respond to immediate threats of violence, which rather negates their usefulness when most required, if the assertion is to be believed.

It’s quite true that cops aren’t social workers; they react to the situation unfolding before them, not to the potential mental disturbance of a subject. Yet front-line officers deal every day with psychiatric patients and the mentally compromised — many of them dangerous in the moment only because they’ve gone off their meds, spiralling out of sensibility.

How can the likelihood of such encounters not be a vigorously addressed component of their training?

There’s been entirely too much looking back, as if in helplessness over fatal consequences.