Not Soft on Cops

I have said fuck the police and meant it.

I have said it outside City Hall, on the Pod, in my Blog, and next to my son at Scotiabank Arena alongside O’Shea Jackson, better known as Ice Cube. We were not joking. We are not play-acting. I have seen too much for that.

I am critical of authority in general, but especially police, because when police abuse power the consequences are immediate and devastating. I have witnessed police brutality in downtown Toronto. I have seen the look that comes over some officers when the badge stops being a public trust and starts becoming a permission slip. I have seen force used against people who were already outnumbered, already panicked, already losing.

So let me be clear.

This is not softness on cops.

My earlier piece argued that the system too often mistakes degradation for justice, confuses punishment with safety, and manufactures “more wreckage later” while calling it order. This is the same argument, turned toward the people tasked with enforcing that order.

Because here is the thing.

I worked on the pioneer team for the Toronto Community Crisis Service. I have responded to 911 calls with police, fire, and EMS in the middle of the night. Long before that, as a priest, I was in delivery rooms, at deathbeds, in hospital corridors, and in the real muck and mess of human life. I have seen people at their most frightened, most ashamed, most volatile, and most undone.

And I have seen the faces of cops.

Not the press-conference faces. Not the recruitment-poster faces. The real ones. The tired ones. The scorched ones. The faces of men and women who look like they have spent too long standing in the path of human collapse and have not come through it clean.

I see the pain there.

I believe that job is doing something terrible to many of them.

How could it not?

What does it do to a person to be called, over and over again, into scenes of psychosis, addiction, domestic violence, public breakdown, overdose, despair, blood, and chaos — and to be told that your role is to impose order on problems no badge can actually heal? What does it do to the soul to serve a system that keeps arriving at the very end of social failure and calling that public safety?

No wonder some of them look spiritually wrecked.

But that pain is not the public’s burden to carry for them.

It is their responsibility to get help.

Not the responsibility of the vulnerable. Not the responsibility of the mentally ill man on the sidewalk. Not the terrified woman in crisis. Not the addict. Not the homeless kid. Not the racialized teenager. Not the person already on the wrong end of state power.

If you are carrying trauma, cynicism, rage, contempt, or emotional rot into uniform, then you have a responsibility to deal with it before you put your hands on another human being.

I can see the pain in the faces of cops and still say this plainly:

If you abuse power, I do not care how hurt you are.

Get help.

Do not make the broken pay for the brokenness of the armed.

That is not anti-cop hysteria.

That is moral clarity.

Not soft on cops.

Hard on brutality. Hard on excuses. Hard on systems that chew people up and then hand the wounded a gun.