1- This thread is long, but I encourage you to read it if you're going to comment.

A father of four in Mississauga was shot dead by police when one of his children called the non-emergency number to ask for help for his mentally-ill father.

#JusticeForEjaz #PoliceReform

2- The police was already told he did not speak English and the man was not in danger to anyone else.

I am not going to talk about that specific incident, but after weeks of debating whether I should write this or not, I am going to share my personal experience.

3- Like many visible minority teenagers, I've been carded a few times (mostly by the Peel Police) in my teen years. What people miss about that experience is this: it creates a fear and distrust of police.

4- You get questioned literally for existing and have to demonstrate that your mere existence has no criminal intent. And every time you hope that you are not interacting with "one of the bad ones". My son was first carded when he was 14. FOURTEEN!

5- Stories involving police always ends up with people insisting how most police officers are good, ethical and professional.

That has never been, and still isn't, an issue.

6- Nobody cares whether individual officers are good or bad. The question is and has always been, is the organisation, its professional standard and its culture good or bad, and does the organisation proactively verify and enforce those standards.

7- Consider another personal experience: I consider one individual, who happens to be a Peel Police employee and once ran for an office and might again in the future, to be a highly unethical and dishonest bully (if not outright racist).

8- What happens if he is in a front-line duty and interacts with people? What systems are in place to *pro-actively* ensure his interactions with the public are impartial and fair?

9- The fact is that police departments, even in Canada and in Ontario, actively protect the bad apples amongst them. *THAT* has always been the issue and I don't think that problem has been fixed yet.

10- A report in 2008 found that out of 3,400 investigations performed by the SIU, only 95 resulted in criminal charges and yet only 3 police officers went to jail.

11- From Ombudsman: "Ministry of attorney general actively undermines the SIU, the watchdog that probes police-related deaths, serious injuries & sexual assaults & that "police either obstructed or failed to co-operate with the SIU in more than 1/3 of its cases in the past 3 yrs"

12- Read the previous paragraph again. And then again. In a third of cases, police officers obstructed the investigations against one of their officers.

13- We don't need to avoid the issue. It's not about how many officers are good and how many are bad. The question is, does the police department that protects you ensures that it proactively catches all bad apples ...

14- ...or does it allow bad things to happen and then obstructs justice when people get caught (in this case the question is for the Peel Police and not Halton)

15- There's a whole different problem of most police boards being almost all male (and mostly all older white men even in extremely diverse places), but that's a post for another day.