By Kenneth Jackson
APTN National News
Gabriel Jacobs spends most of his day bumming for change downtown Toronto on Yonge St.
He hopes to get enough to buy a bottle of sherry.
It was while he was panhandling during the 2010 G20 summit he was arrested trying to pick up a cigarette butt.
Police said they thought the paraplegic was trying to pop a tire.
“They put me in that cage which is not that big for 30 hours. They took my wheelchair. I had to lay there on the floor, shit and piss on myself, because they wouldn’t give me my wheelchair, they wouldn’t give me my medication,” recalled Jacobs recently in an interview with APTN National News.
Jacobs is Ojibway from northern Ontario.
He was later released without charge.
After he filed a human rights complaint, Toronto police came to a financial settlement with him.
The amount is confidential.
While in jail he tried to reach one person.
Doug Johnson Hatlem is a former street pastor in Toronto who said what happened to Jacobs isn’t uncommon.
Especially to First Nations people.
“I was just walking through (a park) one time following an officer who had just ticketed two First Nations people in a row and had walked right by similarly situated white people sitting down on a bench drinking and all he ticketed were people who were First Nation,” said Johnston Hatlem. “I called him out on it and I said ‘what is this Ticket-A-Native-Day?’
They argued for a bit.
“Finally he said to me well you know who you need to lobby is Queen’s Park and get these people more beer money I can’t do anything about this,” said Hatlem who for seven years worked at Sanctuary, a homeless day shelter in Toronto.
But Hatlem said he’s noticed more than just discriminant ticketing.
He claimed he’s tallied dozens of assaults on homeless people by police over the last seven years.
He said the majority of them are First Nations.
APTN spoke to nearly a dozen First Nations men who call the streets home.
All said the Toronto police have a bad reputation.
For being bullies.
And racist.
“Some are known to hit. Some are known to spit, kick, punch. Some are known to just throw you in the back of the car and arrest you for stuff you didn’t do,” said Peter Burrill, a homeless First Nations man.
“They really like to pick on Native people here in the city,” said Greg “Iggy” Spoon. “If they can get away with it, give you a shot in the head, they will give you a shot in the head.”
Johnson Hatlem encourages everyone who is harassed by police to file a complaint.
He said not everyone receives a settlement like Gabriel Jacobs.
In fact, many complaints don’t go anywhere.
“Over time the system responded to wide spread complaints that the complaints system was ineffective by coming up with the new system called the Office of the Independent Police Review Director,” he said. “Now it’s supposedly independent but you send a case to them and nine-and-half-times out of 10 it goes right back to the same division where filed the complaint against.”
Inside the offices of the Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto social workers and lawyers workers hear a lot of these stories.
The ALST is a not-for-profit organization that advocates on behalf of Aboriginal peoples in Ontario.
“As a lawyer I don’t expect every case that walks in the door with someone alleging misconduct is necessarily going to support that finding after an investigation, but what I find troubling is that none of them do,” said Emily Hill of ALST.
The complaints range from racial profiling to assaults committed by police.
“We hear concerns of racial profiling and being stopped on the street and questioned repeatedly for no reason,” said Hill. “We hear those concerns. Then we hear the concerns of excessive force and of violence and assaults.”
Some say the assaults and insults just come with living on the streets of Toronto.
Hatlam said there can be change.
But that change will have to come without him.
He’s moved to Chicago with his family.
“We need to work at the roots of what’s causing the poverty and the racism and the things that are putting First Nations people out on the streets here, and allowing people who have terrible attitudes about people in that position, to be the ones carrying around guns,” said Johnson Hatlem.
The homeless said they’ll miss him.
As for police, APTN contacted the Toronto police on a number of occasions over several weeks to comment.
No one was available.
