Excessive Force: Toronto's Fight to Reform City Policing

Alok Mukherjee was the civilian overseer of the Toronto police between 2005 and 2015, during the most tumultuous decade the force had ever faced. In this provocative and highly readable collaboration with Tim Harper, former Toronto Star national affairs columnist, Mukherjee reveals how Police Chief Bill Blair changed the channel after the police-killing of Sammy Yatim. He explains how society has given police tacit approval to cull people in mental health crisis and pulls the curtain back on a police culture which avoids accountability, puts officer safety above public safety, colludes on internal investigations and pushes for use of force over empathy and crisis resolution.

The book takes the reader inside the G20 debacle; the police push for an ever-growing budget; the battle over carding, which disproportionately targeted blacks; the police treatment of its own members in mental health distress; and the battles with an entrenched union that pushed back on Mukherjee’s every move toward reform. In spite of, or as a result of all this, Mukherjee played a leading role in shaping the national conversation about policing, sketching a way forward for a new type of policing that brings law enforcement out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century.

There is no shortage of “inside” police books written by former cops. Here is a rare title—not only in Canada but the Western world—written from the community’s perspective.

“...The book dramatically captures how entrenched and influential the police service is in Toronto and how its leadership effectively manipulates public opinion and public officials to ensure that any change is slow to come - if it comes at all...unsparing and illuminating in its depiction of how the powerful in Toronto protect their interests above all else. Excessive Force comes at a time when there has been a surge in interest in many of the issues that Mukherjee grappled with...but this particular volume offers a unique perspective. - few shed light on how politicians and other public officials interact with police leadership to the extent this one does...behind-the-scenes accounts will be of interest to Toronto political junkies...to people focused on social-justice issues. Mukherjee’s passionate arguments are unlikely to alter the power dynamics...but his willingness to point out these problems and his suggestions about how to remedy them are laudable.”