Peel police had a reputation for being hard-nosed and uncompromising. A chief’s reset is delivering surprising results
Majd Darwich couldn’t believe the scene that greeted him when he rushed from his home in suburban Mississauga, Ont., 19 months ago.
A few houses away, his slightly built son, a non-verbal autistic man wearing only boxer shorts, was surrounded by several officers of the Peel Regional Police. They had handcuffed the 19-year-old after Tasering him multiple times.
The father said officers at first refused to even let him approach his clearly frightened boy, citing the Taser terminals still attached to Abdullah’s body.
Darwich eventually sued the Peel force, based just west of Toronto, believing officers had gravely overreacted to calls from neighbours that his son was wandering the street half-naked, trying to enter cars and a backyard. The first police officer on the scene said later he feared Abdullah was high on drugs and a potential violent threat.
“This (officer) who Tasered my son, he said he was afraid of him,” noted Darwich. “If they did not know they did something wrong, nothing will be fixed in the future.”
Even so, a provincial police watchdog agency cleared the officers of misconduct, an exoneration that for many forces would have marked the end of the affair.
But Peel, Canada’s third-largest municipal police department, had already done something unusual.
And that episode was not unique. In barely four years, the force has adopted a sweeping array of such measures under Chief Nishan Duraiappah, changes designed to address chronic allegations of trigger-happy, heavy-handed and racially biased policing — the sort of controversies that have bedevilled law-enforcement agencies and the communities they serve across North America for years.
The region has seen a surge of immigration over the last few decades, steadily changing its face, and a slew of policing controversies.
We want to be the most innovative, progressive, inclusive police agency in the galaxy.
Chief Nishan Duraiappah
Much of the credit for the attempted turnaround goes to the youthful, energetic Duraiappah, a Sri Lankan immigrant and Peel’s first non-white chief.
“I can tell you, to the extent that it’s happened here, it’s not happening anywhere (else),” he said of the new policies. “We want to be the most innovative, progressive, inclusive police agency in the galaxy.”
The department dramatically overhauled training on the use of force by police and instituted a pilot program that sees civilian mental-health workers respond on their own to some 911 calls. A novel unit of sworn officers has a “non-enforcement, non-investigative” mandate, engaging with inhabitants of homeless encampments and others who might be guilty of “social disorder” but not actual crime.
A new policy for less-aggressive handling of disruptive or violent children under 12 — following a 2016 incident where Peel officers handcuffed a six-year-old Black girl — requires dispatchers to refer to such young people as “children in need of protection.”
To add new skills to the force’s senior leadership, which had been made up mostly of veteran cops, Duraiappah hired a number of civilian managers, including an openly gay deputy chief and assistant deputy chief. Potential new recruits face extensive psychological screening, partly designed to weed out those with racial biases. Meanwhile, the ethnic face of the Caucasian-dominated force is slowly edging closer to the makeup of an urban area where 70 per cent of the 1.7 million citizens are non-white.
The overhaul is meant to better respect citizens’ rights, yet also free up the growing ranks of frontline officers to focus on actual crime, not the mental-health and other non-criminal issues that eat up 80 per cent of their time now, said Duraiappah.
Some of the measures have been adopted by other police services — an innovative program in Prince Albert, Sask., was a partial model. But what’s particularly striking is the wide reach of Peel’s cultural reset, geared to converting its cops from the time-honored “warriors” in blue to “guardians.”
“Peel … undoubtedly stands out nationally and I would say internationally,” said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a University of Toronto sociology professor and an expert on race and policing.
And though it is early days yet — change-agent Duraiappah was first appointed in 2019 — there’s evidence the reset is working.
The number of times officers have resorted to force — a perennial flashpoint for criticism — dropped almost 50 per cent from 2019 to 2022. And after a string of episodes in which mentally ill men of colour were killed by Peel police, the force has caused not a single death in over three years now.
Meanwhile, injuries to officers are down, too, suggesting they’re no less safe as the emphasis shifts from physical control to de-escalation.
Some surprising observers are impressed.
“It feels peculiar to be sitting here almost singing the praises of a chief’s performance,” he said. “(But) what I’m seeing from the vantage point that I have … is a fairly significant culture change in the organization.”
Not everyone, of course, is willing to hail the changes yet.
The difficulty is that the police culture, the blue culture, is a lot stronger than the public would imagine.
David Bosveld
David Bosveld, a prominent activist in Peel’s Black community, acknowledged that officers are getting physical much less often, but noted that Black people are still the targets of that less-frequent use of force at three times their share of the population.
He pointed to a judge’s decision in February to acquit a Black impaired-driving suspect after “angry” officers kneed him and hit him with a baton several times, then tasered him twice while he was on the ground being handcuffed.
“The difficulty is that the police culture, the blue culture, is a lot stronger than the public would imagine,” said Bosveld. “Bringing in more Black officers, or bringing in more diverse officers or more women, if the culture of policing changes them versus them changing the culture of policing, we’ll be in the same place.”
Meanwhile, many types of crime, from homicide to robbery and break-and-enter, have been on the rise in Peel as its population soars. It is the epicentre, for instance, of a surge in Canadian car thefts the insurance industry calls a “national crisis.”
There’s been pushback from the rank-and-file, too. Adrian Woolley, president of Peel’s police association, declined to comment to the National Post. But in a union newsletter in 2020, he castigated the chief’s public recognition of systemic racism within the force and his agreement with the human-rights commission. That accord, The Pointer news site quoted Woolley as writing, “was made to satiate pressure from political fringe groups who care nothing of the well-being of cops.”
Still, the evolving Peel police reform push looks like a rare good-news story in a law-enforcement world fraught with tension over how to police in the 21st century.
Stacey Reid is among those who didn’t see the apparent change coming.
When her teenage son got involved with some “rough” older students at his Brampton, Ont., high school, a friend suggested last year she contact an officer with Peel’s newly formed, non-enforcement “division mobilization unit.” Const. Peter Grant intervened with the school and convinced it to transfer the boy, who is Black, to another location, then got him involved in programs like the department’s new Boys2Men initiative designed to keep kids on the straight and narrow.
“They always make it seem like the police is your enemy here, especially Black kids’ enemy,” said Reid. “I was so surprised, honestly. I’m really grateful to Peter. I’m really grateful to this program.”
Her surprise is understandable.
Peel has long had a reputation as hard-nosed and uncompromising, with police and local prosecutors together earning the nickname in legal circles of “no-deal Peel,” says Owusu-Bempah.
“It was a very hardlined, law-and-order platform. We prided ourselves on our investigative capabilities and our enforcement capabilities,” said Staff Supt. Dirk Niles. But “we were very slow to evolve. It was a closed culture.”
The department’s treatment of citizens of colour specifically has been a source of controversy for decades.
The Ontario government set up its Race Relations and Policing Task Force in 1988 in response to an incident where two Peel officers shot teenager Michael Wade Lawson in the back of the head as he drove a stolen car. The case helped spur the creation of the province’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which probes cases of injury or death caused by police.
More than 30 years after Lawson’s death, such issues continued to shake what has been called the country’s most racially diverse urban area.
Peel officers shot and killed Marc Boekwa Diza Ekamba, a 22-year-old Black man suffering from “mental distress,” after he tried to attack two of them with a knife in 2015. A 2022 inquest jury recommended police get more training in anti-Black racism, implicit bias and mental-health awareness.
Similar issues arose after police killed two Black men — Clive Mensah and D’Andre Campbell — and a South Asian man — Ejaz Choudry — in the first year or so of Duraiappah’s tenure. Two had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, one was suspected of suffering from such a mental illness. Two had threatened police with knives.
Peel’s hard-line history
Duraiappah’s predecessors in the chief’s office did not exactly embrace change.
The chief before her, Mike Metcalf, refused to implement recommendations on cultural-sensitivity training in a 2007 Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruling.
And the force was almost a reverse-mirror image of the population of Peel region, a haven in particular for newcomers from South Asia. While about 62 per cent of the residents were non-white, all but 25 per cent of the agency’s officers were Caucasian, according to a 2019 report by the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.
The centre’s equity “audit” of the force — a project opposed by Evans, whose report was not released until after she retired suddenly in 2019 — detected other signs of trouble, too.
The force had brought in some laudable policies aimed at improving equity, the organization concluded, but a lack of buy-in from the leadership meant discrimination and harassment were still a fact of life.
The municipal politicians and members of the public on the Police Services Board did acknowledge those issues, and eventually recruited Duraiappah from nearby Halton Regional Police to try to set things right.
Their choice was certainly someone who could relate to the area’s large newcomer population.
The future chief arrived in 1974 from Sri Lanka as a nine-month-old baby after his politician-uncle warned the Tamil family that troubles between the country’s Tamil minority and majority Sinhalese were poised to blow up. The prediction by Alfred Duraiappah, mayor of the northern Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, proved tragically prescient. Barely a year after his brother, sister-in-law and infant nephew set foot in Canada, the mayor was shot dead by the nascent Tamil Tigers insurgency group, one of the first such killings in what would explode into a years-long, bloody civil war.
In their new home, the mayor’s transplanted family thrived, building a solid middle-class life in the suburbs, even as the civil war overseas splintered Canada’s once-united Sri Lankan community.
Nishan Duraiappah was about to finish high school in the town of Milton, Ont., when a teacher suggested he apply to a summer program with Halton police. The force took him on and he developed what turned out to be lasting relationships with the officers who mentored him.
Then, as Duraiappah finished a sociology and criminology degree at the University of Toronto, one of them called and convinced him to apply to be a cop himself. His mother, having dreamt of her only son as a doctor, lawyer or some other professional with instant prestige, was “not happy at all,” recalled Duraiappah. “Almost in tears, in fact.”
Mrs. Duraiappah eventually came around and 25 years later, her son had risen to be a deputy chief. It wasn’t always easy, he said when pressed. He was initially one of just three non-white officers on the Halton force, withstood racist comments and faced a climate where “you had to work twice as hard because of how you looked.”
Those challenges might have been good preparation for his next job, as not only neighbouring Peel’s first police chief hired from outside the region, but the first one of colour.
Duraiappah said he spent six months getting a feel for his new, much-larger force, but once he started to act, the changes came fast and furious.
“The project is unique, as the parties have mutually agreed to develop and commit to legally binding recommendations aimed at eliminating systemic racism,” the commission said in a statement to the National Post.
Those recommendations ranged from publicly apologizing for racial discrimination to encouraging officers to show restraint when suspects are insulting or disrespectful because of a possible history of trauma involving authorities.
From warriors to guardians
Changing how and when officers turned to physical force — whether that be drawing a gun, firing a Taser or whacking someone with a baton — became a major focus.
The force trained officers in a new approach that acknowledges their own racial and other biases and considers the social forces that can fuel someone else’s bad behaviour, said Niles, who oversees the use-of-force revamp. Casting non-white officers as actors in some training scenarios, instructors encourage cops to be neutral in their interactions with the public, show respect and give people a voice, he said.
“I’ve been in Peel since ’98. The change is astronomical from the way we used to police,” said Staff Supt. Niles. “Even when someone has done something wrong and you’re arresting them, telling them, ‘You’ll have an opportunity to speak,’ that directly increases trustworthiness and officer safety … It works.”
To better hone the new approach, the force is now studying footage from body-cameras to determine more precisely what kind of interactions work best at de-escalating volatile encounters.
The force has also come up with a unique way to bridge language gaps that can themselves lead to misunderstanding or conflict. It gave officers access to Voyce, a digital service that says it can provide live, human translation of scores of languages within seconds.
It’s a vast improvement on the past, said Deputy Chief Anthony Odoardi, when “you’re at the roadside dealing with the worst moment in your life and you have to wait 45 minutes for a translation.”
Though the six-year-old girl’s handcuffing happened three years before Duraiappah was appointed chief, the force recently developed the “JKB strategy” — named for the child’s initials — on how to deal with children under 12. A training video in which a young Black actress plays out a similar interaction with police shows officers giving her room and time to vent and rage before eventually calming her.
To ensure the new regimen took hold, senior leaders convinced the department’s 80 staff sergeants — the direct supervisors of frontline officers — that the guardian mentality would save cops the stress of a controversial clash with suspects, said Niles. The change, in other words, was cast not just as a more just way to police, but as protection in the post-George Floyd world for Peel’s men and women in blue.
“They completely got on board with that,” Niles said of the staff sergeants. “No officer wants to be accused in today’s climate of shooting someone.”
The initial outcomes of those changes may be the hardest evidence to date that Duraiappah’s reset is succeeding.
Even as crime rates have climbed, incidents where Peel officers resorted to force fell from 2,099 in 2019 to 1,099 in 2022, the latest year for which data is publicly available. Injuries to the cops dropped 11 per cent over the same period.
There is still a disproportionate number of Black people in those stats, a fact Niles said the force is trying to understand and rectify.
Community activist Bosveld said Peel also needs to be much more transparent. He noted that it fails to release race-based data on arrests, searches and traffic stops, which are much more frequent than use of force and could be prone to bias. The acquittal of the Black drunk driver who was beaten and Tasered by Peel police was never publicly acknowledged by the department, Bosveld said.
Meanwhile, as frontline men and women on patrol employ de-escalation tactics in emergency situations, Peel is trying to tackle issues such as mental health, poverty and dislocated youth before they reach a crisis point. To direct those efforts, Duraiappah set up a “community safety and well-being” bureau, its name one of the buzz phrases of Peel’s new guiding philosophy.
“The unique thing is we jumped in with two feet to this … That policing is about more than enforcement,” said John Versluis, the civilian manager who heads the bureau. “This is not about being soft on crime, it’s about dealing with some of the root causes.”
As part of that strategy, Peel, like other Ontario forces, takes advantage of a provincially funded program and deploys an officer paired with a mental-health professional to respond when psychiatric issues are suspected.
But the service has taken a novel step beyond that initiative. Peel’s 911 operators can dispatch all-civilian pairs of mental-health experts in situations deemed not dangerous. The pilot project — a unique departure from a culture that revolves around armed cops — saw the teams respond to calls 548 times from last October to this April, said Versluis.
As well, Peel’s new intimate-partner violence unit has been embedded in a facility that mostly houses social-service agencies that deal with domestic abuse.
And then there are the division mobilization units (DMU) that helped Stacey Reid’s son. Their officers’ non-enforcement mandate includes meeting with community groups in neighbourhoods that are prone to crime, visiting people who make regular calls to 911 or otherwise frequently interact with police — directing them to social services if needed — and dealing with young people at risk of ending up on the wrong side of the law.
One of the group’s most intriguing duties is to visit homeless tent encampments — those ubiquitous, perplexing phenomena of 2020s North America. Some of their residents are “taken aback” when officers show up and merely want to talk about their problems and how they could be alleviated, said Grant, a DMU officer.
He‘s an enthusiastic booster of the program, noting that in a previous assignment, he escorted prisoners to and from court, seeing the same offenders time and again, learning that their stories were more complex than their record sheets would suggest.
“It prevents crime, it prevents social disorder,” he said about his current DMU role. “I wish more people were doing what I was doing.”
There is hard data suggesting the work does, in fact, curb the need for traditional police action.
Versluis’s team found that a sample of 1,500 people who had interactions with the DMU were involved in 33 per cent fewer occurrences — instances where frontline officers were called out to a situation and filed a report — in the three months after they’d talked to a DMU officer versus the three months before.
But even if some problems are being headed off early, Duraiappah said Peel needs more cops, noting it has one of the lowest numbers of police officers per capita in urban Canada. He’s already convinced the police board to fund a recruitment drive that’s brought on about 700 new officers during his tenure.
The hiring process itself is changing, too, aimed in part at better reflecting the region’s populace. To that end, the proportion of officers of colour has risen to about 35 per cent, compared to 25 per cent in that 2019 equity report. To attract more women, the service organizes special symposiums and “boot camps” to raise the fitness level of potential female recruits, said Supt. Lisa Newison, who heads hiring efforts.
On top of the standard aptitude test police forces use to vet candidates, Peel added two further questionnaires. One is designed to detect trouble on 18 “liability scales,” including drug abuse, excessive force and racially offensive conduct. And then the applicants must submit to an interview with a psychologist.
“Thirty years ago, you were hired because you were able to do 50 pushups and run. Today, it’s not what we’re looking for,” said Assistant Deputy Chief Charles Payette. “Now the people we hire are more attuned to the social issues of the community.”
Duraiappah is quick to note that his overhaul of the force isn’t just about better respect of human and civil rights. He said he’s tried to create a startup, Silicon Valley-like environment that prizes innovation and efficiency. To help loosen up a top-down, hierarchical system that he felt was stifling progress, for instance, the force now makes senior commanders wear blue shirts like rank-and-file officers, not the white tops that used to set them apart.
Peel has also leaned into technology, producing what the chief said is Canada’s most advanced drone fleet, employing 3D printers to make spare parts in-house for communications equipment, and issuing mobile devices that let officers access records and refer people to agencies wherever they are.
Duraiappah rejected the notion that all the changes distract from or somehow undermine the ongoing battle against the region’s bad guys. In fact, data indicate his officers are putting more people in custody now than before he took over, he said.
The chief has also been vocal about urging the Liberal government to tighten the country’s bail laws to keep violent offenders off the streets and has advocated for legal changes to help combat auto theft.
“A relentless pursuit of criminals will always be our priority,” he insisted.
The chief does admit that the vast changes he’s implemented have not been universally embraced by the force but makes it clear that those naysayers will not hold him back.
“I knew going into it there were people who would never get on the bus,” said Duraiappah. “This is not a Jonestown thing where everyone has to drink the Kool-Aid. It’s simply, ‘Come along for the ride or you will find yourself getting left behind.’”
Majd Darwich’s autistic son, Abdullah, may be an illustration of why that’s important.
The father said he’s grateful that the agency has adopted a new approach to autism, but all that progress has done nothing for his son, who still suffers from trauma that makes him frightened to visit the doctor or a barber. Majd said he worked for a decade and a half to build up his son’s social skills.
Then Abdullah ran into those Peel officers. “They destroyed these 15 years in 15 minutes.”