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Queer Ontario’s Letter to Gary Smith, Chief of Police, Windsor Police Service, Supporting His Decision to Include Anti-Homophobia Training as a Mandatory Part of Police Training (January 20, 2011)

January 21st, 2011 Comments off

January 20, 2011

Gary Smith
Chief of Police
Windsor Police Service
Police Headquarters
150 Goyeau Street
P.O. Box 60
Windsor, ON N9A 6J5

Dear Police Chief Smith,

Queer Ontario writes to you today to commend your inclusion of Egale Canada’s Report Homophobic Violence Period presentation as a mandatory ongoing part of training your force. Your commitment to “reinforce the force’s knowledge of basic human rights” and to “increase the force’s empathy toward this particular community within our society” through anti-homophobia training is a welcoming sign for LGBT communities in Windsor as well as across Ontario.

By requiring all officers and staff of the Windsor Police Service to undergo anti-homophobia training, you are working towards fostering a more positive and fruitful relationship between your police force and the LGBT community in the Windsor area. Given the inequitable treatment the LGBT community experiences at times with regards to the law and enforcement, it is a positive sign that a police service is taking ownership of the need to further educate themselves on the issues affecting our community. Indeed, by encouraging your officers to reconsider their pre-conceived notions of LGBT people and to familiarize themselves with the issues facing LGBT communities in Ontario, you are demonstrating true leadership when it comes to professionally serving all Windsor residents, regardless their sexual orientation or gender identity. Hopefully, this education will be adequately enacted at the street level, leading to a strengthened relationship between the LGBT Community and the Windsor Police Service.

In closing, we wish you all the best in your implementation and enforcement of the mandatory anti-homophobia
training throughout the force. We can only hope that your fellow Police Commissioners across Ontario will make the same commitment to equity and to better policing.

Sincerely,

Casey Oraa
Chair
Political Action
Queer Ontario

Cc: Helen Kennedy, Executive Director, Egale Canada

Categories: Releases Tags: , ,

G20: The Police, Governments And The Queer Communities

August 6th, 2010 Comments off

Historically there has been widespread concern within the queer communities about unequal enforcement of the law. Queers are disproportionately targeted as being perceived as more serious offenders meriting more severe punishment.

Policing of the recent G20 Summit in Toronto has aggravated that concern, particularly in respect to the reported attitude of the police toward queer people who were detained. Our concerns go beyond this to the very laws that appear to have precipitated these detentions. Not only the enforcement of which the police themselves have retrospectively admitted was not legal, and which flies in the face of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but also the secretive way in which those regulations were supposedly enacted. Beyond that, we are concerned about the pressure from the federal government to enact tough on crime laws which appear to focus on establishing a police state; a state which is exemplified by the attitude of those who made and enforced laws during the G20 Summit.
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Categories: Releases Tags: , , ,