THE "How are you today?" MANIFESTO

On the night of the 13th of October 2022, Taresh Bobby Ramroop, 32 years old, fell of his familial appartement’s window after several hours of what can be seen as forceful management by the Toronto Police, in response to his mental health crisis. In response to a 911 emergency call, two officers were dispatch to Bobby's house in the Jane street and Finch Avenue area. After a few hours of unsuccessful negociation, they decided to call the emergency force task on the basis that Bobby could be armed. While his family and media report concluded that Bobby was not armed and dangerous, they also underline that no medical assistance was called first hand leading Bobby's faith to this dramatic end. Furthermore, his family was kept in another room, preventing the use of their assitance to this medical and health emergency.

In a statement, where she breaks the silence regarding her son's death, Bobby's mother said that what he needed was for his family to be present, not the police. Bobby's struggles with depression was something his family was aware of and that they all dealt with in the past. After requesting the police to be held accountable for their dramatic mistake, the Special Investigation Unit found the officers's action not guilty of criminal offence.

Bobby’s story is unfortunately one of the very many of the Police's unnecessary violence and inadequacy to respond to calls regarding mental illness issues in the city Toronto. The Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has collected some frightening numbers regarding the state of police violence and its consequences due to interraction between them and people with mental illness:

• Across Canada, 5% of police encounters involve people with mental illness. In Toronto, that number increases to 15%.
• Between 2007 and 2013, the Ontario Provincial Police saw a 42% increase in mental health calls with a corresponding 65% increase in the time officers spent responding to these calls.
• One study found that 60% of police encounters with people with mental illness involve some type of alleged criminal behaviour (20% violent crime; 40% non-violent crime), while the remaining 40% of encounters involve mental health crises, "bizarre behaviours", and/or criminal victimization.
• Between 2000 and 2016, more than 40 people with mental illness were fatally shot by police in Ontario. Of the 461 fatal police encounters in Canada between 2000 and 2017, more than 70% of victims had a mental illness. Black and Indigenous people with mental illness are over-represented amongst victims of fatal police interactions, though a thorough analysis of the intersection between mental illness and race in the context of police interactions is difficult because this data is not always available.
• In 2016, 26% of males in the federal corrections system had a mental health need and 50% of females had a mental health need. By 2018, almost 80% of female offenders in federal corrections met the criteria for a mental illness.
• Serious substance use problems are also seen in 80% of newly admitted offenders. In Ontario’s provincial corrections system about 35% of offenders have a mental health alert on their file and amongst female offenders, this increases to 50%.
• The percentage of Ontario’s offender population with a mental health alert has increased by an average of 6% a year since 1998/1999.

"Being met by the police can heighten apprehension and fear in those experiencing a crisis and pose real risk of physical and psychological harm - particulary amongst Indigenous, Black and other racialized people." (CAMH; 2020)

These numbers show a real impact and the reality of a social and political issue that we face across the country. Mental health care is wildely affected by the policing and federal system and it is an issue that affect several minorities, queer and gendered identities in particular. The necessity for this to change is urgent!

These triggering events of police brutality have led to various movements of revolt worldwide, urging for an inter/national change in law policy and moral rights given to this institution. In North America, #DefundThePolice was a social media’s thread led by USA based BlackLiveMatters movement and responding to the alarming death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. But the movement’s origin can be dated from earlier.

In 1935, Pan-African civil right activist W.E.B. Du Bois first draw upon ideas of abolition of institutions rooted in racism and repressive practices and, so, called to shut prisons and white police forces down. In the 1960s, a similar call for abolition of police departement and the carceral sytem was led in the USA by many Afro-American Black Feminists, including Angela Davis. "Angela Davis and others use the term “abolition feminism” to signify a break with “carceral feminism” and the predominant call within the feminist movement for stricter laws and lengthier sentences for perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence."(Democracy Now!; 2020)

" In essence, policing is a system of control and punishement used through the centuries to uphold the dominant social order of white supremacist capitalism" (Equal Justice Society; 2020)

The need to call on reforming the way the police has been created and its management to population can be seen in the racist history of this institution and discours of colonialism it still conveys. In Canada, it is difficult to detached the history of the famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) without also tracing the attrocity done to the various Indigenous communities, decimated and still present, and the occupation of their land. Based on the model of French and British policing, canadian police were an effectif tool to entertain notion of nationalism and policing bodies of BIPOC. But not only physically, the police institution has also affected the live of minorities indirectly by maintening discriminations that allowed extrem poverty to affect these communities.

"In Canada,immense harms have been enacted on Black populations because of the stress of poverty and economic and racial discrimination. Some of these harms are measurable: racial discrimination against Black communities have been found to have effects on physical and mental health including addiction, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, higher infant mortality, depression, renal damage, asthma, pain and other chronic conditions (James et al.2010;ACLC 2012; Toronto Public Health 2013). Poor racialized people, often women, increasingly suffer from the negative health effects of economic disadvantage. Since poverty inflicts harm on communities, deliberate or unadressedstate policies that disadvantage racialized groups must be conceived of as state-sanctioned economic violence (James 1996)." (Maynard; 2017)

Regarding the call on defunding: The Greater Toronto Area spends $2.6 billion in taxpayer dollars on funding the police. (Defundthepolice.org) Since 2020, Toronto's councils have open an ongoing conversation about the states of the funds given to the police and talked about the possibility of a 10% deduction. Although the budget has increased of 2.3% in 2022, so 7% of the city's annual budget for the year, considerably more than for housing, schools or other community oriented infrastructures necessary to fight social insecurity and fuel neighboroods (CBC news; 2022).

Can we conclude that it is difficult to think about a New Toronto, a place where violent policing doesn’t exist? Can the police be abolished? What do people say about it on the street?

Inspired by conversation I had with people in streets and coffee shops about the matter, I produce this creative story voicing some of the ideologies regarding the necessity of a police system, the state of the call for defunding the police and what collective conversation about it entails.

Defunding the police entails a larger movement than stopping harmful and deadly events to be done to targeted individuals. It also open the possibility of a new way to rethink our society and letting ourself being first in line for the care, security and justice of others.

The movement this Manifesto hopes to provoke relies on the intersection between values that fuel Black Internationalism, as seen by Adom Getachew (2019) and Women Internationalism, by Husseina Dinani (2017) that founds the #DefundThePolice movement; here the anti-imperial affective movement of abolitionism discourse around the notion of an other forme of care for discriminated racialized minorities is met by the anti-colonial nationalism fight against the idea of failure in other scheme of protection that the one given by the hegemony.

I draw this call on the concept of commons formulated by David Harvey (2012). Commons is the “socialization of surplus production and distribution and the establishment of a new common of wealth open to all.” (Harvey, 2012 ; 86) I see the city of Toronto as a collection of seperated neighboroods, fairly detached from each others especially in urbanized central areas. This center is built up to accommodate the booming, and hurting, sense of individualism led by neo-liberalist ideologies that relies on outsourcing decent human care and sociality, in favor of intense production. Numerous empty buildings in the city have been abandonned, left to decrease in favor of brighter towers and cheaper labour services. And yet, the streets are still full of souls wandering without a place to live, food to eat and support to rely on. Many are already subject to mental illness. Many will be. This project I hope will help share access to resources and create knowledge, from and for people suffering from mental illness and their neighbours. 

Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) is a community led charity situated in the Jane Street and Finch Avenue neighborhood of Toronto. Taresh Bobby Ramroop was a member. Already fighting against the presence of police in their school, the charity thrive also by sharing knowledge, time, space and care for each other. One of the main idea JFAAP promotes is the unecessary effectiveness of the use of police because your streets are familiars to you. You know who your neighbours are and you know what they need. And they do the same for you.

This reciprocity shaped into the "How are you today?" action you're invited today to take part of, a simple act of care. With this common sentence, you are invited to lead the way to break the wall that seperate yourself and your neighbours, and so start getting familiar.

"“How are you today?” can be the most neigbourly thing to say, “How are you today?” could take the pain of someone in need away, “How are you today?” shows that I care for you, I have enough “How are you today?” ‘s to spare a few."

Harvey writes that commons are “not to be constructed as a particular thing but as a malleable social relation between self defined social group and environement for non-commodified collective livelihood” (Harvey, 2012; 73) This is why I would like to call for a collective retake of abandoned and emptied buildings in the city of Toronto.

Be an ally.

These places are in town and in need of manpower:

• SURJ Toronto
• JFAAP
• DEFUNDTHEPOLICE
• BLACKLIVEMATTERS Toronto
• SHOWING UP FOR RACIAL JUSTICE Toronto
• DOCTORS FOR DEFUNDING POLICE

Be you.

I'm myself various identity, community member. I'm Khadra, some call me Kay or خضرة I'm she and her. I'm a daughter and a sister, a niece and a cousin. I'm French, my roots are Arabic and I identify to both. I'm a student of Anthropology - I study Anthropology and let myself be studied under anthropological rules. I ask questions and get to be questionned. I'm also able to carry the different hats that are required from me. If not, I'm able to express why and actively find ways to supply effort in other ways. I hope you'll understand my donation of time, space, care, knowledge and affection here. I invite you to join in the movement and please pass it on to someone else.