After some deliberation, the officer puts the arrest on hold. “You don’t want to go in there and stir it up if you don’t have to,” he says.
As members of Toronto’s Somali community grapple with how to respond to the murders of six young men since June of this year, police have quietly set up a two-officer task force focused on improving relations and building trust with Canadian-Somalis in the city.
It’s the first time police are reaching out to the community in a consistent, organized way, says Superintendent Ron Taverner, who is responsible for 23 Division. He said the move is based on a surge in firearms-related offences over recent years in a neighbourhood where a large number of Canadian-Somalis live.
The police also hope to increase residents’ willingness to share information about crimes near their homes.
“We were not getting the cooperation that we hoped for in the community and it was apparent that we needed to build those inroads,” he said.
Supt. Taverner says he knows that won’t be easy. Neither Sgt. Laush nor his partner, Constable Horace Harvey, are Somali, and the officers could face an uphill battle convincing some of the young men who have had negative experiences with police that they are worthy of their trust. Skeptical Canadian-Somalis note the size of the task force seems inadequate, and the officers’ lack of fluency in the culture and language will make it difficult for them interact.
Still, Sgt. Laush knows the community like few of his fellow officers could. He spent most of his career policing the west-end neighbourhoods in 23 Division that are home to a large concentration of Canadian-Somalis, and he approaches his job with a practised curiosity, talking to everyone and piecing together fragments of information to better understand what’s driving the crime that exists in the area.
After three years away, he was transferred back to 23 Division this fall. Soon after his return, Warsame Ali and Suleiman Ali, both 26 (and unrelated), became the fifth and sixth young men of Somali descent to die as a result of gun violence in Toronto. (Police say that while both had minor clashes with police in the past, they were not believed to have been gang-involved.) They were found behind a public-housing complex on Jamestown Crescent, a short drive south from the 23 Division police station.
Loud and jovial, Sgt. Laush’s nickname is “Flash,” earned after he yelled at a man for snapping photos of him arresting the man’s friend. “I guess I didn’t like that too much,” he recalls, grinning. He’s quick to admit that his first impulse is to investigate and arrest, and he’s still trying to familiarize himself with a style of policing that’s more about “building bridges” than cracking down on crime.
His sometimes confrontational style is balanced, he says, by his partner, Constable Harvey. The soft-spoken officer spent the last two years focused on community work as part of Toronto police’s Community Response Unit.
“My main objective is to learn what the Somali community wants and how we can help,” Constable Harvey said. “We need to know what their concerns are before we start making decisions for them.”
Both officers say they plan to meet with community and religious leaders in the coming weeks, and they are participating in after-school homework clubs and mentoring programs for Canadian-Somali youth.
Constable Harvey, whose background is Jamaican, said he’s taking steps to learn about the culture and history of the people he’s working with, educating himself by reading about the new president of Somalia – a key topic of conversation among many older Somali men – and picking up a few simple Somali phrases.
Sergeant Chris Laush is eager to get on the road.
Stepping into an unmarked car behind a police station in Toronto’s west end, the veteran cop explains there’s a man nearby who “needs to get arrested.” The only trouble, he acknowledges, is that the best place to find that man is in the meeting the suspect is expected to be leading this afternoon.
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