In relaying the experience to a friend of mine who is also a Black cop, and asking the question as to why there aren't more of us on the street I was surprised by his answer, it is a systemic problem. The conversation went like this;

Carl: "What do you mean it’s a systemic problem".

Cop Friend: "Well the system is designed to weed us out before we even get to the gate, therein lies the problem, getting to the gate."

Carl : "Hey man, speak English, what do you mean by getting to the gate".

Cop Friend: Say you were to take a random sample of young black males and white males between the ages of 19 to 30 and lets say that you were to run a thorough check on them, and by thorough I mean everything. Criminal record, Parking tickets, speeding tickets, high school record, university record, credit check, loans outstanding, your neighbors to see if you and whoever you live with get along, your employment record, your taxes, your friends at work. Black males invariably come up short. Because if you have so much as a parking ticket outstanding when you apply to Police Services Board to be a cop, the gate is where you stop. So I say its systemic because by the time we as black males get through our teenage years a significant percentage of us is already ineligible.

Carl: Holy fuck, they do that thorough a background check on all new applicants.

Cop Friend: Pretty much, but we end up getting the short end of the stick because we tend to live in urban centers where we come into contact with cops a lot more frequently, so just the statistics alone screens us out. For the most part white applicants are either from middle class suburban families or from towns nobody has heard of. Let me tell you, I've seen it first hand,

Before I became a Cop I worked as a security guard in a mall for a few years and every time they brought a white kid in for shop lifting their parents got called and they were given a stern warning. A Black kid... .... 911. I've recently come to understand how that works to our detriment as it is still happening right now as we speak.

I am bringing this incident to your attention people because as a general rule we don't appreciate the connection between Politics and social policy. One of my employees was the first "Boat Baby" born in Canada. Her family was among the first illegal immigrants that showed up on our shores in the 1970s on boats from Vietnam, her mother had made the harrowing journey with her 4 kids and one in her belly, and the moment they were granted safe landing her water broke as sigh of relief. Remarkable story isn't it, but had it not been for the politics of Pierre Trudeau the story would have been a lot different.

Canada is the country it is today because of its politics, and we are on the verge of destroying this dream. because if Steven Harper becomes Prime Minister of this country we are all Fucked, and that’s just putting it lightly. I've long held the view, that Toronto is the bastion of liberal thought in this country and it is that way because there are so many different people living here, that is why I am here. We all experienced Mike Harris' common sense which is essentially Thunder bay politics, but it had a devastating effect on the social services that were once supported by the government. Day Care centers had their funding cut, single mothers, parks and recreational centers, extracurricular activities at schools, teachers, hospitals all had either their funding cut or taken away. We were encouraged to blame the welfare system for our woes when in reality welfare fraud does not even remotely compare to the billions of dollars that that leaves our economy every year from multinationals that do not pay their taxes. In the end it is the poor and underprivileged that get caught up in the system which results in many of us not reaching the gate. Consider this, ever wonder just how many more bright underprivileged kids had their futures ruined because they didn't have that basketball game or chess club or whatever to go to after school because their programmes got cut and when they went home Mommy wasn't home because she was on "workfare".

I am always amazed when people say to me I am not into politics because it doesn't affect me, consider a parallel argument, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince you that he doesn't exist. Don't be fooled. Don't be sheep, Vote. Because if you can't beat em ... ... . Keep trying. Any other way doesn't make sense.