The chair of the Toronto Police Services Board says he “could have exercised better thinking” after sharing a poster on Facebook that caused the police association’s president to call for his resignation.
“It was a mistake on my part to have chosen this particular material and it is gone from my Facebook,” board chair Alok Mukherjee told CP24’s Stephen LeDrew. “My intent was a discussion of an important issue, not to engage in maligning anybody.”
The poster that Mukherjee linked to late last week from Occupy Wall St. was a commentary on the recent lack of indictments against white police officers who killed unarmed black males in Ferguson, Mo., and New York. The poster said, “Americans killed by ISIS: 3, Americans killed by Ebola: 2, Americans killed by the police: 500+ every year.” Mukherjee added the now-famous words, “I can’t breathe” to his post – words uttered by Eric Garner, briefly before he was fatally choked while in the custody of New York police. The deaths have led to mass protests across the United States.
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association charged that the poster showed a lack of objectivity on Mukherjee’s part and is calling for his resignation.
“It truly unveiled how Mukherjee feels about policing and that’s the problem,” McCormack told CP24 Monday afternoon. “It was not done in an appropriate forum. There was no context to say let’s have a debate, let’s have a discussion… That was totally absent. All he said is, ‘I can hardly breathe’!”
Mukherjee told CP24 that he wishes he had given more context to the poster, but he said he does not believe the price for his mistake should be the loss of his job. However, he and McCormack appear to be at a stand-off now as the association’s president said the chair can “no longer” be seen as objective.
McCormack said he has written to Mayor John Tory, Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Ontario Civilian Police Commission to investigate the board chair.
Mukherjee had his own accusations to level against McCormack. He said he objected to a news release posted on the association’s website that says the Facebook post “not only compares police officers to terrorists but implies they are in fact far more dangerous.”
“These types of innuendos or inferences were made by McCormack,” Mukherjee said in an interview with CP24’s Karman Wong Monday morning. “That disturbed me deeply because it’s very offensive.”
He added that McCormack is using intimidation and bullying tactics to influence policing reforms recommended by the board, and that the longer their argument festers, the more it will distract the public and the police community from a more important discussion on policing reforms
Former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner Chris Lewis weighed in on the issue when asked by LeDrew on the Live at Noon show. Lewis said it was “inappropriate” for the board chair to post what he did, but the penalty ought not to be a resignation or a firing.
“Although I think the posting by Dr. Mukherjee was in error, we’ve all hit the send button or done something we shouldn’t have done over the years,” Lewis said. “I get the concern about it, but at the same time, I don’t see it as a hanging offence. Obviously, it wasn’t the right thing to do.”
