NEWS RELEASE
NIAGARA REGION ANTI-RACISM ASSOCIATION
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The Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association (NRARA) denounced the Niagara Regional Police Service’s announcement of its new Chief as Bill Fordy, and the recent (re)appointment of board member Kevin Gibson, because both publicly denied or doubted systemic racism exists in the Niagara Regional Police. As Deputy Chief, Bill Fordy told CHCH in July, 2020 “I don’t believe that systemic racism exists today in the Niagara Regional Police,” and as Regional Councillor and Wainfleet Mayor, ex-RCMP officer Kevin Gibson said at a Niagara Region Council meeting on August 13, 2020 that systemic racism is “a shadowy area…bandied about….”
Saleh Waziruddin, member of the NRARA executive committee, explained, “When he was Deputy Chief Bill Fordy said ‘we have no data to suggest that’ there is systemic racism in the Niagara Police, but their own data showed that when they did racial profiling, now called Collection Of Identifying Information, in 2017, 13% of those stopped were Black (just 2% of the population then), and in 2018, 1/3 were Indigenous (just 4% of the population), yielding zero arrests (2018).
Since then, thanks to the 2017 Ontario Anti-Racism Act, Niagara police’s own data shows the use force is so disproportionate against Black people that it’s the second worst we see in the province, 9 times the share of the population. This is the same as the Minneapolis police who killed George Floyd in 2020. Yet in Toronto, Peel, and Hamilton the police have either apologized or recognized that there is a problem, but last summer outgoing Police Chief Brian MacCulloch told media ‘…our officers use restraint and use force very conservatively and appropriately….’”
On top of that the province appointed Kevin Gibson back to the police board, who when Wainfleet Mayor and police board member called systemic racism a “shadowy area” and denigrated it as a term “bandied about” at Niagara Region Council meeting.
What is even more perverse is that two of the current police board members, Lauri Ip and Pat Chiocchio, are the only two current Regional Councillors who voted for all of our police reform recommendations in their previous term, and the newly elected Vice-Chair Nyarayi Kapisavanhu was previously on the police chief’s Community Inclusion Council. They said nothing about the incoming chief’s comments on systemic racism or about the disproportionate use of force against Black people.”
The Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association was founded in the summer of 2018 on the principal that anti-racism should be BIPOC-led, and campaigns on police reforms, municipal anti-racism committees, employment equity, organizes speaker series and workshops, and supports individuals under racist attacks.
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