‘Racial profiling is systemic and intractable within Peel police’: judge’s historic ruling eviscerates force for culture of discrimination

On a Sunday afternoon in October of 2023, Peel Regional Police officer Anand Gandhi pulled over a red Jeep driven by a Black man with a suspected suspended licence. He immediately called for backup, and within minutes, the officer seized the man’s possessions, had him handcuffed, patted down and confined to the back of his cruiser—without any legal authority to do so.

His behaviour was described later at trial as “reckless and cavalier” and a “very serious” Charter breach. The officer testified that this was his “common practice”.

If the claim was meant to deceive the court and convince those listening that he treated everyone just like he treated the Black man driving the Jeep, evidence showed this was not the case.

Earlier the same day Constable Gandhi had pulled over a woman who also had a suspension and was not supposed to be driving, on a judge’s order. There was no call for back up, no handcuffing and no search of the woman’s car. She wasn’t even asked to stop driving and was allowed to leave on her own in her vehicle. 

After a gun was found in the Jeep, the man eventually had to stand trial, but Justice Renu Mandhane tossed out the evidence, ruling the seizure of the weapon was the result of an illegal search. The Pointer could not confirm if the charges still stand; it has been reported that they have been dismissed. 

“The state conduct was also poisoned by racial discrimination,” Justice Mandhane wrote in her April decision. “Officer Gandhi substituted reason for stereotype when he assumed that the accused was more dangerous than other suspended drivers because he was Black.”

But it was her broader characterization of Peel Police that has brought national attention to the case: “Clearly, racial profiling is systemic and intractable within Peel police,” Justice Mandhane wrote in her April decision. 

Those words, and Mandhane’s willingness to protect an accused from bias-based policing (which is not groundbreaking), alongside her decision to highlight Peel Police’s historic inability to root out systemic racism in the force (a part of her ruling that was groundbreaking), have suddenly put police leaders on notice.

Before her ruling a long string of scathing reports, decisions and Human Rights Tribunal findings against Peel Regional Police laid out an ongoing pattern of systemic discrimination and anti-Black racism prevalent throughout the organization.

But the connection Mandhane has made between the deeply rooted, “intractable” nature of anti-Black racism within the country’s third largest municipal police force and the problem this has created for Black men in particular across Mississauga and Brampton when dealing with police, is unprecedented. 

For Peel residents, especially members of the region’s diverse Black communities, stories of police discrimination are all too common. Peel Police officers use force against them at a disproportionate rate compared to their representation among the general population. 

Promises of reform have not resulted in any meaningful change. Evidence in the case illustrated the danger when a segment of the population becomes numb to egregious behaviour by officers who are supposed to protect them—not trample on their rights. 

“Watching the body-worn camera footage I was struck by the disconnect between the officer’s repeated breach of the accused’s Charter rights and the accused’s generally compliant and differential attitude toward the officer in the face of it,” Justice Mandhane writes. “I have no trouble inferring that, as a Black man, the accused would have experienced the situation as potentially dangerous and that he was doing everything in his power not to escalate the situation or ‘trigger’ the officer into using force.”

Community advocates say the historic ruling, while unprecedented, simply amplifies what Black residents have experienced for decades.

“I'm not surprised. This is the history of police, and it continues to this day, and the judge's comments are damning," David Bosveld, a Black community advocate who has challenged Peel Police to reform its culture, told The Pointer. "If it's not racial profiling, it's carding. If it's not carding, it's excessive use of force. It's ongoing. It's deeply systemic….They're making some efforts to address it, but we don't have time to wait."

A spokesperson for Peel Police told The Pointer the organization would not comment as the case is “currently within the timeframe for appeal”, adding that “extensive” work has been completed by Peel Police in partnership with the Ontario Human Rights Commission through an agreement signed in 2020 to address systemic racism and racial profiling by its officers. These efforts include the collection of race-based and other identifying data; the creation of an Anti-Racism Advisory Committee; and “mandatory human rights focused training has been completed by all officers”.

Advocates have provided evidence that shows many of these efforts have been little more than lip service, for example, when an expert was hired to consult and advised that a specific anti-Black racism advisory committee be created due to the unique and complex nature of police interactions with Black community members, he was ignored. 

“Please know that we take all allegations and reports related to racial profiling seriously, and that we strive to apply a human rights lens to everything we do to increase transparency and accountability for the communities in which we serve,” the spokesperson concluded.

These claims contradict the reality of what the force has done in response to its agreement with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Despite repeated assurances from Chief Nishan Duraiappah that the terms of the agreement are being met, repeated attempts by The Pointer to obtain evidence of reform, have been met by silence from the chief and a lack of cooperation from the force.

For years, Peel Regional Police officials have made similar acknowledgements and made public promises to end systemic discrimination within their ranks.

Instead, what Justice Mandhane’s ruling shows is these issues remain entrenched in the culture of Peel Police, which is responsible for serving one of the most diverse communities in Canada.

According to the evidence Justice Mandhane used in her findings of the 2023 traffic stop, the behaviour of officer Gandhi was illegal almost from the very beginning of his interaction. 

After pulling over the Jeep Gandhi claimed he was doing so only to confirm if the person driving the vehicle was the owner, whose licence was suspended. Justice Mandhane points out this does not align with Gandhi’s immediate call for backup, informing other officers that the driver had outstanding criminal charges before even confirming that the person behind the wheel was the owner of the Jeep.

The officer arrested the man before asking for information about why his licence had been suspended and before confirming the suspension in the police database.

He then handcuffed the accused in the back of his cruiser before offering him his right to counsel; he seized the accused’s phone and car keys without any legal authority and before confirming the suspension.

When questioned about this behaviour at trial it exposed a clear gap in the training provided by Peel Police.

“The officer maintained that it was ‘common practice’ to handcuff and place suspended drivers in the back of his cruiser because it was a ‘safe place’ to speak with them,” Mandhane writes. “The officer did not say whether his practice was consistent with the law, his training or standard police practice. He testified that he had not received any training on how to use his arrest powers under the Highway Traffic Act,” a damning admission about the basic failings of Peel Police.

While the officer tried to convince the court he handled all traffic stops for a suspended licence the same way, this was false. 

“He denied detaining the accused because he was Black, but also admitted that he had stopped another vehicle earlier in the day for driving on a medical suspension (and therefore not allowed to drive), but did not place the female driver in handcuffs or in the back of his cruiser.”

Officer Gandhi’s questionable behaviour continued after he handcuffed the driver in his police cruiser. He repeatedly switched off the microphone on his body-worn camera when speaking to other officers and a special constable that had arrived on the scene. 

He claimed he did this because the conversations between the officers were “private” and the policy at the time was “unclear as to whether he was supposed to keep his microphone on when dealing with other officers.” 

The Crown could find no evidence of any such “unclear” policy, and Gandhi eventually acknowledged the policy  states the microphone is meant to remain on. 

“His explanation about the ‘privacy interest’ in officer communications makes no sense whatsoever,” Mandhane writes. “There can be no privacy interest in the professional communications between law enforcement personnel engaged in an active traffic investigation—these are precisely the types of interactions that body-worn cameras are meant to capture.”

She continues: “In general, he exhibited a troubling lack of knowledge about the law. For example, he admitted that he had never heard of the principle of restraint when it comes to arresting and detaining criminally accused persons. He did not make any reference to the legal requirement on officers to release a person arrested under the HTA as soon as practicable after serving them with a summons.”

Justice Mandhane states officer Gandhi’s questionable behaviour was a pretext to search the man’s vehicle for guns or drugs—born from the fact he was a Black man. 

"While there was no direct evidence of racial profiling here, there is ample circumstantial evidence from which I can draw an inference that Officer Gandhi’s decision to arrest and detain the accused was motivated in part by the fact that he is a Black man," Justice Mandhane writes in the ruling. “The officer then relied on stereotypes about Black people being more prone to criminality to illegally search his Jeep. I have no trouble concluding that the main reason that the accused was subjected to the arrest, detention and search was because he was a Black man.”

Extensive research and data has shown that police in Ontario commonly treat Black men in such situations differently than others. Peel’s police force was the focus of intense scrutiny a decade ago when its own data, reported by the media following freedom of information investigations, showed alarming patterns of discrimination. Black residents were stopped at almost four times the rate compared to white residents in illegal stops by Peel police.

The lack of acknowledgement by the force’s leadership of the harm done by these violations has not gone unnoticed by community members. 

"If you look at the Peel Police website, if you look at their Twitter account, they will highlight every event and every good deed and every arrest. But when it comes to these types of findings, you won't find an article or a press release on their website or on their Twitter page," Bosveld says. "I would say that the trust is broken, and it's been broken for a very long time.”

Since taking over as Chief in late 2019, Nishan Duraiappah has promised to change a force that has been plagued by allegations of systemic discrimination for decades. Community members say the chief’s repeated assurances are starting to ring hollow.

(Peel Regional Police)

Gandhi is one of approximately 2,700 officers in the force. From training to communications and the board that oversees governance of Peel Police—it has been accused of routinely ignoring evidence from Peel’s Black communities and is currently being taken to the HRTO because of it—to Chief Duraiappah, ongoing practices suggest little has changed. He promised to end discriminatory behaviour, but his words, for many, have grown stale after six years of his leadership without any meaningful change. 

Prior to his arrival, an assessment completed by the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) uncovered many internal issues, including rampant discrimination and higher ranking officers who appeared unwilling to address or even acknowledge the dangerous culture. 

The audit showed about a third of the force’s leaders in 2017-18 “indicated their belief that these systemic oppressions do not exist within PRP,” while others suggested they believe “these oppressions manifest only as individual acts of meanness.” Leaders, the report highlighted, don’t make “the connection that these oppressions are systemic in our society and therefore are also in our organizations.”

The audit found 79 percent of responding employees had experienced harassment or discrimination; 90 percent had witnessed it. 

Chief Duraiappah acknowledged the findings when he arrived in Peel in late 2019. He vowed to fix a culture where racism thrived. 

“It really has to be an authentic journey; it can’t be activities for the sake of checking boxes,” he told The Pointer at the time.

David Bosveld has been a dedicated advocate for Peel’s Black communities and a vocal critic of the lack of action of Peel Regional Police to address systemic anti-Black racism.

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer files)

Justice Mandhane’s ruling is the latest evidence that Duraiappah has failed to change a culture of discrimination and anti-Black racism. Even with the Ontario Human Rights Commission agreement signed in 2020 to stamp out discriminatory behaviour, mounting evidence shows little has changed.

The case of Baljiwan (BJ) Sandhu exposed a force that had little interest in representing the communities it serves and even less ability to police them effectively. 

A report used in Sandhu’s human rights case “indicated that certain criminal elements had become significantly more sophisticated following the increase in the South Asian population within the region. [The authors] specifically identified a lack of knowledge within the [Police] Service of these changes, and as a result crimes within the community were often not being addressed,” the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario detailed in its findings.

This was particularly disturbing for a force that operated in two cities whose South-Asian Canadian communities represented about half the total population.

A small unit that was created but disbanded shortly after, was referred to by senior officers and others as the “Paki task force”.

Policing in the “South Asian” community was “generally devalued in the Service” because it was “associated with the South Asian population”, the tribunal concluded in Sandhu’s case.

Attitudes toward the Black community were similar. When young Black men filled community centres to attend a series of consultations around carding (called street checks by Peel Police) as part of the Ontario Liberal government’s move to eliminate the racist practice almost a decade ago, former chief Jennifer Evans said they only showed up because “free pizza” was served. She later told CBC Radio during an interview addressing carding data that showed Black residents in Brampton and Mississauga were stopped in carding encounters by Peel Police at almost four times the rate compared to white residents, that they were carded “because they weren’t in the area where they lived.”

Since the current chief’s arrival, cases such as the death of Jamal Francique, who was shot by police in Mississauga in 2020, have raised concerns about Duraiappah’s leadership and commitment to address use of force against Black residents and other types of systemic discrimination.

Chief Duraiappah has repeatedly told the community change is coming. There has been very little disclosure detailing specific policies to meet the 64 directions at the centre of a 2023 report that came out of the agreement with the Human Rights Commission (Justice Mandhane was the organization’s chief commissioner before she was called to the bench in 2020).  

Peel police officers filed 835 use of force reports for 2023 (sources have told The Pointer these statistics are incomplete, with reports still being processed). Of these, 276 involved Black residents; 33 percent of use of force incidents involved a Black person while Black residents made up only 9.8 percent of Brampton and Mississauga’s population (Caledon is policed by the OPP). 

The disparity, despite being a key component of the agreement with the Human Rights Commission, was not mentioned in the latest press release announcing the updated use of force data which show Black residents are still being targeted at the same disproportional rate. 

"I think Peel Regional Police needs to be much more transparent with the public,” Bosveld says. “You mean to tell me that one police officer could arrest this man, search his car, detain him, and racially profile him, and nobody else that was involved that day—the backup officers, the senior officers, the sergeants?—was? There should be accountability for that. But, you know, there's body cam footage of the incident. So how does this go all the way to a prosecutor and all the way to this ruling when the defendant claimed that his Charter rights were violated? Shouldn't Peel Police have done a precursory investigation to find out what happened? Shouldn't they have gathered information? Why do they waste the public's time and money?"

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

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