Community members resign from police equity council amid public rift

The rift in the council comes after the Oct. 20 acquittal of Const. Daniel Montsion in the death of Abdirahman Abdi.

by Shaamini Yogaretnam

Nov 07, 2020  

Two people who work with the community group that’s meant to advocate for better relationships between Ottawa police and marginalized communities have resigned, citing fallout from the Montsion verdict and alleging anti-Black racism from within the community equity council.

The council co-chair has denied these allegations and says instead that it was disrespectful behaviour that led to a “corrective” email sent to one of the members.

The public rift in the council comes after the Oct. 20 acquittal of Const. Daniel Montsion in the death of Abdirahman Abdi. The acquittal came more than four years after Abdi’s death and further highlighted the already frayed relationship between the service and the Black community.

In letters dated Wednesday, both César Ndéma-Moussa and Ketcia Peters announced their resignations.

The resignations occurred after a disagreement on how the community equity council ought to have acted after the verdict, specifically whether members of the council should have attended a rally held by the Justice for Abdirahman Coalition on the day of the acquittal.

“It’s important in terms of leadership,” Ndéma-Moussa told this newspaper.

If the council claims to represent communities, then it needed to be present with the community, he said.

Ndéma-Moussa attended the rally, as did one other CEC member.

The next day, the CEC had planned to sit for an emergency meeting following the verdict.

Ndéma-Moussa raised concerns about how it was handled at the meeting, suggesting the council itself is not immune to the same kind of reckoning happening in broader society. He said he began his comments by telling the council his feelings were not personal against any one individual. Instead, he said he was voicing his overall concern with how the council was operating.

“It’s about society and addressing these issues where too often, those who are Black, but also Indigenous and people of colour and other equity-seeking groups … tend to be muzzled, or shut down in these institutions. This is a problem,” he said. “I had to speak up.”

But for Sahada Alolo, the co-chair of the council, there were many complicated reasons why members of the council chose not to attend the rally. Two members did attend.

“To me, that was representation on its own,” Alolo said. She said she can respect and understand that Ndéma-Moussa wanted the council’s leadership to be there.

“But as human beings, we have limitations.” Alolo herself could not be there but in the past has attended other events and even the trial. Her immediate concern turned to what kind of statement the council was going to make to the community and to the Abdi family. Her vice co-chair began reading the lengthy decision and sought the help of a judge to understand it.

“To me, that’s work,” Alolo said.

The decision of the council leaders was to call the emergency meeting for the next day to debrief what happened.

“To me, personally, that is what I signed up to do … I wish I could have been there to show solidarity to be with them. That is symbolic. But to me, the work that I was doing underground, behind the scenes, to change things so that Mr. Abdirahman Abdi did not die in vain speaks to me more than anything that is symbolic.”

Another council member, Alolo said, wanted to go to the rally but decided not to out of respect for the Abdi family. While members of the council have decided to literally sit at the table with police – the council is made up of community members and senior police officers – others in the community, including members of the Justice for Abdirahman Coalition, disagree with that relationship, she said.

“We respect that,” Alolo said. “They’re coming from a place of pain.”

At the emergency meeting, Alolo said Ndéma-Moussa came late and berated people while pointing fingers. He later apologized in the meeting when he was called out for his delivery, Alolo said. She said that his claim of anti-Black racism is “insulting,” when his behaviour was “demeaning” and “condescending.”

“It had nothing to do with race,” Alolo said. Of the community members on the council, only one person is white, she said.

“We are all victims of that colonial narrative and we are all victims of being the other, of being the one that is discriminated against, so we know it, we felt it, we’ve lived it. That’s not what took place here. It’s a complete lie.”

Alolo conceded that the council has been bad at communicating with the broader community and said it is working to change that.

Following the meeting, the council’s facilitator sent Ndéma-Moussa a letter addressing his behaviour. Ndéma-Moussa said the letter painted him as “an angry black male.” That facilitator has sent emails to other members reminding them of respectful rules of engagement in the past, Alolo said.. Those are always private. Ndéma-Moussa sent the letter to other community leaders to show them what was happening

“It’s good to criticize the police and institutions of power but to do so and to want to hold them to a certain standard, you also need to hold yourself to those standards that you claim to be about,” Ndéma-Moussa said.

Both Ndéma-Moussa and Ketcia Peters were part of the community police action committee (COMPAC), the predecessor to the community equity council. COMPAC was essentially disbanded to create a new group. Both, too, have concerns about an alleged conflict of interest where they believe the community equity council’s vice co-chair accepted payment to make a presentation to senior police management. It’s what makes them wonder whether the CEC can hold police accountable. That vice chair told this newspaper that the work was voluntary and unpaid. He also expressed deep respect for Peters and Ndéma-Moussa.

Peters was the former co-chair of COMPAC and was part of the re-formed CEC working group but was not a member of the council before her resignation.

“As the co-chair of COMPAC, I was facing the same challenges where the community felt that COMPAC was not attending to their needs. They didn’t feel COMPAC was effective, that COMPAC wasn’t able to address the many concerns that they had and was not effectively building that bridge between the police and the community and they had hopes that they would.”

When Ndéma-Moussa decided to resign, “I felt that I must also have to resign otherwise I would be complicit to this way of doing business.”

The mandate of the CEC is to “collaborate with the Ottawa Police Service to work more effectively with Indigenous, racialized and faith-based communities in Ottawa.”

Source: Ottawa Citizen