The senior citizen and the big, scary cop

Sometime a little before 2 p.m. on Thursday November 27, Ray Dawson passed through the main entrance of city police headquarters on Second Line East.

Dawson (shown) is a 73-year-old social activist, a former cabbie with an interest in the taxi industry.

He was there to attend a meeting of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board, which licenses local cab owners, drivers and vehicles.

So far, we only know Dawson’s version of what happened next. 

As he tells the story, he arrived five minutes before the scheduled start of what was supposed to be a public meeting on the building’s high-security second floor.

At public meetings of other local boards and committees, you walk in, sit down and watch what happens. 

You require no one’s permission to attend and observe.

You normally will not be asked to identify yourself.

You will never be questioned as to your reasons for wanting to attend the meeting.

But in SooToday.com’s own experience, Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board is different.

As Dawson was about to learn, democracy in the locked-and-loaded mindset of police headquarters can mutate into a decidedly variant form.

Dawson entered the lobby and approached the front desk.

A group of people was talking to the officer there.

Dawson decided to stand back about 10 feet.

That was close enough, he reckoned, for the officer to notice that he was there, but far enough to avoid being accused of eavesdropping on what might be a sensitive, private matter.

It was a bad call.

Ten feet, apparently, was not enough to satisfy the officer on duty.

Dawson says he was quickly ordered to go back through the glass doors and sit in the vestibule by the front entrance.

“He seemed a little brusque,” Dawson tells SooToday.com. “I did what I was told.”

The senior citizen sat there until he saw the group leave.

He stood up, only to see that someone else had also been in the lobby and was now being served at the desk.

As he sat down again in the vestibule, with the advertised meeting time quickly approaching, Dawson noticed that SooToday.com’s Carol Martin was also there.

The desk officer again became free, so Martin approached the lobby desk, asked to be admitted to the public meeting, and was also instructed to go back and stay in the vestibule.

Finally, it was Dawson’s turn.

He went to the desk and told the officer that he, too, was there for the police services board meeting.

“Go and sit down,” he says he was told.

Dawson says the officer also asked him to identify himself.

“I don’t understand why you need my name. Why do you need my name?” he replied.

And that, Dawson says, is when the tone of the conversation took an abrupt turn.

The desk officer “jumped up and went into a tirade about the need for security and how he couldn’t have unauthorized people roaming around the building,” he says.

Then Dawson says he was again ordered back to the vestibule.

“It was said harshly. I started to turn away.”

Here’s Dawson’s recollection of the exchange that followed:

Dawson: “But, the meeting is going to start.”

Officer: “You will go and sit down.”

Dawson: “Why are you threatening me?”

Officer: “I’m not threatening you, but you will go and sit down.”

At this point, Dawson says another officer came to the desk, in what Dawson interpreted as one cop supporting another, thin-blue-line style.

“If you go up to the meeting and cause a disturbance up there, you will be removed,” Dawson says he was told.

He saw this as an odd kind of progress - the first time there’d been any mention of any possibility he might be allowed to attend the public meeting.

Causing a disturbance?

Really?

Over the past decade, SooToday.com has come to know Dawson as an experienced community activist who sometimes espouses less-than-popular causes but is respectful of the chair at public meetings and has never in our presence demonstrated any inclination to disrupt.

Five minutes later, Robert Keetch, the Sault’s new police chief, came down to the lobby to get personally involved in the visitor-screening.

The conversation with Keetch was reportedly more civil.

Dawson was advised that a taxi-related letter he had sent to the police services board had been forwarded to the provincial ministry of labour.

The issue that interested Dawson was not on the agenda.

By now, it was some 15 minutes after the meeting’s scheduled start time.

Dawson says he was advised by Chief Keetch that the public portion of the meeting had not yet started.

He would have liked to attend, but his treatment in the lobby made him feel so unwelcome that he left the building,

Two weeks ago, Dawson filed a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) about the way he was handled on November 27, also asking for a ruling on whether any of the matters taken behind closed doors could have been discussed in open session.

The Police Services Act of Ontario never obligates a board to hold closed meetings.

It says only that board members “may” exclude the public if matters to be discussed involve public security issues or intimate financial or personal details, and if, after weighing those considerations against the democratic principle of open meetings, they are found to override the public interest. 

Otherwise, the default is openness.  

Dawson is not alone in feeling that Sault police sometimes obstruct or discourage lawful access to police services board meetings.

His reported treatment is consistent with this reporter's own experience trying to attend the monthly meetings - sometimes we have been received in a manner very similar to what Dawson described. 

To be fair. SooToday often enjoys a relatively smooth passage into Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board meetings, sometimes even being welcomed in the lobby by a senior officer.

The problems seem to arise when complicated or sensitive matters precede us at the desk.

Unless there’s blood on the floor, the governing principle is apparently to resolve issues one at a time, before proceeding to the next person in line.

SooToday has never been totally denied access to a police board meeting.

Reporters have, however, been delayed as much as 15 or 20 minutes, which is significant because the public portion of meetings is often not a whole lot longer than that. 

Dawson says he felt intimidated, threatened and harassed by the police screening he received trying to attend the November 27 public meeting.

“I’m a 73-year-old man. I’m not a threat in any way, shape or form,” he says. “This guy [the desk officer] was big enough to be two of me. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal.”

“Either they should hold it in a less-secure environment or they should make sure all the people at the front desk are aware to make it non-threatening for people to attend. The fact that they want to attend should be more than sufficient.” 

Is it really necessary for police services boards to meet in such a high-security environment, or are police stations used simply for convenience?

Are there other ways of managing lobby visitors to expedite access to the second floor?

Reached by SooToday.com this week, Ian MacKenzie, chair of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board, said it was the first he had heard of Dawson’s OIPRD complaint, or of any media problems accessing board meetings.

MacKenzie, a retired Sault Star advertising director with 43 years of experience in the media sector, said he takes the complaints seriously.

If he’s reappointed next week as the city’s representative on the police services board, MacKenzie said he will work to resolve the issue. 

He said if there are public access issues they are not the result of any directives from the board.

MacKenzie remembers when visitors could just walk up to the elevator and press the ‘up” button to proceed to the second floor.

There were no technical impediments to doing that, although SooToday.com provoked a very angry security response once when we tried it during a public meeting.

More recently, security card readers were installed on the elevator and police and board members were issued cards.  

Consideration might be given to issuing pass cards to others attending board meetings, MacKenzie said.

In the meantime, members of the public and news media wishing to attend police board meetings would be wise to arrive 15 or 20 minutes early, he told SooToday.com.

Police chief Robert Keetch was traveling on Wednesday and was not available for interviews.

EDITOR’S NOTE: David Helwig was the founding news director of SooToday.com. He has testified at legislative review committees on illegal use of secret meetings in Ontario municipalities. His reporting and pro-transparency activism has been recognized with awards and citations from the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Association of Broadcasters, U.S. Free Press Association, New York Festival of Radio, Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada, Canadian Community Newspapers Association and the Governor-General of Canada’s Michener Awards committee.