Justice is not the same as vengeance

Eighteen-year-old Sammy Yatim was shot to death by Toronto police in the early hours of last Saturday morning.  He had produced a knife on a streetcar, ordered everyone off, and then refused police demands that he drop the knife and surrender.  Nine shots were fired, followed quite remarkably by the use of a Taser.  As is the way of the world today, there are numerous videos of the tragic events.  These have gone viral, prompting anger and protests in Toronto and elsewhere.

Sammy was a much-loved son.  Sammy had recently been booted out of the house by his father for smoking pot and not looking for work.

Sammy had just graduated high school and was planning to start college in the fall.  Sammy had fallen in with a bad crowd.

Sammy was the kind of guy who always tried to intervene to prevent conflicts.  Sammy had taken to carrying a knife with him at all times.

All of these contradictory statements have shown up in the media since Sammy was killed.  I'm mentioning them here for one reason only: they can't possibly be relevant to our understanding of what happened last Saturday, because the police officers involved can't have been aware of any of them.  As the video shows, Sammy was alone on the streetcar when the shooting started.  A huge number of officers had converged on the scene -- reports say the actual number was 22 -- which should have been enough to resolve the situation without any shooting.  In the event, all nine shots were fired by a single officer, who has now been suspended with pay.

This is by no means the first seemingly avoidable shooting by Toronto police, but the existence of very clear video footage has resulted in a strong outpouring of anger, with protesters calling for "justice for Sammy".  There has also been a blizzard of largely irrelevant breast-beating in the media.  One columnist in the Toronto Star, Joe Fiorito, offers up a list today of persons with mental health issues who have met their deaths at the hands of the police in recent times.  This is beside the point in so many ways.  In the first place, and most importantly in the current case, Sammy Yatim's family has strenuously denied that he had any mental health problems.  Secondly, and putting ourselves in the shoes of the police officers involved in such incidents for a moment, if someone is threatening you with a knife, you inevitably go into self-preservation mode, with all that entails.  If you hesitate and wind up with a nasty wound (or worse), it's not going to be any less dangerous or painful just because of the poor mental state of the person who attacked you.

All of this rushing to judgment and speculative context-building is going to make it very difficult for the officer involved to get a fair trial, if it comes to that -- and if the video evidence is to be believed, it almost certainly will come to that.  Making things worse, the media have now uncovered and published the name of the officer who fired the fatal shots.  The CTV television network found it first, but the Toronto Star enthusiastically put it at the top of the front page of today's print edition.

Needless to say, this has led to an outpouring of anger and threats in the social media, directed against the police in general and against the individual officer.  One tasteful sample from Twitter will suffice to give you the tone:

100k a year to strike fear into the hearts of your children. Paid vacation if they take one out permanently.

The Star has found the officer's address and phone number but has had the good sense not to publish them. How long will it be, however,  before someone less responsible circulates that information and triggers some sort of vigilante action against the officer and his family?

Whatever the circumstances here -- and again, the video evidence looks very hard to gainsay -- the officer has a right to be presumed innocent unless and until he is found guilty in a fair trial in a court of law.  Sammy Yatim's family have expressed confidence in the justice system, but most of the people who have taken to the streets in protest don't really want "justice for Sammy".  They want vengeance, condign punishment,  against one particular cop and against the police in general, the legal niceties be damned.

By coincidence, and in a quite different context -- he was talking about gays --  Pope Francis made headlines around the world this week by asking "Who am I to judge?"  Papa Francis was no doubt mindful of the biblical admonishment to "judge not, lest ye be judged yourself", and the clear instruction that "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord".  A lot of people in Toronto, egged on by the media, seem little inclined to show any such restraint.

FOOTNOTE: read this story on the Star website and decide if you see it the way the headline writer does.