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An Ottawa man has filed a human-rights complaint alleging he was harassed at the Shoppers Drug Mart at Westgate mall, not once but twice, because he’s black.
Douglas Addo likes to walk, he says, often going for long meditative rambles by himself in the middle of the night.
“I work internationally, so I’m often up at odd hours,” he says. He’s a business consultant, mainly helping Canadian companies seeking customers in Africa.
Addo lives with his wife and two children near the Civic hospital campus, 10 minutes on foot from Westgate, and he drops into the all-night drugstore frequently. As he did, one night last March, sometime around 2 a.m.
“I was out for a walk and I had a craving for some sugar, just a little something sweet,” he says. “So I went in and I was looking at the candy. I wanted gummy bears, and I couldn’t find them, so I was down on my knee looking at the rack, and I felt this, like a presence behind me.”
Over his shoulder was a night-time security guard, Addo says, “right on me, I mean right on me.”
He asked whether everything was all right. Yes, she said, but didn’t move. She followed him to the cash register, where he paid for his candy and asked what was going on.
“It’s our policy,” Addo says the cashier told him. They get a lot of shoplifters at that hour and need to discourage them.
OK, but there are other people in the store and you’re not standing over them, only me, Addo says he replied. The cashier, who was also the senior person in the store on the overnight shift, advised him to call and complain in the morning.
It took five days, Addo says, but eventually he got to talk to a day manager, who he says apologized for the way he was treated.
All right, he thought. They know there’s a problem and they’re fixing it. I’ll take that.
A month later, in April, Addo stopped in again. Immediately, he says, things started to go wrong. The same security guard began following him around. This time, Addo had his cellphone on him and started taking pictures, about two dozen of them. Eventually, he objected to being shadowed and he asked to speak to the manager on duty.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard in April.
Addo concedes that things got heated then, beginning with a dispute over his recording the exchange. Officially, he’s likely in the wrong on this; a store can forbid photography and video recording on its own premises.
On the recording, he mainly keeps his voice low but he refuses to co-operate by either leaving or turning his camera off.
“She’s doing her job, like she’s been told to,” the night manager says of the guard. “To follow you, to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong.”
She adds that she, the manager, has been following him, too. “Do you have a problem with that?” she asks.
When she threatens to call the police, Addo tells her to go ahead, and when an officer arrives he treats Addo like a belligerent trespasser, which by then he sort of was. Addo’s recording shows the officer pulling on his black OK-we’ll-do-this-the-hard-way gloves, though everybody stays cool and in the end Addo leaves peacefully.
The next day he called the same daytime manager who’d apologized to him before, according to the complaint. This time he recorded the call.
He heard again that racial profiling isn’t store policy but that at high-theft times guards will follow customers closely, regardless of race. It was his clothing, a toque and jacket, that would have gotten their attention. (Weather records say the low was 3 degrees that night.)
Furthermore, the day manager told him the guard had been suspended after the first incident and warned about racial profiling when she returned.
The guard who Addo says targeted him is also dark-skinned — southeast Asian, he thinks, though he’s not sure.
“There’s no racial profiling,” she says on Addo’s phone recording. “My skin colour and your colour is (the) same thing,” she says on Addo’s phone recording.
That’s neither here nor there, Addo says, if she’s working under rules that allow or even indirectly encourage discrimination.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard.
His complaint, which he filed at the end of May, is now slated for a mediation session next spring, a preliminary step that might avert a more trial-like hearing. Addo’s seeking $100,000 in compensation, alleging discrimination on the basis of race, colour, ancestry, place of origin and ethnic origin, and also age — because the store employees thought he was much younger than he is.
He also wants Shoppers and its GardaWorld security contractor to audit their practices to look for weak spots that would open the door to racial profiling, develop new policies and training specifically to combat it, and track race-based data on interactions employees have with customers.
These “public-interest remedies” are similar to ones the Ottawa police agreed to when they were accused of racial profiling in making traffic stops. The data showed the police stop dark-skinned people disproportionately.
The public-interest remedies are what really change organizations’ behaviour. The money is a punishment, the remedies are the fix.
“I want to start chipping away at a systemic problem,” Addo says.
•
After midnight, early Thursday morning, I went to the Westgate Shoppers in my puffiest winter jacket, a toque and gloves, wearing a backpack.
The place is less welcoming overnight than it is during the day. The automatic doors are off and all the in-and-out traffic is channelled through one exit door, the better to be monitored by a checker. No guard was on duty yet, but when I ignored the dog-eared sign saying that between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. customers have to leave any bags at the cash, the checker intercepted me and politely insisted.
The place wasn’t hopping but it saw a steady stream of shoppers, six to eight around at a time, mostly buying groceries.
Though I loitered in the candy aisle as conspicuously as I could, none of the three workers in the place gave me a second look, unless they were being really subtle about it. The treatment seemed the same for a black woman (wearing dark glasses and a jacket with her hood up, with straight blonde bangs peeking out, pushing a cart) and another woman, Hispanic to my eye, shopping separately.
The gummy bears are on the bottom row of hooks in the candy aisle, where Addo says they are. When the stock gets disorderly, other candy piles up on the single shelf just below them.
I bought some knockoff Turtles and Christmas wrapping.
•
“As this matter is before the courts we cannot comment,” said a spokeswoman for GardaWorld, Isabelle Panelli, from Montreal.
“Shoppers Drug Mart is committed to diversity and to being inclusive, equitable and accessible in our interactions with each other and with our customers,” Shoppers spokeswoman Julie Dunham said by email from Toronto. “Each store is owned and operated by an independent pharmacist-owner. Diversity training is made available to all pharmacist-owners to educate their staff.
“Any allegations of this nature are taken very seriously. Accordingly, we expect that this matter will be addressed by the appropriate parties in the appropriate forum. Given this matter is in active or pending litigation, we are not able to provide further comment.”
Reached by phone Wednesday, the pharmacist-owner at the Westgate Shoppers, Narmin Jalaldin, said she’d have to call back.
Shoppers Drug Mart has been sanctioned for aggressive anti-shoplifting tactics before. In 2015, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered a Toronto location’s owner to pay a customer $8,000 after a worker rudely insisted the woman open her bag on suspicion she was shoplifting, which she wasn’t.
“In my view, although the applicant’s race and colour were not the sole factor, they were a factor, and moreover, a significant factor, in the adverse treatment,” the adjudicator in that case found.
In Regina at the end of November, Giant Tiger fired a store detective who recorded brazenly following Indigenous customer Ezekial Bigknife around.
“We are currently undergoing a rigorous internal review of our loss prevention processes that involves various levels. Our goal is to ensure that we are identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement,” the company’s statement at the time said. Giant Tiger didn’t quite admit to any specific failing in Bigknife’s case, but the statement said someone had “reached out to the customer in question to apologize and to ensure that he is fully updated on our actions and the commitment to ensuring process improvements.”
Ontario’s Human Rights Commission released a big report on racial profiling last May, examining what a difficult problem it is. Many people who do it don’t know they’re doing it. But according to the commission, profiling in stores is the second-most prevalent type, after profiling by police, and the people who experience it most are black men.
There’s more American research on the experience of “shopping while black,” but peer-reviewed research has documented “various patterns of discriminatory behaviour, including using security measures against someone, such as staring at, following, detaining or arresting a consumer based on race,” the commission reported.
Here in Canada, the commission surveyed about 500 people about their experiences of racial profiling. About one in 10 white people reported experiencing it at some point, while nearly three-quarters of black people reported experiencing it. More than Indigenous people, more than people of Arab or west-Asian descent.
“Survey respondents wrote about the stereotypes that they face in retail stores – for example, that racialized and Indigenous peoples are prone to shoplift and cannot afford the products being sold,” the commission reported. “Researchers have noted that Black men, who are commonly stereotyped as criminals, may be viewed by authorities in shopping environments as ‘suspects first and shoppers second’.”
•
Addo’s being represented by lawyer Christine Johnson, who works with human-rights activist attorney Paul Champ, but when we meet at the Westgate Second Cup just outside the Shoppers Drug Mart doors, he’s on his own. He gets a mint tea and stirs in a couple of sugars.
At 42, with his unlined face and close-shaved head he could pass for much younger. There’s a hint of white in his short goatee but you have to look closely to see it.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard.
He’s married, with a 10-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. He moved to Ottawa to go to the University of Ottawa; after graduation, he got a job as a customer-service rep for Rogers, where, he says, he was soon promoted to join an elite team that handled complicated requests that crossed the company’s multiple lines of business. He moved on to Dell, and then was headhunted to a top business-development job at a smaller company called Vocantas.
About 10 years ago, he struck out on his own, working with a small network of partners consulting on international business projects.
“I help Canadian companies make money internationally,” is his one-sentence explanation.
He’s had bigger gigs but the job he’s proudest of was helping the major airport in Liberia buy a new piece of weather-monitoring equipment it needed to keep its full roster of landings. He found a supplier in Finland but Finnish installers would have broken the airport’s limited budget, so Addo found a qualified team from Ghana to do the work.
He’s become successful after starting from nothing, an immigrant at 14 from Ghana who came with his mother and a brother. They lived with another brother who’d sponsored them; the brother was married and the place was small and before long, the new arrivals had to find a home of their own.
“We talked about it and we had a choice,” Addo says. “We could try to move into social housing or we could try to go someplace different, a bit better of a neighbourhood. We believed that if we stuck to our guns, if we all worked, and paid the rent, we’d be better off.”
They moved to the better neighbourhood.
Addo worked through high school, worked through university. “I’ve been successful and I have a good life, because I’ve worked hard and I’m a go-getter, and because I was afforded the opportunity to do so,” Addo says.
He shows me a TEDx video of Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, recorded just a couple of weeks ago. Addo says a cousin who knows nothing about his human-rights complaint sent it to him the night before.
Hussen, who arrived in Canada as a refugee from Somalia when he was 11, talks about being stopped by police in the social-housing development where he lived as a youth.
“Every single time that happened to me, it was more humiliating than the first time it happened, because your neighbours are looking at you, strangers are passing by with a car, through their car windows, they’re wondering, ‘What did this guy do to deserve being held on the side of the road?’,” Hussen says in the talk.
Even now, as a government minister, Hussen says he knows that the same thing could happen if he walks in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As Addo watches me watch the talk on his phone, his eyes well up.
“I felt very exposed, like the rug was pulled out from underneath me,” Addo says.
Part of him is embarrassed by it all, he says. He hasn’t told many people, though he’s decided to now because making things better sometimes takes uncomfortable conversations.
“I don’t want my son, my daughter, to go through this later,” he says.
Canada is a country of generosity, of decency and of laws, and they need to apply equally to everyone, he says. We’re prosperous, and Shoppers Drug Mart is a multibillion-dollar part of the even bigger Loblaw family, because people follow rules. One of which is that you just can’t discriminate against people because of how they look.
That’s why he believes his case is worth pursuing, Addo says.
“The Canadian dream that I’m hoping to pass on to my kids is being attacked,” he says.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Douglas Addo likes to walk, he says, often going for long meditative rambles by himself in the middle of the night.
“I work internationally, so I’m often up at odd hours,” he says. He’s a business consultant, mainly helping Canadian companies seeking customers in Africa.
Addo lives with his wife and two children near the Civic hospital campus, 10 minutes on foot from Westgate, and he drops into the all-night drugstore frequently. As he did, one night last March, sometime around 2 a.m.
“I was out for a walk and I had a craving for some sugar, just a little something sweet,” he says. “So I went in and I was looking at the candy. I wanted gummy bears, and I couldn’t find them, so I was down on my knee looking at the rack, and I felt this, like a presence behind me.”
Over his shoulder was a night-time security guard, Addo says, “right on me, I mean right on me.”
He asked whether everything was all right. Yes, she said, but didn’t move. She followed him to the cash register, where he paid for his candy and asked what was going on.
“It’s our policy,” Addo says the cashier told him. They get a lot of shoplifters at that hour and need to discourage them.
OK, but there are other people in the store and you’re not standing over them, only me, Addo says he replied. The cashier, who was also the senior person in the store on the overnight shift, advised him to call and complain in the morning.
It took five days, Addo says, but eventually he got to talk to a day manager, who he says apologized for the way he was treated.
All right, he thought. They know there’s a problem and they’re fixing it. I’ll take that.
A month later, in April, Addo stopped in again. Immediately, he says, things started to go wrong. The same security guard began following him around. This time, Addo had his cellphone on him and started taking pictures, about two dozen of them. Eventually, he objected to being shadowed and he asked to speak to the manager on duty.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard in April.
Addo concedes that things got heated then, beginning with a dispute over his recording the exchange. Officially, he’s likely in the wrong on this; a store can forbid photography and video recording on its own premises.
On the recording, he mainly keeps his voice low but he refuses to co-operate by either leaving or turning his camera off.
“She’s doing her job, like she’s been told to,” the night manager says of the guard. “To follow you, to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong.”
She adds that she, the manager, has been following him, too. “Do you have a problem with that?” she asks.
When she threatens to call the police, Addo tells her to go ahead, and when an officer arrives he treats Addo like a belligerent trespasser, which by then he sort of was. Addo’s recording shows the officer pulling on his black OK-we’ll-do-this-the-hard-way gloves, though everybody stays cool and in the end Addo leaves peacefully.
The next day he called the same daytime manager who’d apologized to him before, according to the complaint. This time he recorded the call.
He heard again that racial profiling isn’t store policy but that at high-theft times guards will follow customers closely, regardless of race. It was his clothing, a toque and jacket, that would have gotten their attention. (Weather records say the low was 3 degrees that night.)
Furthermore, the day manager told him the guard had been suspended after the first incident and warned about racial profiling when she returned.
The guard who Addo says targeted him is also dark-skinned — southeast Asian, he thinks, though he’s not sure.
“There’s no racial profiling,” she says on Addo’s phone recording. “My skin colour and your colour is (the) same thing,” she says on Addo’s phone recording.
That’s neither here nor there, Addo says, if she’s working under rules that allow or even indirectly encourage discrimination.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard.
His complaint, which he filed at the end of May, is now slated for a mediation session next spring, a preliminary step that might avert a more trial-like hearing. Addo’s seeking $100,000 in compensation, alleging discrimination on the basis of race, colour, ancestry, place of origin and ethnic origin, and also age — because the store employees thought he was much younger than he is.
He also wants Shoppers and its GardaWorld security contractor to audit their practices to look for weak spots that would open the door to racial profiling, develop new policies and training specifically to combat it, and track race-based data on interactions employees have with customers.
These “public-interest remedies” are similar to ones the Ottawa police agreed to when they were accused of racial profiling in making traffic stops. The data showed the police stop dark-skinned people disproportionately.
The public-interest remedies are what really change organizations’ behaviour. The money is a punishment, the remedies are the fix.
“I want to start chipping away at a systemic problem,” Addo says.
•
After midnight, early Thursday morning, I went to the Westgate Shoppers in my puffiest winter jacket, a toque and gloves, wearing a backpack.
The place is less welcoming overnight than it is during the day. The automatic doors are off and all the in-and-out traffic is channelled through one exit door, the better to be monitored by a checker. No guard was on duty yet, but when I ignored the dog-eared sign saying that between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. customers have to leave any bags at the cash, the checker intercepted me and politely insisted.
The place wasn’t hopping but it saw a steady stream of shoppers, six to eight around at a time, mostly buying groceries.
Though I loitered in the candy aisle as conspicuously as I could, none of the three workers in the place gave me a second look, unless they were being really subtle about it. The treatment seemed the same for a black woman (wearing dark glasses and a jacket with her hood up, with straight blonde bangs peeking out, pushing a cart) and another woman, Hispanic to my eye, shopping separately.
The gummy bears are on the bottom row of hooks in the candy aisle, where Addo says they are. When the stock gets disorderly, other candy piles up on the single shelf just below them.
I bought some knockoff Turtles and Christmas wrapping.
•
“As this matter is before the courts we cannot comment,” said a spokeswoman for GardaWorld, Isabelle Panelli, from Montreal.
“Shoppers Drug Mart is committed to diversity and to being inclusive, equitable and accessible in our interactions with each other and with our customers,” Shoppers spokeswoman Julie Dunham said by email from Toronto. “Each store is owned and operated by an independent pharmacist-owner. Diversity training is made available to all pharmacist-owners to educate their staff.
“Any allegations of this nature are taken very seriously. Accordingly, we expect that this matter will be addressed by the appropriate parties in the appropriate forum. Given this matter is in active or pending litigation, we are not able to provide further comment.”
Reached by phone Wednesday, the pharmacist-owner at the Westgate Shoppers, Narmin Jalaldin, said she’d have to call back.
Shoppers Drug Mart has been sanctioned for aggressive anti-shoplifting tactics before. In 2015, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered a Toronto location’s owner to pay a customer $8,000 after a worker rudely insisted the woman open her bag on suspicion she was shoplifting, which she wasn’t.
“In my view, although the applicant’s race and colour were not the sole factor, they were a factor, and moreover, a significant factor, in the adverse treatment,” the adjudicator in that case found.
In Regina at the end of November, Giant Tiger fired a store detective who recorded brazenly following Indigenous customer Ezekial Bigknife around.
“We are currently undergoing a rigorous internal review of our loss prevention processes that involves various levels. Our goal is to ensure that we are identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement,” the company’s statement at the time said. Giant Tiger didn’t quite admit to any specific failing in Bigknife’s case, but the statement said someone had “reached out to the customer in question to apologize and to ensure that he is fully updated on our actions and the commitment to ensuring process improvements.”
Ontario’s Human Rights Commission released a big report on racial profiling last May, examining what a difficult problem it is. Many people who do it don’t know they’re doing it. But according to the commission, profiling in stores is the second-most prevalent type, after profiling by police, and the people who experience it most are black men.
There’s more American research on the experience of “shopping while black,” but peer-reviewed research has documented “various patterns of discriminatory behaviour, including using security measures against someone, such as staring at, following, detaining or arresting a consumer based on race,” the commission reported.
Here in Canada, the commission surveyed about 500 people about their experiences of racial profiling. About one in 10 white people reported experiencing it at some point, while nearly three-quarters of black people reported experiencing it. More than Indigenous people, more than people of Arab or west-Asian descent.
“Survey respondents wrote about the stereotypes that they face in retail stores – for example, that racialized and Indigenous peoples are prone to shoplift and cannot afford the products being sold,” the commission reported. “Researchers have noted that Black men, who are commonly stereotyped as criminals, may be viewed by authorities in shopping environments as ‘suspects first and shoppers second’.”
•
Addo’s being represented by lawyer Christine Johnson, who works with human-rights activist attorney Paul Champ, but when we meet at the Westgate Second Cup just outside the Shoppers Drug Mart doors, he’s on his own. He gets a mint tea and stirs in a couple of sugars.
At 42, with his unlined face and close-shaved head he could pass for much younger. There’s a hint of white in his short goatee but you have to look closely to see it.
Photographs shot by Douglas Addo at the Westgate Shoppers Drug Mart, which he says show him being followed aggressively by a security guard.
He’s married, with a 10-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. He moved to Ottawa to go to the University of Ottawa; after graduation, he got a job as a customer-service rep for Rogers, where, he says, he was soon promoted to join an elite team that handled complicated requests that crossed the company’s multiple lines of business. He moved on to Dell, and then was headhunted to a top business-development job at a smaller company called Vocantas.
About 10 years ago, he struck out on his own, working with a small network of partners consulting on international business projects.
“I help Canadian companies make money internationally,” is his one-sentence explanation.
He’s had bigger gigs but the job he’s proudest of was helping the major airport in Liberia buy a new piece of weather-monitoring equipment it needed to keep its full roster of landings. He found a supplier in Finland but Finnish installers would have broken the airport’s limited budget, so Addo found a qualified team from Ghana to do the work.
He’s become successful after starting from nothing, an immigrant at 14 from Ghana who came with his mother and a brother. They lived with another brother who’d sponsored them; the brother was married and the place was small and before long, the new arrivals had to find a home of their own.
“We talked about it and we had a choice,” Addo says. “We could try to move into social housing or we could try to go someplace different, a bit better of a neighbourhood. We believed that if we stuck to our guns, if we all worked, and paid the rent, we’d be better off.”
They moved to the better neighbourhood.
Addo worked through high school, worked through university. “I’ve been successful and I have a good life, because I’ve worked hard and I’m a go-getter, and because I was afforded the opportunity to do so,” Addo says.
He shows me a TEDx video of Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, recorded just a couple of weeks ago. Addo says a cousin who knows nothing about his human-rights complaint sent it to him the night before.
Hussen, who arrived in Canada as a refugee from Somalia when he was 11, talks about being stopped by police in the social-housing development where he lived as a youth.
“Every single time that happened to me, it was more humiliating than the first time it happened, because your neighbours are looking at you, strangers are passing by with a car, through their car windows, they’re wondering, ‘What did this guy do to deserve being held on the side of the road?’,” Hussen says in the talk.
Even now, as a government minister, Hussen says he knows that the same thing could happen if he walks in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As Addo watches me watch the talk on his phone, his eyes well up.
“I felt very exposed, like the rug was pulled out from underneath me,” Addo says.
Part of him is embarrassed by it all, he says. He hasn’t told many people, though he’s decided to now because making things better sometimes takes uncomfortable conversations.
“I don’t want my son, my daughter, to go through this later,” he says.
Canada is a country of generosity, of decency and of laws, and they need to apply equally to everyone, he says. We’re prosperous, and Shoppers Drug Mart is a multibillion-dollar part of the even bigger Loblaw family, because people follow rules. One of which is that you just can’t discriminate against people because of how they look.
That’s why he believes his case is worth pursuing, Addo says.
“The Canadian dream that I’m hoping to pass on to my kids is being attacked,” he says.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
