Umar Zameer during a press conference following his not-guilty verdict, in Toronto on April 21, 2024.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Late one night in July 2021, Umar Zameer got into his car in the garage under Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square and prepared to drive home. With him were his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. The family were downtown to celebrate Canada Day.
Suddenly two plainclothes police officers accosted them. They were looking for the suspect in a stabbing nearby. Mr. Zameer said later he thought they were thugs, not cops. He panicked and tried to drive off, hitting and fatally injuring one of the officers, Jeffrey Northrup.
It was obviously a tragic accident. Mr. Zameer, a 34-year-old accountant born in Pakistan, had no criminal record and no possible motive for running over a policeman. Yet, incredibly, police charged him with first-degree murder. Worse, Crown prosecutors insisted on taking the case to trial, despite a judge’s warning they were on shaky ground.
Three years later, after an incalculable waste of police and court resources, a jury acquitted Mr. Zameer. The presiding judge, Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy, expressed her “deepest apologies” for the ordeal he had been put through.
Umar Zameer’s lawyers call for public inquiry into Toronto police officers, OPP probe
And that is where the matter should have ended. But Toronto police were not happy. Only hours after the verdict, their chief, Myron Demkiw, said they had been “hoping for a different outcome,” an outrageous thing for a high police official to say about a court ruling. He soon walked back the comment, saying he accepted the verdict, but what happened after suggests otherwise.
Having lost at trial, the police decided, in effect, to retry Mr. Zameer outside the courtroom. They asked the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate whether, as Justice Molloy suggested, the three other officers who were in the parking garage that night had lied about what they saw.
The OPP report came out this week and it concludes – surprise, surprise – that the three officers did not lie at all. According to an unnamed expert who reconstructed the events of the night for the OPP, they were speaking the truth when they testified that Detective Constable Northrup was standing in front of Mr. Zameer’s car when he was struck. The clear implication is that Mr. Zameer saw the policeman and knew what he was doing.
That directly contradicts the evidence not only of the defence’s expert witness at the trial, but of the prosecution’s: a skilled veteran of the Toronto police whose reconstruction concluded that Det. Constable Northrup had already been knocked to the ground and was invisible to Mr. Zameer when his car ran the officer over.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw speaks during a press conference in Ottawa, on Thursday, March 12.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
What makes the police think that their after-the-fact analysis of these sad events is better than the one the jury heard? The movements of the car and the officer were examined exhaustively at the trial, where the experts and witnesses could be seen, heard and cross-examined about why they reached their conclusions. Now the OPP comes along with a whole other take.
Naturally, Chief Demkiw is boasting that his officers have been exonerated. Ontario Premier Doug Ford went even further, saying Justice Molloy should tell the three police officers she is sorry for “accusing them of everything under the sun.”
In fact, it is he and the police who should apologize. They should apologize, first of all, to Mr. Zameer. He thought he had been cleared. Now he finds his name being sullied by the Monday-morning quarterbacking of a bitter police force.
Next, they should apologize to the public for breaking one of the cardinal rules of our democracy: police and politicians should never interfere with the work of the judicial system. Having independent courts that make their rulings based on the facts presented to them, not the demands of the authorities, means that people don’t have to be afraid the state will come after them in pursuit of some crusade, vendetta or prejudice.
As the Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court, Geoffrey Morawetz, notes, unless there is an appeal (and, significantly, in this case there was none) a court’s ruling is meant to be final. There is a reason that judges don’t talk about their rulings after they are issued, much less apologize for them. As he explains, it would be “inappropriate and unethical for judges to succumb to outside pressure to modify or qualify their decisions or reasons.”
Mr. Ford has never seemed to grasp any of this. He has made a habit of attacking judges whose rulings don’t go his way. He once called judicial independence “a joke.”
It is discouraging to see police get into the act. Their job is to enforce and arrest, not to judge or punish. That is up to the courts. They did it well in this case, weighing the evidence and rejecting an unfair accusation against an innocent man.
Now they find themselves under fire from the highest police official in the city and the highest political figure in the province. Disgraceful.