So, when I was growing up, I lived in the same house as my mom. But we didn't live in the same neighborhood. See, my mom never had a reason to fear or distrust the police. But for me, that was a big part of my childhood. And I learned at a young age that I would experience some things differently than my white mom, because I have a black dad. For example, one of the few memories of having my dad as a kid is seeing him yelled at and questioned by police on the street. And when they didn't like the answers, he was giving them to their questions. They proceeded to aggressively question me, and I was just eight years old. And as I grew older, that fear and distrust of police grew with me and by the time I was in high school. I was getting stopped by cops and security guards the mall with the bus station on the street. And often they'd have comments about how I dressed in big jeans and hoodies like any other kid at the time. In high school, I was so afraid to cop say anyone in a uniform made me feel uncomfortable. And unfortunately that experience is not unique to me. But it's the status quo in a lot of neighborhoods across North America. Right here in Toronto, for example, black people make up 8.1% of our population, but over 1/4 of the people who were stopped by police last year, to have their personal information entered into the police database, are black and that type of disproportionate interaction when it's seen as unfair and illegitimate breads a distrust of law enforcement. It makes people distrust cops who are the most visible faces of our legal system. And when people distrust law enforcement because they believe that the law is not being enforced equally across all communities, they grow to distrust their government and believe that their government works for some people. But not for all people. There is no better reminder of the relationship between policing and democracy than what happened in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this year. And it's continuing to happen today. The streets of Ferguson erupted in protest after the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson police officer. And just like when you're boiling water, that boiling point frustration building up in Ferguson didn't happen overnight. But rather it's the product of gradual frustration, resentment and struggle that people have felt with their police department. Consider this, Ferguson's population is 67% but only three of the city's 63 police officers are black. Black people in Ferguson make up 86% of the people who stopped by police last year and 92% of the people more searched by police last year. Those statistics tell a story of a community that is frustrated with their police department. But it's made all the more worse by an oblivious government. While the people of Ferguson were in the street protesting the mayor of that city was on television claiming and I quote "that all residents of the city believe there is no racial divide in the city of Ferguson". Seriously, he said that now if we're going to address this problem, and avoid those boiling points, that tension like we're seeing in Ferguson right now, you can't just focus on the extreme incidents like the death of Michael Brown that made international news headlines and you see on television, but we also have to address the series of smaller injustices that go under the radar, but bread that distrust in the first place. And for the last few years, I've been working on a solution to those smaller injustices. I studied policing and other social justice issues at Yale University and moved back to Canada last year and found an organization called the policing literacy and now what we do is develop ideas that will improve the way police interact with low income neighborhoods and communities of color. One of the highlights of this work for me over the past year is when I myself filed a complaint against two Toronto Police officers last year. About a year ago to this day, I was standing outside my apartment building in the Little Jamaica neighborhood in Toronto. And I was on the phone with a senior person at one of the biggest international business firms in the world. He's giving me some career advice. And as we were talking things through a police car pulled up and it were two white police officers and they told me they received a report about a suspicious black male in the area. Now when you're fishing for a black male in the middle of Little Jamaican neighborhood in Toronto, you're gonna find them. So they found me and they proceeded to question and I tried to explain look, I live in this building right in front of us and the key that goes in the door. And I'm on an important one so that my answers didn't matter because I was guilty until proven innocent. They asked me for identification for every address I've lived in for the last 10 years. And they also ran my name through their system to confirm I didn't have a policeman. And at the end of it, they exhausted all their options and realized they had no reason to stop me in the first place and they let me go. Now that night, I was mad. I was frustrated. And you know, you see that kind of stuff happening to people all the time that happened to me growing up and I just I hit my limit. And I said no rather than let those feelings bottled up inside and contribute to distrust. Why don't I try something? So I filed a complaint with the Ontario complaint system. And I took a leap of faith that maybe our government's process might bring some justice to my situation. So I filed the complaint. And as part of the complaint, I requested a mediated conversation with the two officers that stopped me that night and a few weeks later my request was granted. I sat down with them at a division station and I told them how they made me feel racially profiled and stereotyped. And then I was being treated like a guilty person not to prove his innocence which is opposite. And to my surprise, these officers were very receptive to my comments. They were only a few years older than me and when I sat down and I looked in their eyes, I can see that it bothered them how they made me feel. They tried to explain to me the procedures and the protocols that guided their behavior. And by the end of the conversation, we didn't agree on everything but we understood each other. See, they left that night with a better understanding of how to treat the next young man being counted.