They Are Still Children

Two fifteen-year-old twins went into a McDonald’s in Scarborough.

They were children.

I want to begin there because somewhere between the police report, the video, the questions about what happened beforehand, the arguments about who struck whom and the inevitable demands that we “wait for all the facts,” we have an extraordinary habit of forgetting something very simple.

They were children.

Not miniature adults. Not threats that happened to be fifteen. Not bodies upon which grown people should be permitted to demonstrate authority. Children.

And I find myself asking a question that increasingly troubles me: When did treating children like this become acceptable?

Whatever Happened to De-escalation?

Police officers are not simply citizens wearing uniforms. We give them extraordinary authority. They can detain us. Arrest us. Use force against us. They carry weapons.

And precisely because we give them powers the rest of us do not have, I expect more restraint from them, not less. Especially around children.

Why do encounters involving children ever reach the point where adults with state authority are grabbing them, throwing them down, striking them, restraining them or frightening them?

And why is our first question so often: What did the child do?

Perhaps we should begin somewhere else: What did the trained adult do to stop the situation from getting there?

Black Families Have Been Telling You

Black people have been talking about violent, humiliating and frightening encounters with police for generations. Long before everyone carried a camera. Long before body cameras. Long before a stranger could press a button and put an encounter in front of a million witnesses by dinner.

We told you. And too often we were not believed.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has concluded that Black people experience systemic racial discrimination, racial profiling and anti-Black racism in Toronto policing, and it has identified gaps in policies, training and accountability that help perpetuate that discrimination.

Historical OHRC analysis found Black people dramatically overrepresented in serious Toronto police use-of-force encounters. Those figures describe a past period, not today’s rate. But history matters when communities have been saying the same thing throughout it.

How much evidence were Black people expected to produce before everybody else agreed to look?

I Had a Child Too

Years ago, my own son was twelve.

Police officers beat him.

There was no cellphone recording. No viral video. No stranger standing nearby capturing what happened. There was simply a twelve-year-old Black boy and his mother saying that something had happened to him.

I went to the police intending to press charges. I waited. And waited. And waited. We were ignored for hours. Eventually, we left.

There was no hashtag. No public demand for answers. No footage television stations could replay. Nothing that could persuade strangers who had already decided that the officer should receive the benefit of the doubt before my child did.

But something happened that no complaint statistic could ever capture. My son learned something.

The people who enforce the rules do not always follow them. And when they do not, your mother may not be able to make anybody care.

What does that do to a child?

Apparently, It Stays With You

Research on youth-police contact has found that police stops can be associated with psychological distress, and that distress can carry into school disengagement and other parts of young people’s lives.

Toronto research into direct and witnessed police violence has also documented lasting fear, trauma and mistrust. The police encounter ends. The consequences do not.

A bruise may disappear. A cut may heal. But what happens to a child’s relationship with authority? With school? With safety? With their neighbourhood? With the belief that adults will protect them?

Those injuries do not photograph as easily.

And Black Girls Do Not Always Get To Be Girls

Research on adultification shows another danger: Black children can be perceived as older, less innocent and more responsible for what happens to them than white children. One study examining perceptions of police force found adultification was associated with judging force against juveniles as more justified and less severe, with Black girls particularly vulnerable to being seen through that distorted lens.

When we look at a Black child in conflict with authority, do we actually see a child?

Or do we see attitude, defiance, aggression and threat before we see fear, development and vulnerability?

What If Reporting It Makes Things Worse?

There is something else we do not talk about enough: fear after the encounter.

Toronto research has documented people who were afraid to complain about police violence because they feared harassment, further violence, retaliation or even being charged. Only two participants in one study formally complained.

People reported violence. People wanted accountability. And fear itself helped keep incidents out of the complaint system.

Now consider what happens next. We look at official complaint numbers and say: Where is the evidence?

No complaint. No official record. No official record. No statistic. No statistic. No proof of a widespread problem.

Then when Black communities say the official numbers cannot capture what people are afraid to report, they are told they are making accusations without evidence.

The silence produced by fear becomes evidence for the institution that produced the fear.

We Give the System the Benefit of the Doubt

Watch what happens whenever one of these videos appears.

What happened before the recording? Were they complying? Why were they there? What did they say? Why did they fight back? There must be more to the story.

Perhaps there is. Context matters.

But notice where society so often sends its curiosity first: toward finding an explanation for the person with power, not understanding the person underneath them.

The institution receives nuance. The victim receives interrogation.

What Exactly Is a Black Child Supposed to Do?

We tell children: Do not let strangers grab you. Protect yourself. Protect your sister. Protect your brother. Get away from someone frightening you. Call the police if you are in danger.

And then suppose the frightening stranger turns out to have police authority. What then?

When does instinctive self-protection become “resisting”? When does defending your sibling become “assaulting an officer”?

At what precise moment is a frightened fifteen-year-old expected to override everything we have ever taught them about danger and correctly calculate the legal powers of the adult putting hands on them?

Black parents know something about this calculation. Keep your hands visible. Do not argue. Do not move suddenly. Be respectful even if the officer is not. Come home. Whatever happens, come home.

We are sometimes teaching our children survival choreography.

Cameras Were Supposed to Save Us

My son had no recording. Today’s children often do.

For a while, I thought that would change everything. Surely if people could finally see it, denial would become impossible.

Instead, sometimes the videos feel like admission tickets to the world’s sickest lottery.

If someone records what happened. If the video is clear enough. If it gets shared enough. If journalists notice. If the public cares. If a lawyer takes the case. If investigators believe you. If the process does not exhaust you. If nobody successfully turns you from victim into defendant.

Then perhaps, one day, somebody will say: Yes. Something wrong happened to you.

And perhaps there will be money.

The Sick Lottery

We speak about settlements as though a cheque can transform what happened before it into justice.

Civil litigation has an important place. People who are wrongfully harmed should absolutely have access to compensation. But compensation is not prevention.

It arrives after. After the humiliation. After the broken bone. After the hospital. After the lost job. After the trauma. Sometimes after years of litigation. Sometimes after the funeral.

We have somehow created a public imagination in which a large settlement can become the ending of the story: The family received millions.

As though this means they won.

Won what? Their child back? Their body before the injury? Their peace? Their trust? Their years? Their sleep? Their future?

You can win this sick lottery and never live long enough to spend it.

That sentence should horrify us because it exposes what we have mistaken for accountability.

If somebody has to be permanently injured or killed before the machinery takes their suffering seriously, we have not created justice. We have created a price list for damage.

That is not prevention. That is accounting.

Death Is a Particularly Absurd Time to Discover Someone’s Rights

Ontario has independent oversight for the most serious police encounters. That matters.

But think about the terrible logic of any accountability system that becomes most powerful after serious injury or death.

There is something morally backwards about congratulating ourselves on the thoroughness of the investigation after the child is in a coffin.

“There will be an investigation afterward” cannot be our primary definition of safety. Safety is what should happen before the investigation becomes necessary.

What About the Children Without Cameras?

This may be the question that haunts me most.

How many were there? Before smartphones. Before social media. Before body cameras. Before somebody across the street could press record.

How many mothers walked into police stations like I did? How many waited? How many were dismissed? How many were frightened into silence?

How many children begged their parents: Please, Mom. Just leave it.

Not because nothing happened. Because something did. And they did not want anything else to happen.

Those children may never appear in a database. Their injuries may never become statistics. Officially, their encounter may barely exist.

But they existed. They were children too.

This Is About More Than Police

It is about what kind of society we claim to be.

The existence of laws alone does not make a society just. Power must have limits. Children must receive protection. The person with greater authority must carry greater responsibility.

Wrongdoing does not magically become acceptable because the person committing it belongs to an institution we value.

Victims should not have to become perfect victims before we believe them. Accountability should begin before somebody is dead.

How much money repairs a child’s relationship with authority? How much money removes terror from their body? How do you sue your way back into the person you were before somebody hurt you?

You cannot.

Peace Cannot Mean Powerlessness

Black people are repeatedly instructed to remain calm. Comply. Trust the process. Wait for the investigation. Do not become angry. Do not say too much. Do not generalize. Do not hate.

And I practice peace.

My bullets are my writing.

I do not want anybody’s child hurt. I do not want anybody’s mother beaten. I do not believe justice means reversing the identities of victims and perpetrators and beginning the violence again.

But peace cannot mean impotence in the presence of injustice.

Peace without accountability becomes permission.

Restraint cannot forever be demanded from the people absorbing harm while those delivering it are protected by procedure.

We have four cheeks. Two of them are no entry.

At some point, turning the other cheek stops sounding like morality and begins sounding remarkably like an instruction for injured people to remain conveniently available for another slap.

I am asking why accountability is treated as more dangerous than the behaviour that made accountability necessary.

We Have Studied This. Now What?

There comes a point when research stops being discovery. It becomes evidence of our refusal to act.

We have commissioned reports. We have collected testimony. We have counted racial disparities. We have recommended de-escalation. We have purchased body cameras. We have created complaint agencies. We have written policies about transparency. We have promised accountability.

And still the children appear on our screens.

How many studies does a Black child have to survive before an adult decides to protect them?

What I Want to See

I want automatic independent review when significant force is used against a child.

I want every such incident publicly accounted for in age- and race-disaggregated statistics.

I want developmentally appropriate de-escalation requirements that carry consequences when ignored.

I want body-camera rules with meaningful consequences when cameras that should be recording mysteriously are not.

I want families to have access to independent advocates who do not work for the police service they are complaining about.

I want officers who report misconduct protected—and officers who conceal serious misconduct held accountable.

I want repeat substantiated findings to matter. I want reports to produce deadlines. I want recommendations to produce implementation.

I want “we are reviewing the matter” to eventually become: Here is what changed.

And if those demands are considered radical, then perhaps we should ask why protecting children from unnecessary state violence sounds radical in the first place.

They Are Still Children

Black children do not lose childhood because an adult becomes afraid of them. Black girls do not become women because somebody wants to justify treating them roughly. Black boys do not become men because somebody puts handcuffs on them.

They are still developing. Still learning. Still frightened sometimes. Still somebody’s baby when the telephone rings late at night.

And every time we give an institution the benefit of the doubt before giving a child the benefit of our concern, we teach that child something about whose innocence matters.

So I am finished asking whether acknowledging this reality makes people uncomfortable. Good. Perhaps discomfort is overdue.

I am more concerned about the child whose face hurts. The child whose wrists hurt. The child who cannot sleep. The child who no longer trusts adults. The child who watched somebody hurt their sibling. The child who came home different. The child who never came home.

We have enough reports. We have enough footage. We have enough grieving parents. We have enough evidence.

Do something before the next settlement.

Because the next child should not have to become rich, traumatized, disabled—or dead—before we decide what happened to them mattered.

They are still children. Act like it.

What Prompted This Piece

This article was prompted by the September 2026 case involving 15-year-old twins at a McDonald’s in Scarborough, Toronto.

Their father says the teenagers were confronted by plainclothes police officers, and video from the encounter raised serious questions about force, identification, de-escalation, and how quickly Black children can be treated as threats instead of children.

The incident became the starting point for a much larger question: How many Black children have experienced violence, humiliation, fear, or criminalization at the hands of authority—before cameras, during cameras, and even now that cameras are everywhere?

Original CP24 report: https://www.cp24.com/local/toronto/2026/09/06/i-want-justice-father-demands-answers-after-twins-manhandled-by-toronto-police-officers-at-mcdonalds/

Sources and Further Reading

Ontario Human Rights Commission — Impact to Action / anti-Black racism in Toronto policing: https://www.ohrc.on.ca/

Justice Canada — Black Youth and the Criminal Justice System: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/bycjs-yncjs/

Toronto peer-reviewed research on police violence, fear, trauma and complaint barriers: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/17/10503