- Contributed
Police Chief Julian Fantino, of the Toronto Police Service (TPS).
Lionel Gayle, Gleaner Writer
TORONTO, Canada:
A TEAM of Toronto Police Service (TPS) personnel and civilians will travel to Jamaica next February with a shipment of supplies for distribution in some of Kingston's needy inner-city schools.
The donations - specifically for young children - will include crayons, readers, colouring books and sport equipment such as basketball and baseball gear.
"The most immediate thing is to bring all the stuff together. So all of that is happening as we speak," Police Chief Julian Fantino told The Gleaner.
Besides Supterintendent Wayne Cotgreave - who sat in on the interview - other representatives of TPS and the police association, Mr. Fantino's benevolent team includes Jamaican-born television newscasters Andria Case of CFTO and Dwight Drummond of CityTV. Former Ontario Lieutenant Governor Lincoln Alexander is "willing to lend his name and his support" to the project, the chief said.
In February this year, while in Jamaica at the invitation of National Security Minister Dr. Peter Phillips, Mr. Fantino and his team visited some of Kingston's inner-city neighbourhoods and spoke to teachers and residents about their needs.
"It was quite obvious that they have the bare minimum," he said of the "beautiful children with very little opportunities to have the kinds of things that we have here and take for granted."
Since his return from Jamaica he has been in touch with Commissioner of Police Francis Forbes and several others, including Gleaner Company chairman, Oliver Clarke.
"We thought we would be able to bring something to the children, some of the things that we could very easily provide from benefactors and donors and very conscientious charitable people here," he said.
"All we did there, to be honest about it, was to see for ourselves what was missing, what they don't have. And I asked some schoolteachers and some of the other people we met what kinds of things we could help them with from Canada. They told us and that's what we are focusing on."
Mr. Fantino kept in touch with Mr. Clarke, who gave him some contacts in Toronto and he discussed the project with Commissioner Forbes at a Chiefs of Police meeting in Philadelphia where Mr. Forbes was one of the speakers.
"This is a work in progress," he said about the gathering of the stuff. "We're obviously in a position where we made a lot of contacts and we've also had significant commitments from a number of areas, so we're waiting to bring all of this together."
WORK IN PROGRESS
Hopefully, they would be able to go to Jamaica in February and distribute the goods through the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), he said.
"The stark poverty and the difficulties in the neighbourhoods those children are living in and their conditions," struck him most of all, said Mr. Fantino, who is well known here for expressing his concerns about the welfare of children. They were "wonderful people and all of that, but there is a reality that those children don't have much to look forward to in terms of the kinds of things we take for granted.
"You have to see those children, just loveable, wonderful, young, helpless children - every bit of potential of being good citizens." But he observed the graphic contrast during a curfew when he visited one area in Kingston. "You got these children in the schools and then you got the teachers trying to do their best and then you have people who care deeply about helping to make things better, and at the very same time you got armoured personnel carriers patrolling the streets; you got razor wires across the streets; you got police in tactical gears, and that's the environment those children are being conditioned in."
Asked why his focus on the young, Mr. Fantino said: "Children, I suppose, have a very special place in our hearts whether they are from Kingston, Jamaica or downtown Toronto. I've always had a lot of regard for the children... I just felt that was probably the most meaningful thing we could do."
The chief said the project was also "a sign of respect" for the Jamaican community in Toronto.
