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Toronto police face questions over weekend subway shooting, lawsuit filed by black teens

A police officer attends the scene at the Queen Street subway station entrance in Toronto on Friday Dec. 13, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Doug Ives

The cops in Canada's largest city are getting no respect these days.

The Toronto Police Service is under a microscope, again, after officers opened fire Friday on an apparently disturbed man aboard a subway train.

Now comes word it's facing a lawsuit over an incident two years ago when a group of black teenagers were roughed up and arrested when one refused a demand to produce ID.

And of course, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is accusing the department of carrying out a vendetta against him because he's been pushing for cost cuts.

The subway wounding Friday of an 18-year-old man immediately recalled last summer's shooting death of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim, killed by police gunfire July 27 as he brandished a knife aboard an empty Toronto streetcar.

The officer who allegedly fired those shots, Const. James Forcillo, was suspended and subsequently charged with second-degree murder.

Witnesses to Friday's shooting say the young man appeared to be holding a gun before police arrived, The Canadian Press reported. When officers confronted the man, he reportedly yelled "I don't have anything to live for anyways."

Ontario's Special Investigation Unit (SIU), which is called in whenever police use force, said it believes four of the nine officers at the scene fired their weapons.

Sammy Yatim's death renewed calls for changes in the way police handle mentally distraught subjects, focusing more on de-escalating the situation when no one is directly threatened.

Yatim, an immigrant from Syria, reportedly was agitated aboard the street car and pulled a small knife, though no one was hurt and everyone fled.

Toronto police began a review of their use-of-force policies after the Yatim shooting.

The details of what happened Friday have not come out but SIU said it had recovered a weapon, CP reported.

A few dozen protesters attended a rally Sunday at the Queen Street subway station where the shooting took place.

"It seems from the witness accounts that the police did not take time to assess the situation before firing an excessive amount of bullets," protester Sakura Saunders told CP.

Meanwhile, a suit has been filed against five Toronto officers on behalf of four black teenage boys who accuse them of false arrest, assault and racial bias in a November 2011 incident.

The four, aged 15 and 16, were stopped and asked for identification under a controversial practice known as "carding," CBC News reported.

One of the boys balked, having been told previously by a judge that he did not have to provide identification to the police without cause, CBC News said. There was a scuffle and all four were arrested at gunpoint. A surveillance video showed them being thrown to the ground and at least one officer throwing punches.

The teens were arrested and later strip-searched at the police station.

An investigation resulted in the officers being disciplined.

The teens now are suing for $100,000 each. Their lawyer, Peter Rosenthal, said the boys were arrested "just because the one young man decided to assert his rights to not be questioned by police."

"The whole question of carding is racially bias," he told CBC News. "Young black men in particular are very disproportionately stopped by police officers with reasonable grounds to stop them."

[ Related: After Trayvon Martin, can Canadians be smug about racial profiling? ]

There was a time when the Toronto police probably could count on having the mayor in their corner on something like this.

But Rob Ford has his own beef with the department he nominally oversees. He's accusing Chief Bill Blair of using the department in a political vendetta over his demand for spending cuts.

"He wasn't happy when I told people to find efficiencies," Ford said during the now infamous conversation with Conrad Black on Vision TV. "I want to save money and I guess he disagrees with that."

Ford claims a massive police investigation that's disclosed the mayor's association with drug dealers was aimed at neutralizing him.

But Ford's been defiant, saying last week that being an admitted crack smoker and the subject of wiretapped conversations among gangsters is no reason for him to recuse himself from participating in police budget delineations.

"I’ll be voting on the police budget," he told reporters, according to the National Post.

Ford's brother, Toronto Councillor Doug Ford, has previously called for Blair to resign for saying publicly that, as a citizen of Toronto, he was "disappointed" by the controversial video apparently showing the mayor smoking crack.