They are among the year’s most high-profile stories from the city’s fringes: A homeless woman whose brutal Yonge St. assault was captured on video. A quadriplegic man who claims he was yanked from his wheelchair by police during the G20. Occupy Toronto’s sprawling encampment in St. James Park. The fugitive mother and daughter living in Parkdale. Beyond their street-level setting, these stories also share a common behind-the-scenes character: Doug Johnson Hatlem, the Mennonite “street pastor.”
As many local reporters can attest, when a story breaks in Toronto involving the city’s most marginalized people, a phone call or text message from Hatlem will usually follow.
The father of three with the bushy beard and curious title is one of Toronto’s most vocal — and sometimes difficult — advocates for anti-poverty issues, and often the de facto media representative for many of the city’s voiceless citizens.
He is a chaplain of the streets, whose unorthodox advocacy includes writing press releases, tweeting reports of police abuse and maintaining a rolodex with the personal cellphone numbers of more than a dozen media contacts, to go along with the regular duties of his job as a frontline outreach worker for Sanctuary, a Christian charity and day shelter.
He’s an unabashed and unapologetic critic of police — particularly officers from the downtown east side’s notorious 51 Division, who he says target homeless people with “impunity” — in a sector that often shies away from public controversy.
Hatlem is also the co-coordinator of Toronto’s monthly homeless memorial, held on the second Tuesday of every month at the Church of the Holy Trinity. He works with the coroner’s office, relief agencies and other shelters to carry out the difficult task of compiling not only a monthly list of names, but also individual life stories of the men and women who died on the city’s streets that month.
He’s a political agitator and tireless advocate, who always seems to be in the thick of the things and is never afraid to share his opinion, whether his audience is a politician, reporter or fellow outreach worker.
“He is really driven by an Old Testament sense of outrage,” says Michael Shapcott, a leading housing expert in Toronto. “He’s not out there because he has a quiet, gentle call … He is fiercely committed to street-level justice.”
That outrage can sometimes boil over, Shapcott said.
“One of the annoying things about dealing with somebody who is so passionate and so moved by a sense of justice and a sense of outrage at injustice is that those of us around him feel a bit scorched from time to time.”
Downtown councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose ward includes the Sanctuary ministry, admits to having been “scorched” by that from time to time.
“Whether or not the message is harsh, it is sometimes what is needed,” she said, describing a time when Hatlem confronted her on a safety walk of her ward by pointing out a location where security guards had beaten up a homeless man. “He gave voice to someone who wasn’t able to represent himself. If [Doug] wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have known that story.”
“I met Doug around the G20 and then all of a sudden he was everywhere and he was kind of doing everything,” says Tess Sheldon, a lawyer who has worked with Hatlem through the people he advocates for. “He just had this force.”
Even those he criticizes have a tough time responding in kind.
Det. Matt Moyer, who works at 51 Division and has dealt with some of Hatlem’s allegations of police abuse, called him a “diligent” and “conscientious professional.”
“Is he critical of police? Sure. … But with him, he makes it all about his clients, and I think that speaks volumes,” Moyer said. “If somebody was advocating on my behalf like he does, I would be impressed.”
Hatlem’s Mennonite faith only partly explains what drives him. A combination of events in his personal life — and a lifelong attraction to people in need — have also led him on his path of relentless empathy.
“Doug was always the good kid,” his sister Stephanie explains. “And he always befriended the kid that was the bad one.”
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Hatlem grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California and was raised in a Christian Baptist household.
His parents separated when he was 12, following a tumultuous custody dispute amid allegations that his father sexually abused his younger sister.
No charges were ever laid.
When Hatlem’s mother took her daughter’s claims to police, Hatlem says police didn’t believe her because she was already embroiled in the custody dispute. So she took the kids and fled to other towns in California, raising them mostly by herself.
The allegations were well known in the communities they lived, Hatlem says, and young victims would often confide in him and seek advice.
“I started wading through these issues when I was 12 years old.”
After high school, Hatlem left California to study at Liberty University, a private Christian school in Lynchburg, Va., founded by right-wing fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell.
Despite his hard shift to the left of the political spectrum, Hatlem doesn’t discount his conservative Christian upbringing or his time at Liberty.
“They got me to read the Bible a bunch, and there’s a lot of stuff in there about justice, a lot of stuff about poverty, a lot of stuff about peace.”
He moved on to graduate studies in law and theology at Duke University in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, his sister Stephanie had taken a very different route. She was a prostitute working in big cities across the U.S. for a pimp with a vast network of sex workers.
Hatlem aggressively pleaded with his sister to give up her life on the street, threatening to go on a hunger strike if she didn’t.
In 1998, Hatlem’s family was contacted by the FBI, who were investigating Stephanie’s pimp, Tracey James Barnes. Hatlem cooperated with police and agreed to testify against Barnes — admitting his sister’s diary into evidence as part of his testimony — in the hope that it would get her off the street.
Barnes was convicted under federal anti-slavery laws and sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison. But Stephanie continued as a sex worker for five more years. She also refused to talk to Hatlem during that time.
Hatlem says the failure of the system to help his sister was a pivotal moment for him in shaping his opinions about police, prisons and restorative justice.
“I think it made me realize that using the police to try to help somebody isn’t always what that person wants.”
Around the same time, Hatlem was struggling with the compatibility of Christianity and violence and discovering Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, who espoused a radical Christian pacifism.
“I became convinced that non-violence and pacifism applied not only to people fighting overseas, but it also applied to police,” he says.
“Part of the reason why I engage with the media a lot is because I think it’s an alternative to violence: the word is more powerful than the sword.”
Hatlem says he is not “anti-police,” but believes they generally escalate potentially violent situations rather than control them — their use of force model dictates this, he says.
He refuses to call police except when there may be an immediate and serious threat of bodily harm; even then, he says there are usually non-violent methods of de-escalation that would be more effective.
He’s very supportive of the Toronto Police’s Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams, for instance, which pair a plainclothes police officer with a mental-health nurse to handle suicide calls.
“If every police officer responded to situations as if it were an MCIT event, we would prevent well over 90 per cent of the problems that happen in terms of police violence in our city.”
Hatlem’s own personal experience informed his decision to help Helen Gavaghan, the mother who landed in Hatlem’s Parkdale neighbourhood on the run from police in the UK, where she was accused of abducting her daughter.
Gavaghan has claimed that her ex-husband, Henry Da Massa, who was awarded joint custody, was abusive to their daughter. No charges have been laid, and Da Massa denies the claim.
“The story sounded so much like Stephanie’s,” Hatlem said, referring to the alleged child abuse suffered by his sister 25 years earlier. “Part of what really connected with me was that if she wanted to go any further (in her custody battle), she would have had to put her 4-year-old daughter on the stand. Stephanie was 6” when the alleged abuse happened.
In March 2010, when the community that had supported Gavaghan thought police were close to finding her, Hatlem rented a van and drove her to Winnipeg, where she was to be picked up and taken on to Vancouver. Hatlem hardly slept on the 2,000-km drive, fearing he was being tracked by Interpol and communicating only by payphone after hearing weird clicks and beeps whenever they picked up a phone.
Hatlem says he trusts Gavaghan, who’s awaiting extradition after she was arrested in Montreal in September, and remains convinced her claims of abuse are true.
“People have gone to great lengths for this because we believe we’re protecting a child, but that part of the story has never been told.”
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At his family’s old Parkdale house — with rustic paint-scratched wooden floors and children’s paintings on the wall — Hatlem, 35, is changing his newborn son’s diaper with one hand and checking his cellphone with the other.
Samuel joined the family in November, a new sibling for Simeon, 6, and Johanna, 8.
Hatlem and his wife, Jodie, moved to Toronto six years ago when Jodie entered the PhD program at the University of Toronto’s religion department. They met at a New Testament ethics course at Notre Dame, and when they were married in 2001, he took on Hatlem, her family name.
Hatlem says Jodie is very supportive of his work, but his job sometimes creates tension when it inevitably spills over into his personal life. But in many ways she shares the intensity of his convictions.
The couple moved to Toronto in part to start an intentional Christian community known as Junia House, named after a female apostle. As part of a movement sometimes called “new monasticism,” community members share household duties and incomes. Currently the group includes a culinary arts student from Edmonton, a formerly homeless man whom Hatlem met at Sanctuary, and another young family.
Hatlem said he has enjoyed living in Toronto and could see putting down roots here, but has committed to Jodie that her career is the priority and if she gets a teaching job in another city, they will move.
“Sometimes my work is so overwhelming it would provide a nice out,” Hatlem admits.
His sister, Stephanie, who’s visiting from Minneapolis — where she is now studying nursing and has been off the street for three years — said she always thought her brother would go into politics because he was so argumentative. “But he’s a terrible liar.”
Politics isn’t “out of the question,” Hatlem says. But it won’t happen in Canada, “because I won’t swear an oath to the Queen.”
“Anyway, I feel what I do is politics.”
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On the 501 streetcar heading east to Sanctuary from Hatlem’s home in Parkdale, he takes a call from Sheldon, a lawyer from ARCH Disability Law Centre who is representing Gabe Jacobs in a human rights complaint against the Toronto police.
Hatlem is a trustee, advocate and friend of Jacobs, a formerly homeless man who was allegedly pulled out of his wheelchair by police during the G20 and tossed onto the floor of the Eastern Ave. detention centre, where he lay for hours.
Jacobs once lived in Hatlem’s home as he transitioned from shelter life into supportive housing.
They have a meeting with Toronto police later in the day, but Gabe, a quadriplegic who battles alcoholism, is not having a good day.
Hatlem makes it to Sanctuary a little after 9:30 a.m. to unlock the doors for a meeting of the Safe Streets For All committee, which today is discussing how to combat the police’s ticketing of panhandlers.
Hatlem suggests a subtle edit to the letter they are sending to police and councillors: “How about people on the street who panhandle, rather than ‘panhandlers and homeless people’?”
He also suggests incorporating one of the comments by Sabrina, a formerly homeless woman he brought to the meeting for her first-hand experience.
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Hatlem’s favourite Bible passage comes from the sixth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, titled, “The Whole Armour of God.” In it, Paul urges Christians to don “the belt of truth,” “the breastplate of righteousness,” “the shield of faith” and “the sword of God’s word.”
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,” it reads.
“It’s pretty clear Paul’s talking about big systems, governing authorities,” Hatlem says.
The section concludes with phrases Hatlem has clearly taken to heart: “… that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.”
Can you be an aggressive pacifist?
“I admire and need to learn from Mennonites who are a lot more gracious, but I don’t think I’ll change to become more reserved,” he says. “I think there’s a time and a place to disturb things.”
Original Article
Source: Star
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