Black Action Defence Committee


The Black Action Defence Committee is a Canadian activist group founded by Dudley Laws, Charles Roach, Sherona Hall and Lennox Farrell, with Laws as the group's chair. It was founded in 1988 in response to the killing of Lester Donaldson, which was the latest in a series of police shootings of Black men in Toronto since the late 1970s. Among its several accomplishments, the BADC was primarily responsible for the creation of Ontario's Special Investigations Unit. The BADC organized demonstrations and called for an end to "police investigating police", which had become the norm when police shootings previously occurred. Still in effect, the SIU investigates incidents involving police shootings.