POLITICS-CANADA: Police Sue Paper for Racial Profiling Accusation

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - A newspaper expose of racial profiling by local police officers has provided fresh political ammunition for a beleaguered black minority, which has long had a bad relationship with the largely white police force in Canada’s largest and most multicultural city.

Relying upon city police arrest data, the Toronto Star found that people of African origin, who make up eight per cent of Toronto’s three million people, are stopped, interrogated, searched and detained more frequently by officers than whites, estimated at about 63 per cent of the population by the 1996 census.

Facing a charge of simple drug possession, whites are more often released at the crime scene than blacks, while blacks are twice as likely to be held overnight for a bail hearing, reported the paper.

This is old news for Torontonians of colour. ”The Star lent credibility to what we already know. It is good to see it in black and white,” says Erica Lawson, policy and research analyst for the African Canadian Legal Clinic.

Black community leaders expressed a lack of confidence in Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino, who initially denied the conclusions of the Star reportage and then tried (without success) to enlist a veteran judge to conduct a study of police-minority relations.

Instead, the Legal Clinic and other black groups want the Ontario government, which regulates municipal policing in the province, to implement recommendations of past studies of police-minority relations.

Some involve basic police procedures, such as forcing officers to explain on a standard form why a suspect has not been released, pushing them to justify their decision.

Lawson says police reform should begin with replacing the current system where police investigate police officers for alleged misconduct.

Veteran black civil rights lawyer Charles Roach is more ”optimistic” now that the influential and widely read Toronto Star is taking city policing seriously.

In the past, he says, ”they have backed off the police and this is the first time there has been a head-on situation like this”.

Roach is also encouraged by Toronto city council’s unanimous vote in favour of amending the current police complaints process. The motion also criticised the initial ”denials and defensiveness” displayed by Fantino and others towards the Star’s findings..

Until recently, it was almost political suicide for local politicians to criticise or oppose the police in Toronto, says Roach.

Nonetheless, the tough union representing Toronto police officers, which has been known to monitor and target politicians deemed anti-police, is suing the Star for about two billion Canadian dollars (1.3 billion U.S. dollars).

The Toronto Police Association wants an apology and a retraction from the paper for the series on police racial profiling. But the newspaper’s managing editor Mary Deanne Shears stands by the reporting.

A major newspaper like the Star has deep enough financial pockets to be able to fend off the charge, which has little chance of succeeding in the long run in the Canadian courts, says libel lawyer Brian Rogers.

But the costly litigation process that the newspaper will still have to undergo could discourage less financially endowed media outlets or even citizens from overly criticising police policies, he fears. ”It has a chilling effect on free expression.”

Some local commentators say that racial profiling by police makes perfect sense.

They point to police statistics quoted in the Star that demonstrate that Toronto’s small black minority accounts for nearly 27 per cent of charges for violent crime, including homicide, attempted murder, sexual assault, gun related offences and assaults.

Black community leaders like Dudley Laws, head of the Black Action Defence Committee and among the police’s severest critics, acknowledge the problem of violence in Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods.

"The issue of our youth has been sidelined for many, many years," he told the National Post newspaper. "We know about it, we try to address it, we acknowledge the violence. Our youth need counselling, they need skills training and they need to be motivated so they can go back to school or stay in school.”

But those problems do not justify stereotyping an entire ethnic or racial group, the majority of whom are law-abiding citizens, says University of Toronto assistant professor of criminology Scot Wortley, the author of various studies of police-minority encounters.

Police crime statistics are often biased, says Wortley. He notes, for instance, that people charged with drug possession or trafficking are overwhelmingly black or members of a racial minority.

Yet, the majority of users of illegal marijuana, crack cocaine or alcohol (if the person is under age) tend to be white, he adds.

”Police are looking for these types of crimes in the black community and not looking for them to the same extent in the white community,” says Wortley.

At the same time, Torontonians view crime with a double standard. For example, serial killers and paedophiles are overwhelmingly white. Yet, says Wortley, ”when white males commit heinous crimes, we tend to think of them as pathological individuals”.

But if a black person murders, he adds Wortley, ”we look at it as a problem in the black community”.

POLITICS-CANADA: Police Sue Paper for Racial Profiling Accusation

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - A newspaper expose of racial profiling by local police officers has provided fresh political ammunition for a beleaguered black minority, which has long had a bad relationship with the largely white police force in Canada’s largest and most multicultural city.
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