The plain fact is that Black people are not treated equally in our justice system

There’s an unspoken agreement in society. That we, the people, will give up some of our freedoms, not take justice into our own hands, follow the rule of law and defer to the authority of the state. And in exchange, those people representing the state will protect our rights, all people will be equal before the law and no one will be above the law.

The reality is quite different. Police surveil, stop, question and traumatize Black people who have done nothing to warrant police attention or intervention. Nothing, but be Black, that is.

Mail carrier Ronald Phipps, for example, was dressed in a Canada Post uniform and delivering mail door-to-door, when he was stopped and questioned. Television journalist, Dwight Drummond was driving home with a friend when police pulled him over and pointed guns at him. The sixyear-old girl in Mississauga who police handcuffed by her wrists and ankles for 28 minutes was … six years old.

Black people do not experience equality before the law.

Even when all other relevant factors are the same, police are more likely to arrest Black people, and members of the bench are less likely to grant bail and more likely to impose strict bail conditions. Black people spend more time behind bars awaiting trial than white people charged with the same categories of crime. It’s no surprise then that Black people make up about three per cent of the country’s population but almost nine per cent of the federal prison population. Between 2006 and 2016, at a time when Canada’s crime rate was dropping, the incarceration rate among Black people increased by almost 70 per cent. We see similar problems and outcomes in child welfare, education, health care, employment and housing. The message to members of Black communities has for a long time been that the people who harass Black people, point guns at Black people, take away Black people’s children, take away Black people’s freedom, and, in some instances, take away Black people’s lives, are above the law.

In Toronto, Black people make up only nine per cent of the population but approximately 30 per cent of police use-of-force cases that resulted in serious injury or death, 60 per cent of deadly encounters with police, and 70 per cent of fatal police shootings. In the deaths of Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby, Abdurahman Ibrahim Hassan, and others, the officers involved were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, police budgets and authority continue to grow. In municipalities across the country, the police receive more funding from property taxes than public transportation, affordable housing, employment services, and children’s services. Across Canada, police budgets are 10 times larger than those of legal aid services.

In March 2020, Legal Aid Ontario released its Racialized Communities Strategy. This strategy was born out of an acknowledgement that for members of racialized communities, particularly Black communities, the justice system is not just. Also, that as the largest provider of legal services in the province, Legal Aid Ontario has the responsibility and the power to do something about it.

Through this strategy — and Legal Aid Ontario’s Aboriginal Justice Strategy, which addresses the systemic issues and racism faced by members of Ontario’s Indigenous communities — Legal Aid Ontario’s board of directors has committed Legal Aid Ontario to ensuring that every decision it makes, every dollar it allocates, every person it hires or promotes, every legal argument it advances and every policy it introduces will be done to advance racial justice or must at least consider and address the impact on racialized and Indigenous communities.

The action plan created from the Racialized Communities Strategy gives Legal Aid Ontario 10 years to address our role in perpetuating systemic inequalities by, among other things, ensuring there are no differences between the legal outcomes for our racialized and white clients, that the percentage of racialized people working in all levels of the organization is at least equal to the percentage of racialized people among low-income Ontarians, and that we regularly provide lawyers with training and information about how to challenge racism in the justice system.

What we are seeing is a reckoning. The protests and demonstrations are damages — a sort of reparations — for long-standing breaches of an important social contract. It is time for all of us to address these breaches by addressing anti-Black racism in the justice system.

Legal Aid Ontario has the responsibility and the power to do something about it