Over-policing a Canadian crisis too
For many Canadians, the viral Starbucks video is both shocking and abhorrent.
The incident, like the Stephon Clark shooting in Sacramento, California, sparked broader public discussions about the ongoing ubiquity of racial injustice in the United States. However, for most Canadians, racism in policing continues to be treated as an exclusively American phenomenon.
In Canada, discussions about policing of black lives here are sidelined or ignored entirely. While Canada’s global reputation of racial tolerance is a source of national pride, it is accompanied by a reluctance to acknowledge the ongoing injustices faced by black communities here at home.
To those attuned to the realities of race and policing in Canada, the Starbucks incident is an all-toofamiliar reminder of the violent police killing of Abdirahman Abdi in the summer of 2016, which originated in a coffee shop in Ottawa, Ontario. According to witness accounts reported in the Ottawa Citizen, Abdi, a black Somali man with mental health problems, was pepper-sprayed and brutally beaten by Ottawa police officers. One of the officers involved was later charged with manslaughter.
Despite official denials by police forces, the racial injustice so frequently decried in police killings in Canada cannot be chalked up to mere misunderstandings. A study released a few weeks ago by CBC News uncovered that police killings disproportionately affect black communities.
To little fanfare, a report published in fall 2017 by the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent concluded that Canada’s black population experiences ‘‘endemic’’ racial discrimination by law enforcement. Encounters often escalate ‘‘into police violence, resulting in injuries and even deaths’’ of black Canadians.
Many Canadians might recognise the names of Eric Garner and Philando Castile. But Abdi, Andrew Loku, Bony Jeanpierre and Pierre Coriolan, all black men killed by law enforcement in Canada in recent years, are far from household names – even though sizeable protests occurred in the days and weeks after each of their deaths.
Similarly to the US, racism in Canadian policing does not begin and end with violent encounters and loss of life. Racially biased policing occurs within a broader continuum of injustices from police stops to arrests. For instance, despite relatively similar rates of drug use across racial groups, a recent report by Rachel Browne for Vice News found that across multiple cities, both black men and women have been significantly over-represented in cannabis arrests between 2015 and the first half of 2017. Black women, too, have experienced physical and sexual violence by police.
In the past 10 years, racially disproportionate police stops have been documented in cities across the country. For many black people in Canadian cities, profiling is a daily reality. As long as black people are seen as suspect, they will be less able to move freely through public spaces.
The refusal to acknowledge the crisis in policing and race in Canada is not only a negation of present-day realities, but also an erasure of history. Canadians are largely aware of the history of slavery and segregation in the US, but they have comparably less knowledge of these realities in the Canadian context, despite the fact slavery existed in preconfederation Canada for more than 200 years.
Disproportionate arrests and incarceration affected black communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Historian Constance Backhouse uncovered police support for cross-burnings and other acts of racial hostility by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, although police killings have nearly doubled in the past 20 years, police killings of black civilians in Canada are far from a solely contemporary issue.