Citizens ask questions about police race profiling project,
Citizens wonder how police will determine if stopped driver is Asian or Latin American
When Aisha Sherazi goes into schools to do outreach programs on race and diversity, almost no one guesses that the Muslim woman who wears a hijab was born in England.
“Assumptions are very important here,” Sherazi told more than 150 people Thursday night at the last of the Ottawa Police Service’s planned consultation phases before beginning an Ontario Human Rights Commission-mandated study on racial profiling at traffic stops.
Sherazi is a member of Ottawa’s Community and Police Action Committee and the Traffic Stop Race Data Collection Project advisory committee.
“The reality is that racial profiling exists in society and therefore can exist in policing,” said Police Chief Charles Bordeleau.
Though police officers will catalogue the races of people they pull over during traffic stops beginning in April, the people gathered at the roundtable discussions Thursday evening agreed that the categories of racial groups might present an issue.
The categories police will use are aboriginal peoples, white, black, East Asian and southeast Asian, South Asian and west Asian and other visible minorities.
People wondered where biracial individuals would fall and how police would know whether someone was southeast Asian or Latin American. The latter would fall into the category of other visible minorities.
But as researchers from York University, the team conducting the study, pointed out, police perceptions will matter most.
“Perception is where the action is when it comes to racial profiling,” said researcher Lesley Jacobs.
The project, the largest of its kind in Canada, is supposed to help Ottawa provide bias-free policing.
The head of the research team, Lorne Foster, said that while 46 of 50 states in the U.S. engage in racial profiling studies either voluntarily or because of legislation, Canada hasn’t followed suit.
The study is part of a settlement between the Ontario Human Rights Commission and Ottawa police after an Ottawa man alleged he was pulled over for being black and driving a high-end luxury car.