Get the facts to build trust

If alarm bells weren’t clanging over anecdotal evidence and media reports that Black people are much more likely than whites to be stopped, questioned, or even killed by police, they surely should be now.

A new report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission finds that Black people were “grossly overrepresented” in incidents between 2013 and 2017 where Toronto police used force resulting in injury or death.

In fact, while Black people make up just 8.8 per cent of the city’s population, they made up 61.5 per cent of cases in which police used force, such as batons or Tasers, that resulted in civilian deaths. In cases of police shootings that resulted in death, it’s even more disproportionate; fully 70 per cent of those cases involved Black people.

The bottom line: the analysis found that a Black person in this city is nearly 20 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by police.

These numbers are new, drawn from reports dealing with 187 cases handled by the Special Investigations Unit, which gets involved whenever someone is killed or badly injured by police. But the overall picture is anything but new, as members of the city’s Black communities were quick to point out. The question is what to do about it.

The Human Rights Commission adds its voice to those recommending that Toronto police collect and publicly report race-based data on all stops, searches and incidents in which police use force.

This sensible suggestion should be implemented quickly. Only when comprehensive data are available will police be able to judge whether such measures as diversity training, anti-racism initiatives and outreach programs are working, and adjust if they are not.

It should be possible to do this without long delays. As Alok Mukherjee, former chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, suggests, the recommendation could be implemented if the board simply directs Chief Mark Saunders to immediately begin to collect and report data on police interactions with Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities.

But action should not stop there. Every police force in the province should establish a permanent, standardized, publicly reported method of collecting race-based data to measure the extent of the problem. In fact, the Human Rights Commission itself recommended that very step more than two years ago.

Further, the commission asks that the province follow up on a 2017 report by Justice Michael Tulloch that also recommended the mandatory collection of race-based data, as well as greater powers to charge police officers and far greater transparency from the province’s police watchdogs.

The response of the TPS and board to this week’s report seemed muted and defensive, at best. That may be because the force knows all too well that data can be just as easily used to reinforce racist beliefs and actions as to dispel them.

So yes, the force should scrutinize the methodology and data behind the report, as they say they will. And yes, they should consult with the department’s Anti-Racism Advisory Panel on how best to collect and analyze data before it goes ahead. But neither of these steps should be used as a delaying tactic.

Finally, the police and the board were right on this point: the report, they said, must be seen in a “broader context of poverty, social exclusion, inequality in our neighbourhoods and the root causes of crime and violence ... Once the police have been called, the incident is often one of crisis.”

That is certainly true. It’s too much to expect the police to solve social and economic problems that have developed over decades; tackling conditions that lead to crime will require effort and resources from all levels of government, indeed from all parts of society.

But that doesn’t excuse police from doing their part. They need to do all they can to ensure their interactions with Black people are not more likely to become violent than those with whites.

And for that, they — and the public — need all the facts.

In cases of police shootings that resulted in death, 70 per cent involved Black people