Another report reveals racism in policing
“We’re committed to learning and continuing to address the harmful impacts of systemic racism.”
Oh, Toronto police! At what point did you decide to make this commitment you declared to media Monday? Was it in January, when Kanika SamuelWortley’s report on Durham police found Black youth more likely to be charged and less likely to be cautioned for minor crimes? Was it in 2017, when the Black Experience Project revealed, among other things, that 79 per cent of young Black men said they were stopped by police in public for no apparent reason?
Was it in 2010, when Barrington Walker identified historical trends in charges and convictions of Black Canadians beginning in 1858? The Roots of Violence report in 2008?
Or maybe 1998, when Clayton Mosher offered a historical examination of systemic racism in social, legal and criminal justice systems?
Or was it literally only Monday when a new report titled “A Disparate Impact,” by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), found that Black people are far more likely to be arrested, charged, shot and killed by Toronto police?
“When we think about why it is Black people exist in the conditions they do in Toronto today, to what extent are the police playing a role in producing those conditions?” asks University of Toronto sociologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, who co-authored the upcoming book “Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice.”
We’re awash with the evidence of violence against Black people in this country, in this province, in this city. That evidence-gathering is at least partly in response to policymaking naysayers who continuously couch their ignorance with the demand: “Where is the evidence of racism?”
However, racism doesn’t shift because data exists. The practice of brutalizing a people and calling them brutes wouldn’t survive 400 years if it were so fragile as to actually disappear in the face of evidence.
Even with this plethora of data, I’ve been told “Black people get disproportionately arrested because they commit more crimes.” One reader sends me an email every time he comes across a news story of a crime involving a Black person. Inherently, “brutes,” see?
But how about the violence that flows the other way, from others to Black people? For instance, the statistic that Black people are far more likely than any other racial group to be victims of hate crimes, according to the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety? Shrug. Criminality is different from criminalization. One is the act, the latter is the process in which a person is turned into a criminal.
Owusu-Bempah illustrates the cycle of criminalization like this:
Black Torontonians are more likely to live in impoverished neighbourhoods, in small homes, in apartments. His research shows cannabis is used at similar rates among different groups. Youths in dense housing wanting to consume cannabis outside the watchful eyes of their parents are more likely to have to go into the streets as opposed to the backyard or basement or garage.
Couple this with long-standing data that shows Black people are disproportionately likely to be stopped, questioned and searched by police, and the chances of the youths being caught go up. Throw in the data that Black people with no criminal history are three times more likely to be arrested for a small amount of cannabis than white people and also more likely to be detained without bail.
Because people are not likely be convicted of a single cannabis offence, these youths may get other charges.
For instance, Owusu-Bempah says, a 17-year-old young Black man who has been stopped multiple times by police is more likely than others to have a bad attitude with the cops because he’ll think he’s being harassed like he has been numerous times before.
If he happens to be in possession of cannabis, his risk of getting further criminalized rises.
“We know that the police are more likely to exercise their authority and to arrest when people are impolite, when they are hostile. So that individual may not get just a cannabis possession arrest but may get a charge for something like obstructing justice.”
Being arrested is a destabilizer.
“It’s hugely disruptive to their lives,” Owusu-Bempah says. It disrupts the ability to finish school. To get a job. To keep a job. Legal fees unsettle already precarious finances. “Oftentimes they don’t get to clear their names if the charges were made public, even if the charges were dropped.
“We want the police to deal with very real issues of crime and violence but we don’t want the police creating conditions that lead to further crime and further violence.” When the OHRC’s newest report says charges against Black people were more likely to be withdrawn and less likely to result in a conviction, it illustrates — like the Durham police report did — how racism resides in the use of “discretion” in policing.
Reports on anti-Black racism among police usually focus on the worst outcomes such as death. Monday’s report highlights layers to those violations with new data that showed Black people were five times more likely to be injured in a “lower use of force” that resulted in severe bruises and lacerations, but not death or sexual assault.
The Toronto police board released 81 recommendations Tuesday, one of which was to “immediately” implement anti-Black racism training and make it an annual affair. But it was short on accountability: it did not make it mandatory for police officers to speak to investigators of the Special Investigations Unit — Ontario’s police watchdog — in cases of fatal encounters. It did not explicitly tie officers’ performance reviews to anti-racism.
The question is no longer, where is the evidence of racism against Black people?
It now turns on the police to ask, “If you must exist, show us the evidence that you’re not racist.”