Monday, June 4, 2001
by John Saunders
Globe and Mail
Two years ago last month, Selwyn Pieters, a 31-year-old federal civil servant, was on his way home to Toronto by train after a weekend in New York. He is black.
Ryan Timmins, 22, had a summer job as a Canada Customs inspector. He is white. As he worked his way through the train at Niagara Falls, Mr. Timmins decided to search Mr. Pieters's bags.
No contraband was found and Mr. Pieters went on his way, but not until after a tense exchange with Mr. Timmins and his supervisor. The supervisor ended up calling him "Billy Jack," the title of 1971 movie about a half-white, half-native karate expert who avenges bigotry with his feet. Customs Canada admits the name-calling was wrong, but it was not the main thing to which Mr. Pieters objected. He filed a racial-discrimination complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, asserting that he was picked for the search because of the colour of his skin. After an investigation, the commission has announced that the case warrants a public hearing before a three-member panel of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. No date has been set for a hearing.
Mr. Pieters, who is working on a law degree in his spare time, hopes to turn the hearing into an examination of what is called racial profiling: the use of race, consciously or otherwise, in official guesses about which individuals are likely to break the law.
If he succeeds, the case could have lasting effects. Not often discussed in Canada, racial profiling is a big issue in the United States -- to the point where Texas, among other states, is poised to spend millions of dollars to put video cameras in police cruisers to fight it. In separate interviews, Mr. Pieters and Mr. Timmins recalled the events on the train differently. It is not clear whether Mr. Pieters could ever be stopped by a law-enforcement official without thinking it was because of his race -- and it is not the first time he has complained of discrimination. Even so, there is evidence that blacks are more likely than whites to be questioned or searched by police and other authorities in Canada.
"Of course it was a matter of race," he says, arguing that young white men making the same trip in the same car were left alone. "I'm singled out and I'm humiliated."
Mr. Timmins, now 24 and working for a computer software firm in Mississauga, says it was no such thing. "He claims that I was being racist. It's like somebody tells you what you're feeling inside. I don't know how to tell him otherwise. I mean, that isn't why I searched his luggage." Mr. Pieters initially complained that he was the only black person among about 70 passengers in the car and the only person whose luggage was searched. A report by a commission investigator was inconclusive on both points.
Mr. Timmins says he searched at least three other sets of luggage before reaching Mr. Pieters and did not search anyone else because Mr. Pieters, who insisted on speaking to his supervisor, took up the rest of his time. "I don't remember if he was the only black person or not."
Mr. Pieters now says: "I was the only black person. Canada Customs hasn't produced any evidence to show that there were any other black persons in that car. I didn't observe him searching anyone else. That's not to say he didn't search anyone else." The commission report dismissed Canada Customs' argument that Mr. Pieters was picked at random. It said that Mr. Timmins gave four reasons for chosing him: He was travelling alone; he had been out of the country a short time; he had visited New York, which Canada Customs sees as a drug-source city; and he seemed anxious to avoid having his bags searched.
As Mr. Timmins tells it, Mr. Pieters flashed his government ID card, which shows he is a refugee claim officer with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, "in a way to suggest to me that that was a reason for me not to search his luggage."
Mr. Pieters, who says he intended nothing of the sort, took further offence when Mr. Timmins said there was no way to be sure the ID was real. "It certainly led me to the conclusion that he couldn't fathom the idea that someone like me, that looks like a drug courier, could be in the public service."
Things did not get better. Mr. Pieters demanded Mr. Timmins's name; he was given his badge number. He demanded an explanation for the search and got none. There is still a dispute about who had to pack up his belongings afterward. "When he searched my bag, some of my clothes fell on the ground and I was required to repack my bag 'as a courtesy to him,' " Mr. Pieters says. "That's completely inaccurate," Mr. Timmins says. "What really happened is I packed his stuff together for him after he demanded me to, and I mentioned as I was doing it that legally it's up to him to pack his stuff up but customarily we do it as a courtesy to the travellers."
The supervisor, Paul Morrison, abandoned courtesy altogether. "Faced with the insistent expression of the complainant's opinion of his customs clearance, the supervisor said he commented 'Okay, Billy Jack' out of frustration," the commission report said. It said that Canada Customs "indicated that the supervisor has been counselled on the use of this expression." Mr. Pieters, who was born in England and raised mainly in Guyana, has seldom been meek during his 14 years in Canada. He is pursuing racial-harassment complaints at the provincial level against the Toronto police and the former Toronto Board of Education. He is not alone in thinking blacks do not get an even break.
University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley, from whom he once took a course, has done two studies of racial profiling, one involving men, the other high-school students.
He found that black men in Toronto reported being stopped and searched by police far more frequently than whites, and that older, wealthier whites were hardly bothered at all. "Becoming older or becoming affluent did not protect black males from police contact," he said. "Highly educated, high-income black males over 35 were just as likely to be stopped as younger, lower-educated black males."
In the high-school study, he found that youngsters who reported less drinking, drug use and other law-breaking tended to be stopped less often, suggesting that police are good at spotting troublemakers, at least if they are white. The pattern did not hold for blacks, he said.
Mr. Wortley, who is white, is one of the experts Mr. Pieters hopes to bring to his hearing.
"Every time I'm profiled," Mr. Pieters vows, "I'm going to file a complaint. I'm going to go through the judicial process. Whether I win or lose, there's a public record of it, and that's the way it is."