The Toronto police force, the Toronto Police Services Board and the province have dragged their feet on the issue of racial profiling by police, members of the African Canadian Legal Clinic charged yesterday.
A year after the clinic released a list of recommended changes to prevent the targeting of black men and women by police, not one has been implemented, said Marie Chen, the clinic's director of legal services.
"There's resistance even to addressing the issue and to make assertive efforts to address racial profiling," she told a news conference.
After a conference last March, the clinic called on the Ontario government to appoint an auditor of police services to look into charges of racial profiling. Other recommendations included the creation of an independent complaints body, so police would not police themselves, and the collection of race-based data by Toronto police about their stops and arrests.
"This data is essential to establishing the depth of the problem that we have proven exists," said Charles C. Smith, a racial diversity consultant hired by the clinic to study racial profiling by police across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
"You can't manage what you don't measure. Without the data, we can't tell whether or not change is actually going to be effected."
The Toronto police force has introduced a regular 90-minute session on the violation of rights and the allegations of racial profiling for all of its front-line officers, said Chuck Lawrence, the department's manager of training and development.
The police services board has completed a review to assess how the makeup of its employees compares to the city's overall diversity, as well as recommended an independent arm to investigate complaints against police, said Councillor Pam McConnell, who chairs the board.
She is currently awaiting the results of a year-long project in Kingston, where police collected race-base statistics, before making a move in that direction, she added.
To show the board's commitment to combatting the problem, it has specified that the force's new chief "ensure the service addresses issues of public concern," with racial profiling as a specific example, McConnell said.
"We are well on our way towards confronting this major issue," she said.
The Toronto Star, for a 2002 series on racial profiling, obtained the police arrest database, listing arrests from 1996 to early 2002, through a Freedom of Information request. The database records more than 480,000 incidents in which an individual was arrested or ticketed, and almost 800,000 criminal and other charges.
The Star's analysis of the data found that blacks charged with simple drug possession were taken to a police station more often than whites facing the same charge. Once at the station, black suspects were held overnight for a bail hearing at twice the rate of whites.
Possible mitigating factors, such as a previous conviction, state of employment and whether a detainee listed a home address, were taken into account in the analysis.
The data also showed that a disproportionate number of black motorists in the database were ticketed for offences that routinely would only come to light following a traffic stop.
Civil libertarians and criminologists say this pattern points to racial profiling, whether conscious or not.
Rick Eglinton Toronto Star At a news conference on racialprofiling held by members of the African Canadian Legal Clinicyesterday, Peter Owusu-Ansah alleged he was mistreated by Torontopolice. He has filed both a human rights complaint and a lawsuitagainst the police.