Should police be required to collect race-based data to fight discrimination?
Retired Kingston police chief, Bill Closs, says police chiefs won’t willingly collect race-based data and government must require it.
What is race-based data collection?
Race-based data collection is recording police encounters with the public and categorizing each record by a racial label. This is a arguably useful tool for tracking police incidents by racial label.
Are there risks with race-based data collection?
However, it is fraught with risks and problems. The correlation of encounters of a colour and the number of crimes by that racial group may be non-existant. Every encounter with a particular racial group may not necessarily have a criminal connection or be associated with a crime in any way. Police could be checking for a lost vehicle, for a vehicular safety issue or even something as innocuous as seeing a person limping and thinking there may be an injury needing attention.
Why the furor with Julian Fantino’s statement?
Staff inspector Julian Fantino, who would later serve as Toronto police chief from 2000 to 2005, had been hauled before a committee to respond to allegations of discriminatory policing.
Instead of defusing a combustible situation, he put a lit match to it.
In the Jane and Finch area, he said, black people committed 82 per cent of robberies and muggings, 55 per cent of purse snatchings and 51 per cent of drug offences.
Fantino added that “an inordinate amount of serious crimes” involved black people.
Those crimes were a “significant reason for the tensions” between cops and community, he said.
How was Fantino wrong thinking?
The public outcry was fast and furious. Community activists swiftly denounced his statistics as “disgusting and racist garbage” and criticized police for releasing such stigmatizing figures without transparency or context.
Today, race data is only mandatorily collected and reported by Toronto police in the context of the police practice of carding.
People didn’t want to go there
“Race-based statistics” became politically radioactive. Many attempts to push for race data collection have failed.
Attitude toward race-based data collection has shifted
For years, anti-racism advocates agreed: no more race-based statistics. In the years since, the tide of public opinion has shifted.
Research into racially biased policing has deepened and the public’s demand, and appreciation, for data of this kind has grown.
In the U.S., this data has been instrumental in police discrimination problems. Some also point to the Star’s racial profiling investigations as providing the proof of concept that while race-based statistics can be misused to stigmatize vulnerable groups, they can also be a powerful tool to expose and destroy systemic racism.
“It’s not the collection of data; it’s the criminalization of data about us that has been the concern,” said Anthony Morgan, a community advocate and lawyer.
“We’ve come to a place where we see the power and importance of having more data and we are less fearful of the ways in which that data will be manipulated.”
Calls for police to start collecting and releasing race-based data that capture police interactions with the public have grown louder.
Is Toronto, and the rest of Ontario, ready for this?
The potential for problems with race-based data collection can be huge.
Proof: Oakland, Calif.
Problems relating to Oakland:
1. A fact about Oakland: if you are a man in this city of roughly 400,000, police are far more likely to stop you if your skin is black.
- Another fact: if you are a black man stopped by Oakland police, you are more likely to be searched, arrested and even spoken to harshly. You have a 1-in-4 chance of being handcuffed, even if you’re not arrested.
Oakland questionable police practice is now public knowledge thanks to statistics published by Stanford University, which made over 50 recommendations, 33 of which have been implemented.
Why collecting race-based data is important
Data collection throws a spotlight on extraordinary statistic. Though data is collected for every police interaction with the public, categorizing by race, will highlight any numbers which stand out or are significantly high.
Through this kind of data, the Ottawa police discover that officers were more likely to pull over Middle Eastern and black male drivers in a traffic stop than those who were white.
What conclusion is to be drawn if for example, if blacks are stopped more than whites?
The Ottawa police response to the data is part of the reason Renu Mandhane, Ontario’s chief human rights commissioner, believes the province is in a “hopeful moment.”
Ten years ago, Mandhane said, the police response would have been more defensive, far more likely to have included claims that the data showed racialized people commit more traffic crime, and outright denials about the possible role of racial profiling.
But this was not how Ottawa police responded.
“In my conversations with police leadership, many of them have moved beyond questioning whether racial discrimination, or racism, exists,” Mandhane said.
Mandhane and the commission, which has been pushing for the collection of race-based police data for more than a decade, are under no illusions that police will collect the data voluntarily.
As part of the overhaul of the Police Services Act, which has not been revised for 25 years, the commission is urging the province to require police to collect data on identity, including information on race, in all stops of civilians and incidents involving the use of force.
The commission made the same recommendation to Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Michael Tulloch. For the past year, Tulloch and his team have been reviewing police watchdogs, including the Special Investigations Unit, which does not collect race data in its probes of fatalities, serious injuries and allegations of sexual assault involving police.
Tulloch’s report is due at the end of the month, while the changes to police legislation are expected to be unveiled this spring.
To many, the success of both turns on the question of race-based data.
Data must be collected
“I would argue that the revision of the Police Services Act and the Tulloch Review will not have fulfilled their mandate if neither include provisions for the collection, analysis and dissemination of race-based statistics,” said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Toronto and an expert in race and policing.
Morgan, the lawyer and community advocate, adds that race-based data is a vital part of evidence-based policy making in policing and beyond, including measuring the need for reforms to everything from schools and housing to health and prisons.
“It gives us greater access to the levers of both change and accountability.”
Is race-based data collection simply gathering of statistics?
If recent developments are any indication, Queen’s Park appears to be warming to the idea of race-based data.
Last year, in its new regulations governing carding, the province mandated that police services release annual statistics on things such as the race, sex and age of those stopped. The children and youth minister also vowed that Ontario’s 47 children’s aid societies would start collecting race data, as part of efforts to reduce the high number of black kids in care.
Earlier this month, the province’s anti-racism directorate announced proposed legislation that, if passed, will require the collection of data on race and ethnicity within several government sectors, including the justice system.
Asked whether the revised Police Services Act will include direction for police to begin collecting data on race, Yasir Naqvi, Ontario’s attorney general, said the new law is under development.
“So much of our work is focused on community-based prevention, evidence-based prevention. In order for that to take place appropriately, to develop community-based evolving plans, you need that data,” Naqvi said.
As for Toronto police, spokesperson Meaghan Gray didn’t say whether the service or the police chief would support race-based data collection, but pointed to Ontario’s new carding regulations, which require the gathering and reporting of this data.
Why would police departments oppose race-based data collection?
The province will likely face strong opposition from chiefs and police associations, says former Kingston police chief Bill Closs, who is now retired.
In 2003, Closs made the unprecedented move to begin collecting race-based data from stops by his officers. The two-year project showed that black people were stopped three times as often as white people. The revelation prompted a tearful apology from Closs.
The backlash from inside the policing community was swift: the Kingston Police Association attacked the study. When then premier Dalton McGuinty was asked if he would instruct police services to collect the same data, he said he wouldn’t tell police what to do.
Could police departments fear what might be discovered?
In his 43 years of policing, Closs said the race data project was “the most depressing and rewarding time of my life.”
“Everybody outside of the government and policing community were congratulating us or were supporting us. But (there was) intense negativity from police chiefs, from police unions and — what was bitterly disappointing — from the government,” Closs said in an interview.
Closs admits his experience left him cynical about the prospects of provincial lawmakers forcing police to collect data involving race, but he said he would like to be “pleasantly surprised.”
Kingston police force worked more diligently in their jobs
He stresses that, if police are required to collect the data, it should include officers providing the rationale for their decisions; officers in the Kingston study didn’t just mark down the perceived race of the person stopped, but included the reason they pulled over a car or spoke to someone walking down the street. That information provides an all-important glimpse into an officer’s mind, the subconscious bias that may exist within good police officers.
The benefits of race-based data collection
In Closs’s experience, race-based data can expose problems, inform officer training and build bridges within the community.
“It’s going to take somebody with the courage, in government, to say, ‘It’s time to do this.’”
SOURCE Base:
By JENNIFER YANG
Identity and Inequality Reporter
WENDY GILLIS
News reporter
Toronto Star, Sun., March 19, 2017
Important links to followup:
Summary fact sheet from the ONT HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION
DEPUTATION to the OTTAWA police service board
OHRC data collection at the heart of good policing
