Front Burner - Toronto police more likely to use force against people of colour, data suggests

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Toronto police are more likely to use force against people of colour, especially Black residents, according to race-based data released this week. The internal data on use of force and strip searches from 2020 also showed Indigenous people were, proportionally, more likely than any other racial group to be strip-searched after being arrested. Some academics, journalists and activists have been saying for decades that systemic racism is a problem in policing. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a researcher and sociologist at the University of Toronto, talks to Frontburner about the need for more transparency from police forces across the country on race-based data, and ultimately, more accountability for systemic racism in policing.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Allie Janes, in for Jamie Poisson. As an organization, we have not done enough to ensure that every person in our city receives fair and unbiased policing. And for this, as chief of police, and on behalf of the service, I am sorry and I apologize unreservedly. That was Toronto's interim chief of police, James Raymer, on Wednesday.

Raymer was apologizing for something that many racialized people in his city have known for decades. People of colour, especially black residents, are disproportionately subject to use of force by Toronto police. He spoke on the day that the force released internal data that showed Black residents accounted for nearly 40% of all police use of force incidents in 2020. And Black Torontonians were five times more likely to have force used against them than their white neighbors. Indigenous people were also more likely than any other group to be subject to a strip search after being arrested. The Toronto Police hired external researchers to help create their report, after promising to collect and share race-based data back in 2019.

It was a promise that University of Toronto professor Notitia Massakoy pushed for, as the force continued to deny systemic racism, despite years of evidence to the contrary. Massakoy played a key role in developing the policy that made this new report possible. If you're so confident that everyone else is wrong, then let's look at your data, because then it should also show the same thing. What was realized when they did pull their own data is that no, actually everyone has been correct and now you can't refute it. So that's what the importance of that data is, right, is to at least level set the conversation where we're not arguing around the legitimacy

of the data or the source. For advocates like Beverly Baines from No Pride in Policing, who's been pushing for more accountability in the criminal justice system, Chief Ramer's apology just wasn't enough. This is insulting to Black people. This is insulting to Indigenous people. This is insulting to racialized people. This is not about saving our lives. What we have asked for you to do is to stop, to stop brutalizing us, to stop killing us, to stop cutting us, to stop continuously stopping us and harassing our children, our Black children, our Black sons, our Black daughters. That's what we have asked for. And Toronto isn't the only city in Canada where activists and community leaders say police use disproportionate force against racialized communities. In other parts of the country, activists have been calling for police to release their own race-based data on use of force.

But journalists, academics and activists all agree that the data is difficult to access, especially when police forces try to keep it hidden. data is difficult to access, especially when police forces try to keep it hidden. It's information that Akwasi Owusu-Bempa has spent over a decade trying to uncover. He's a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and a special advisor to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. And he's here with me today to dig into this new report. Akwasi, hi. Thank you so much for making the time. Ali, absolutely. My pleasure. So before we get into the data, I just want to first get a sense of what it means when we talk about use of force.

What exactly does that translate to? So the use of force as captured in the data that was released by the Toronto Police Service yesterday relates really to those instances that would trigger an SIU or a special investigations unit investigation or notification to the SIU. So serious injury leading to hospitalization or death and then instances of sexual assault or misconduct involving police officers, essentially. But with respect to use of force specifically, it is what we might call those higher level uses of force. So something like a punch, a slap, a takedown that doesn't result in a serious injury would not be included in this data set. And can you tell me about some of the key numbers that are in this report?

Well, I think, you know, when you look at the use of force, it shows that Black people are almost four times as likely to have force used against them as their representation in the general population would predict. With respect to the strip searches, Black people, again, overrepresented amongst those who had been arrested. So rather than looking at the general population this time, the data scientists, the researchers looked at only those people who'd been arrested. I think, you know, the specific numbers are important because we want to watch them to see whether they increase or they decrease or they stay the same over time. But, you know, from my perspective, it's not just the rates of overrepresentation, but the consistency in overrepresentation across different policing

outcomes. And I know we'll talk about this a bit later, but, you know, today we're talking about use of force and strip searches. Five years ago, we were talking about carding. A group of prominent Ontarians is speaking out against the Toronto Police Service's policy of carding. It allows officers to collect personal information about people even when they aren't suspected of a crime. 20 years ago, we were talking about police stops generally. 40 years ago, we were talking about use of force. Part of what I think we need to do is stop looking at these figures and these numbers kind of in isolation and take a much broader look at what these data are telling us.

Right. And I do want to get more into that in a moment. I mean, in terms of, you know, some of what we see in here, and, you know, you just noted it, something that, as I understand it, is new is, you know, that it's when it's looking that, as I understand it, is new is that when it's looking at racial disparities in use of force, again, like you said, it's not just comparing to the general population, but also within the smaller pool of people who were already having interactions with police, arrests, being ticketed, that kind of thing, and again, found big disparities there. To give some specific numbers, Black people were 1.6 times or 60% more likely to be subjected to use of force

compared to their total percentage of police interactions. Latinos were also 50% more likely. And Middle Eastern as well as East and Southeast Asian people were also overrepresented here. What point does that drive home for you? That as with other data, Black people and members of other racialized groups continue to be overrepresented in undesirable policing outcomes. And I think it's important again to point out that although the Toronto Police Service researchers and consultants took into account a number of factors in considering the overrepresentation, this is not the first time. Like, I think there's a fairly large omission in the report produced by the services consultants where they failed to point to the data released just two years ago by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is the data from the Toronto Police Service.

A new report from Ontario's Human Rights Commission, reaffirming what so many in Toronto's Black community say they experience at the hands of police. Black people are more likely to be charged, overcharged, and more likely to be arrested by Toronto Police. When they make such an omission, whether it's done intentionally or not, and my assumption is that they're aware of the Ontario Human Rights Commission's report

doing work in this area, they should be knowledgeable of that. Like when they fail to include, you know, similar findings and similar analyses done, it serves to, again, paint these findings as kind of one-off and fails to depict them as part of a larger and continuing problem. What else for you is missing from this data? Well, from my perspective, again, and, you know, if we take a step back, police agencies in Ontario are now mandated to release race-based data on two main kind of policing activities or outcomes.

With respect to what are called regulated interactions now or street checks, what was euphemistically called carding before, under the regulations that came into effect, police agencies need to report each time they stop and they document the information of the Anti-Racism Act, police agencies across the province are mandated to collect, analyze and report on use of force data. So the Toronto Police Service, in line with those requirements, it publishes use of force data and we're seeing that here. What differentiates the Toronto Police Service from some other agencies in the province is that its board has adopted a race-based data collection analysis and reporting strategy. And so as part of that strategy, we have here the release not only of the mandated use of force data, but also the strip search data. And subsequently, we'll be seeing data on other policing outcomes, for example, around things like stops. And I think that's important. So to actually answer your question, you know, from my perspective, we should have racially desegregated data on all policing activities and outcomes, right from police stop and question activities through searches, arrests and charges, use of force, of course, and strip searches. And for for me it's really important that we understand

you know what the outcome of these encounters are and so we need to start getting data beyond just that captured by the police and I say this you know importantly because and this is why thinking about other studies is important part of the work that Scott Wortley did with the Ontario Human Rights Commission also looked at what happened to people who were charged with different kinds of offences, and especially highly discretionary offences, by the Toronto Police. So things like obstruct justice, low-level drug possession, assault police officer, and especially those assault police officers and the obstruct justice, like those are charges that we often see the police add on to what would otherwise be kind of frivolous instances.

And what we saw when Wortley and his team analyzed the outcome of those charges is that Black people were much more likely to have their charges withdrawn or dropped than were white people. And the conclusion was that the police lay a lower quality of charge with Black individuals than they do, for example, with white individuals. Again, demonstrating racial bias and enforcement action in the city. So, you know, we need this information on the full scope of police activity. And it needs to be collected in a systematic fashion. It needs to be done so, again, not only in Toronto, but across the province and really across the country. And we can talk about a national initiative that's underway. But there's no reason that we shouldn't have information about the race of individuals who come into contact with the police, how they're treated by the police and the outcome of their police contacts.

Yeah. So let's talk about this in the rest of the country. So, I mean, just to give a few examples, in 2020, the same year that this Toronto data is from, three Indigenous people were killed in a span of just 10 days by Winnipeg police. In New Brunswick that same year, there was the high-profile shooting of Chantelle Moore, who was a young Tlalocan First Nation woman during a wellness check. The constable who shot her testified he went to Moore's apartment after a 911 call from an ex-boyfriend concerned about Moore's safety. When he arrived, Moore was asleep and he knocked on the window and shone a flashlight into the apartment. Constable Jeremy Sun testified that Moore came outside with a knife and moved toward him. He shot her four times. Last year, Edmonton police shot and killed 33-year-old Stephen Nguyen after they allegedly believed that the cell phone he was holding was a gun.

And this past February, Calgary police shot and killed Latro Tull, a young Sudanese immigrant who was in mental distress. Police say they were responding to an assault call on February 19th in Forazlan where they found Tull carrying a stick and a knife, and after failing to de-escalate the situation peacefully, he was shot. The killing sent shockwaves throughout the community, especially among local Sudanese, after Tool came here from his home country after previously fighting as a child soldier. I'm giving, you know, just a handful of individual examples here, but

these obviously don't give us a sense of how widespread this problem is in any of those cities. Are police forces across the country collecting and releasing race-based data? So as it stands, most police agencies collect race-based data or some racial information about people that they come into contact with in the context of criminal incidents. So the general occurrence reports that police fill out when, for example, they've arrested someone, charged someone, they often include racial descriptors of the accused people or the suspects. They'll often include racial descriptors of victims. So they keep that information because it's useful, you know, in criminal cases and it's useful for their own intelligence and informational purposes but you know almost 10 years ago now I

conducted a study with a colleague Paul Miller and what we found was that police agencies were systematically stripping that data from the information that they were sending on to Statistics Canada and this is a practice that we've seen over and over again across the country. Despite the fact that police agencies often collect race-based data, and they don't do so in a systematic fashion, but despite the fact that they collect this data, they don't make it public, they don't release it to the public. And they typically will do what they can to deny access to such data

to researchers, scholars, academics, such as myself, to journalists. And so, you know, the Toronto Star has long had to fight for access to data on the police service. We recently did some work looking at drug arrests across the country. Halifax, for example, would not release, the Halifax police would not release data in this instance. So the police, I think it's important to note, have actively resisted up until now releasing such data. Now, in the Canadian Associations of Chiefs of Police, along with Statistics Canada, has announced plans to explore and hopefully implement a race-based data collection strategy across policing in the country. And so this is positive.

This would be the first time that we would have implemented, not the first time discussed, but the first time we'd have implemented a national race-based data collection strategy in policing in Canada. Now, while positive, I think at the moment, the scope of the data collected is too narrow. So this would be data collected specifically on criminal incidents. And so it wouldn't get to, for example, the stops, the questions, the searches, and some of these other issues that we've highlighted as problematic. So, you know, again, when we would start looking at

racial disparities in, for example, arrests and treatment, we wouldn't understand, you know, the population that's actually having contact with the police and the nature of those outcomes. So today, we're talking about use of force and strip searches, right? If listeners will recall, seven, eight years ago, we were talking about carding, and I got quite frustrated in the context of our conversations around carding and street checks, because that was just such a narrow police activity, right? Like there are all of these other things going on. And from my perspective, please play a good public relations management game by focusing narrowly on issues such as the ones today, as opposed to looking big picture. And I say that, you know,

acknowledging, of course, that Chief Raymer pointed to systemic racism as the problem, but we can't look at things and we can't refer to things as systemic without looking at the entirety of that system. Right. And also, I mean, he sort of said, and Toronto Police had sent out an internal memo saying, you know, our public comments will emphasize that this exercise is about systemic racism within systems and processes and not about overt racism within systems and processes and not about

overt racism by our members. But I mean, what do you make of that about, you know, making that distinction between individual acts and systemic racism? Well, I think he fails to acknowledge the fact that there are individuals within those systems. And, you know, while we might look at institutional policies and practices as producing racial bias, so carding, for example, for a long time in Toronto, street checks and the completion of street check reports by Toronto police officers was a performance measure. where police officers were being evaluated on the number of contact cards they filled out, because those officers were then going to more marginalized, impoverished and higher crime areas of the city and filling out these forms on people who had no involvement in crime whatsoever, and they happened to be black and brown people. But in so doing, I think the chief is, you know, again, absolving members of the police service of any wrongdoing.

is, you know, again, absolving members of the police service of any wrongdoing. He's obfuscating the problem. And he's actually, you know, playing a bit of an opposite side of hand that his predecessor played. So under Bill Blair, the line was, and the focus was on implicit bias, so unconscious or implicit bias. So taking responsibility, again, away from the individual, because our implicit and our unconscious biases are activated without us knowing. So Chief Blair went to great pains to, you know, talk about the fact that the police hire from the human race and therefore they were going to hire people who thought in the same way that others in our society do. And we know that racism is a problem in our society, but failed to acknowledge that there may be people who are acting in a consciously

biased manner and failed to acknowledge the impact of you know institutional policies and practices so James Raymer is doing something different here. The interim chief acknowledged bias in policing but pointedly avoided blaming his officers. This data analysis speaks of systemic racism not of individual acts of racism. He's once again taking responsibility away from the individuals and in a sense as well the institution who manages these individuals. So from the frontline officer to their managers to their managers and ultimately the buck stops with the chief.

But I think it's really important that we acknowledge a major shortcoming in the Toronto Police race-based data policy and in the subsequent report that was released by Foster and Jacobs. The policy and strategy does not allow for the data to be used to identify specific officers for their behavior to be corrected or disciplined and ultimately, you know, if they were to persist to be let go from the service. Now, the service, as far as I know, has some early warning systems in place. So to identify officers who exhibit troublesome patterns of behavior. But like, you know, I asked the question, in what kind of world would we collect information on the behavior of individuals

that could so plainly tell us where there is troubling behavior and then not use that information to identify those individuals and to correct or address that behavior. And, you know, I think the answer lies in the fact that the police don't actually want to hold their members accountable for their actions. I think that the police service and the board wanted to placate the police association here and, you know, remove any kind of risk and responsibility from its members. So that's a huge shortcoming of the strategy. And I say it's a shortcoming of the related report produced by Foster and Jacobs, because in their report, they highlight some limitations of the strategy and, you know, the analysis thus far,

and they fail to acknowledge that as a shortcoming of the strategy. And so, you know, either it's an oversight on their part, and I would say a troubling oversight as they're supposed to be experts in the area, or they've, you know, just ignored the fact that there is this huge gaping hole in the policy and one that needs to be filled, and one that must not be replicated by other police agencies as they look to adopt race-based data collection analysis and reporting policies and strategies. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. And just finally, what do Toronto Police say they're going to do to fix this problem? And I'm wondering if you could tell me what you think

of that. So there are 38 recommendations that come from the report. They highlight a number of pieces of work that have been completed or in progress or yet to begin. There's a lot of attention being paid to community building and consultation. There's an immense amount of attention paid to continued training across different areas. There's attention immense amount of attention paid to continued training across different areas. There's attention to kind of focusing on policies and procedures, and I think there's some merit to that. But again, what I don't see is any evidence of accountability. I wrote a piece published in the Globe and Mail on this where I suggested that what we have here is a modicum of transparency masquerading as police accountability. And what I mean by that is we're getting a very narrow window into a policing practice and the police are focusing on the data that they've released and their commitment to

releasing more data and to training their officers about data and about race, but not holding anyone accountable for their actions and their behaviors. And again, I think we need to have individual accountability and we need to have institutional accountability. And the accountability ultimately rests on the shoulders of the current interim chief and the chief's replacement, the chief's predecessor. Akwasi, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you. That's all for today. FrontBurner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show was produced this week by Imogen Burchard, Mackenzie Cameron, Levi Garber, Simi Bassi, Derek Vanderwyk, Ben Andrews, Lauren Donnelly, and me.

Our sound design was by Sam McNulty and Mackenzie Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Chavison. The executive producer of FrontBurner is Nate McCabe-Locos. And I'm Allie Janes. Jamie will be back next week. Thanks for listening.