OCASI Asks Ontario Government To Act To End Racial Profiling
July 12, 2005
May 27, 2005
Hon. Michael Bryant
Attorney General
11th Flr, 720 Bay St
Toronto, ON
M5G 2K1
Dear Mr. Bryant:
The preliminary results of the Kingston Data Collection Project, released by Kingston Police yesterday serves to further confirm the existence of racial profiling in policing practices.
Other reports, such as the 2003 Ontario Human Rights Commission report on Racial Profiling and the 2002 Toronto Star analysis of Toronto Police statistics have also reported the same findings. They found that residents of African/Black origin receive harsher treatment than White residents, and are over represented in Police statistics of charges and arrests.
These reports echo the extensive and comprehensive findings of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. The Commission report was tabled in December 1995, and none of the recommendations contained therein have been implemented to-date.
In this context, Kingston Police Chief Bill Closs should be lauded for his courage in initiating the Kingston Data Collection Project, the only Police Chief to do so in Canada. The project findings are of tremendous value for the City of Kingston as well as other Police jurisdictions. This type of concrete data is necessary to confirm that police racial profiling exists, to identify the extent of the problem and then to develop the means to eliminate it. While the project findings, that Black and Aboriginal youth are more likely to be stopped, charged or arrested by Police are alarming, community members have expressed grave concern that these figures could be higher when there is no monitoring for race-based statistics.
The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) is deeply troubled at the implications of these findings for members of the Black and Aboriginal communities in Kingston and for members of racialized communities elsewhere in Ontario. Recent immigrants and refugees arriving in Canada are increasingly from racialized communities, and they must have the confidence that they would not face discrimination from police or other security and government services. They and all residents in this province are entitled to protection under Ontario’s Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, all residents should receive the clear and unequivocal assurance that the Ontario government will act immediately to address racial profiling and any other form of discriminatory practice. The practice of racial profiling is unacceptable and must be stopped.
OCASI together with leaders of Black communities and other community organizations had asked the Province of Ontario in 2002 to invest in collecting race-based statistics on policing activity (Click here to see letter). Premier McGuinty in his role as Leader of the Opposition in 2002 had asked the Ontario Government to strike an implementation task force to move forward on the many recommendations put forward over 25 years.
In December 2003, you stated in the Ontario Legislature, “The time has come for us to take action and to tackle these challenges in all parts of government and in all parts of our society” (Source: Hansard). During the same period, Premier McGuinty said that the government has a responsibility to do what it can to minimize racial profiling and ideally eliminate it.
OCASI urges you to fulfil the commitment your party made while in the Opposition, and later when you took office to take concrete steps to eliminate racial profiling. The Council echoes the recommendations put forward by community groups in 2002 and urges you to:
1. Act quickly to implement the recommendations of the Ontario Police Complaints Review report submitted to your office by Justice Patrick LeSage in April 2005 and establish an Independent Police Complaints and Oversight body.
2. Make the necessary investment to support police jurisdictions in Ontario in collecting race-based statistics in policing. This would include providing adequate resources to the communities affected, especially the Black and Aboriginal communities, to develop and implement a community-based documentation project that would gather stories and complaints from victims of racial profiling.
3. Establish a process to implement the recommendations that have been made in the reports on policing, especially the recommendations from the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, along with an independent audit mechanism to review the effectiveness of this implementation process every two years.
OCASI believes that an effective response to the clear evidence of racial profiling would require much more than depending on the information gathered by video cameras installed in police cruisers. The release of the Kingston report demonstrates the need to systematically gather the relevant data to identify the range and extent of racial profiling in police jurisdictions.
The Council sees this as an opportune moment to work together with police and governments at all levels to bring about the systemic change that is required to effectively eliminate racial profiling in policing and in the criminal justice system.
Yours sincerely,
Debbie Douglas
Executive Director
Click here for the Kingston Data Collection Project report [Adobe Acrobat PDF format].