The force began analyzing the data after a Star investigation based on the same information showed that officers stop and document black people at disproportionately high rates.
“If you’re doing something that is controversial for a legitimate reason, then let’s understand exactly what it is you’re doing and if it meets the goals of what you’re doing,” commissioner Barbara Hall said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Police fill out hundreds of thousands of so-called “contact cards” every year with the personal information of the people they stop, including race. In the vast majority of cases, charges aren’t laid. Police say the information taken down is important to investigations.
While black residents make up just 8.3 per cent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the cards police wrote from 2008 to mid-2011.
In high-crime areas of Toronto, where people are stopped more often, black and brown youth report being corralled by officers in cruisers as they walk with friends through public areas, or while standing alone at a bus stop or standing on the sidewalk to have a cigarette.
The police data should be analyzed to “identify, monitor and remove potential systemic barriers, including possible patterns of behaviour that are consistent with racial profiling,” Hall wrote in a letter introduced at a police board meeting Wednesday.
The board has been considering ways to mitigate carding since the Star series ran a year ago.
Since then, the force began its own analysis; the board asked the city’s auditor general to also review the data and create a baseline from which it can measure change; and in January, the board created a subcommittee to pull all the pieces together and find a way forward.
But it’s been a year and nothing has changed on the street, a frustrated John Sewell of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition told the board Wednesday.
The board, at the urging of activists, has also talked several times about how to issue receipts to people who are stopped. But the idea has never been put into practice. Hall endorsed receipts in her letter, suggesting they would “help ensure transparency and accountability in the process.”
Board members were also awaiting an opinion from the city’s lawyer on the legality of street checks, after human rights lawyers argued earlier this year that the stops contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Toronto city solicitor Albert Cohen, who was present at the meeting, told board members the legal issues were complex. His department is still in the process of reviewing and discussing the nature and purposes of the contacts.
There “may well be legal, defensible and, I would expect, Charter-proof rationales for these types of contacts,” Cohen told the board.
But Police Chief Bill Blair reiterated that stops prompted by race are indefensible.
“If a police officer was to stop an individual and the sole purpose of doing that was motivated by the race of a person or any of the human rights codes, that, in my opinion, would be an offence under the code,” said Blair.
The board accepted Hall’s letter, but didn’t say if they needed her help. “We’ve put out an offer of assistance, so they can accept that. They’ve accepted our offers in the past,” Hall said.
The human rights commission has worked with the Toronto force before on a project to eliminate bias — both in services to the community and as an employer.
“It’s a major organizational change project,” said Hall. “It’s a work in progress.”
A report by the three-member subcommittee of the board will be presented at next month’s meeting.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Patty Winsa
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