Two sources familiar with the situation said that Ramer, the interim leader of Toronto, will apologize in a press conference on Wednesday morning. Ramer’s apology comes as the agency prepares to release data on the over-representation of certain communities in policing – almost three years after it was first instructed by the Ontario government to document race-based data on incidents of violence. The data collection began in the context of widespread protests against police violence, sparked in the US by the assassination of George Floyd by a white police officer and, in this city, as questions swirled about the role that race may play in death. of Regis. Korchinski-Paquet – a young black woman who fell to her death from a balcony in Toronto after her family called 911 for help. The data, some of which was reported to the media before its release, remain under embargo until 10:30 a.m. ET Wednesday.
Aim to “eradicate systemic racism”
The information about the use of force was collected as part of the Toronto Police’s racial data collection policy, aimed at “detecting, measuring and, ultimately, eliminating systemic racism,” the force said in a statement before the release. The data collection policy followed a basic recommendation of a sweeping interim report 2018 on race and policing by the Ontario Commission on Human Rights (OHRC). The report found that a black man in Toronto was almost 20 times more likely than a white man to be shot and killed by police. It also emerged following a 2019 report by Michael Tulloch Court of Appeals on random road checks, in which an Ontario judge said the practice only produced “low-quality intelligence” and alienates some communities from the police. After being instructed to collect race-based data on the use of force, the force says it “went one step further” and pledged to also collect race-based data for strip searches. This data collection started in January 2020.
